Halls of Torment review

Halls of Torment's most obvious difference from its most obvious inspiration is that it expects you to click to attack. No sir, none of that Vampire Survivors laxity here. You'll make inputs to hit enemies and you'll like it. At least for the 10 seconds or so before you head into the settings menu and turn it off.

But there's a reason HoT starts like that: It's a mission statement. Yes, it's saying, you're one little guy against an army of hundreds, thousands, hundreds of thousands of other little guys, and yes, you're sucking up experience gems by the bucketload, but this isn't that other autobattler. This is something different, more deliberate, more considered, and altogether less slot-machiney than its razzle-dazzle forebear. This is Vampire Survivors with a heavy Diablo gloss. It's exactly as dangerous for your time and productivity as it sounds.

Hellbound

I'm not namedropping HoT's clearest influences to demean it. The game doesn't shy away from its inspirations—they're there on its sleeve for all to see, but it would be unfair and inaccurate to call Halls of Torment derivative. By some mad alchemy, it blends the compulsive loops and endless enemies of Vampire Survivors with the gear and build-crafting of Diablo and produces something wholly its own.

Despite the writhing masses of sprites, it's a little more thoughtful and conservative than other autobattlers I've played. Your hero has over 20 stats for you to take into account and consider as you massacre your way through dungeons. There's the usual stuff: health, defence, damage, but there's also stuff like piercing, force, and a critical hit system composed of multiple substats.

Rounds are 30 minutes, so you're not likely to max them all out even if you want to. You have to decide how you're going to spec your little guy over a multitude of +1% and +0.2% increments to their myriad stats. And where ordinarily those kinds of minute increases are barely noticeable in RPGs, the constant churn of level-ups means they quickly accrue into meaningful differences.

Plus, your buildcrafting is made easier by one of HoT's primary cleavages from Vampire Survivors: Level ups only give you a chance to buff stats, not to choose new weapons, and you'll get four options to choose from (with opportunities to reroll your options, once you get in far enough). If you want new gear, actual gear, you'll have to slay one of the bosses roaming the levels, but it's not strictly necessary. Filling all your possible weapon slots is a rarity, and it wouldn't be unheard of to make it all the way though a level without ever getting anything on top of your default, class-based weapon.

Take my favourite class and probable war criminal: The Exterminator. He's got a flamethrower. Notionally, you could have other weapons, but who cares? My focus when playing him is turning him into a roving, angry Roman candle, melting hordes of enemies into masses of undifferentiated flesh. Is this optimal? Perhaps not. Is this satisfying? Like you wouldn't believe.

That's the handle: The thing that makes Halls of Torment different to Vampire Survivors and the thing that makes me keep coming back to it is that I feel like I'm following something resembling a plan. Vampire Survivors is great, but its experience is one of frantically assembling an ad-hoc toolkit out of whatever its level-up gachas spit at you. Failure is a quirk of the slot machine. In HoT? My failure is the failure of my plan or my ability to adhere to it. There's an element of luck, but only an element.

Plus, Halls of Torment's specific aesthetic couldn't be more attuned to my sensibilities as a child of the ARPGs of the late '90s and early 2000s. Give me two honking great orbs representing my health and mana and a protagonist who has no articulating joints in his legs and I'm a happy man, and HoT makes me very happy indeed with its lo-fi heroics and diffuse, stygian levels. If I could play this thing on a beige CRT while Rob Zombie screamed in my ears I wouldn't know it wasn't 1999. Actually, wait, I can do that. If anyone needs me, tell them I'm busy for the next… foreseeable future.