Serious Sam: Tormental

My first few runs through Tormental had me grinning at the sheer audacity of the premise: Sam "Serious" Stone, via an ancient Egyptian artifact, literally invading the imagination of his nemesis Mental. That setup gives the game a cartoonish, almost psychedelic visual identity that catches you off guard if you grew up with the first-person Serious Sam games. Gone is the blood-soaked, sun-bleached grit. In its place is a colorful, well-animated 3D top-down world that reviewers described as arguably the cutest the franchise has ever looked - and I mean that as a compliment. The art direction has a clarity and warmth to it that smaller studios rarely pull off this cleanly. Mechanically, Tormental sits squarely in the Enter the Gungeon / Nuclear Throne lineage - procedurally generated rooms, a hub you return to on death, bosses at the end of each thematic stage, and a slow accumulation of permanent upgrades locked behind a vault that requires collecting thirty-two black keys across runs. You start with Sam but unlock additional characters over time, each with their own dodge roll behavior and a unique special ability. The primary weapon has unlimited ammo and picks up modifiers - things like rapid fire or ricochets - by clearing bosses, while secondary weapons like the shotgun, grenade launcher, and spinning disc launcher run on scarce ammo. The "Brutal" mechanic is the spiciest wrinkle: when a damaged enemy glows yellow, you can roll into them to trigger a melee detonation that splashes damage across nearby foes. In theory it's satisfying. In practice, it kills a lot of runs because the contact damage during the roll is real and the screen chaos can blind you to it. Here is where I need to be straight with you, because I care more about your time than about charitable framing. Tormental spent three years in Early Access and launched into a market already crowded by Hades, Vampire Survivors, and their descendants. The main criticism across reviews is not that anything is broken - controls are snappy, frame rate holds up outside of the heaviest bullet-hell moments, and the dialogue between Sam and Mental is genuinely funny in places. The problem is that the five thematic stages are short (each clearable in under ten minutes), the level design is strictly linear with no branching paths, and the enemy roster, while varied on paper, starts to feel repetitive faster than the better examples of the genre. Steam users sitting on mixed feelings have specifically called out the thin permanent progression and the feeling that the core loop runs out of surprises before the vault unlock grind is finished. That grind - clearing multiple loops and challenge runs to gather all the keys needed to face Mental - can feel more like a checklist than a revelation. Where the game earns genuine affection is in its co-op. A second local player can join, revive you using Ankh Pieces dropped by enemies, and doubles the damage of explosives - which changes the chaotic maths in your favor in ways that solo play never quite achieves. Played shoulder-to-shoulder with someone who likes arcade silliness, Tormental lands much better than its review average suggests. The puns are better shared. The chaos is funnier with someone else cursing beside you. Solo, it is a solid but unremarkable afternoon roguelite. In co-op, it becomes something warmer.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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