Halls of Torment

I went in expecting another horde-survivor clone wearing a Diablo costume for Halloween. What I got instead was something that quietly rewired how I think about the genre. Chasing Carrots, a small indie outfit, built a game where the pre-rendered, torchlit grimness is not decoration. It is load-bearing atmosphere. The stygian halls, the health-and-mana orbs straight out of 1997, the chunky enemy sprites shambling toward you, all of it creates a specific, deliberate mood that most games in this space never bother with. The core loop runs on 30-minute timed sessions. You pick one of eleven unlockable characters, each with a distinct main weapon, then survive long enough to face a final boss when the clock hits zero. The Swordsman is your balanced entry point with the highest base health in the roster. The Shieldmaiden leans into knockback and stun mechanics, using her Shield Bash to punt elites at the cost of crits. The Archer is a long-range critical-strike specialist who struggles badly in close quarters. The Sorceress has the ceiling for electrocute builds but paper-thin defenses that make her punishing to pilot. Later unlocks like the Sage play as genuine snowball characters, fragile early and explosive late once you understand how to chain his ability synergies. Each character uses the same pool of up to six abilities gathered from Scrolls of Mastery dropped by mini-bosses and champions, but class-specific stat scaling, dedicated buffs, and main weapon mechanics create real differentiation if you lean into them rather than defaulting to whatever tier-list abilities dominate the meta. What separates Halls of Torment from the Vampire Survivors side of the family is that your failure here is the failure of your plan, not the random cruelty of a slot machine. Abilities like Meteor Strike, Kugelblitz, Ring Blades, and Phantom Needles each interact with your character's stat profile differently. Dragon's Breath suits short-range melee fighters. Frozen Avalanche pairs beautifully with the Norseman's frost-focused main weapon. The item retrieval system adds another layer: you can pull one piece of gear per run back to your hub permanently, which means every session involves a real trade-off between optimizing the current run and building long-term power. Over 100 items, Torment Shard upgrades through the Scriptor, the gold-gated Vault with its modifiers, and the harder Agony Mode difficulty tiers keep the meta progression churning well past your first dozen hours. The criticisms are real but specific. Some characters blur into each other when the strongest ability combinations overshadow their individual identities, a complaint the community has flagged for a while. Combat can start to feel repetitive in very long sessions if you are not actively pushing into Agony tiers or chasing new unlocks. The world is narrow, the story nonexistent. Retro visual charm has a shelf life, and once it fades you are left with mechanics alone. Fortunately, the mechanics hold. The soundtrack earns its keep too: orchestral strings and eerie ambient layers that shift tone as the 30-minute window narrows and the screen starts filling with things that want you dead. It is one of the few survivor-likes where the audio actually signals danger rather than just accompanying it. For players who have bounced off Vampire Survivors for feeling too passive, or who grew up with Diablo 1 and want something that respects that headspace, this hits a frequency that almost nothing else in the genre manages. It runs well on Steam Deck, supports controllers natively, and the per-run commitment is short enough to fit into gaps in your day without demanding a full sit-down session.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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