Tormentum - Dark Sorrow

What would happen if H. R. Giger’s artwork and I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream had some sort of strange lovechild? You’d get Tormentum - Dark Sorrow, a dark point and click adventure game with an art style inspired by Giger and a story that seems to come straight from the mind of a twisted philosopher. Or in this case: Immanuel Kant.

Tormentum - Dark Sorrow takes place in a strange, nightmarish place where the main character is imprisoned. At the start of the game you’re delivered there and introduced to your nameless main hero, who will be called “Cloak Guy” for the remainder of this review. He has amnesia and has no idea why he’s being taken to this prison and promptly decides to escape.

The first thing that will strike you about this game is its visuals; they are truly inspired by the late artist, H. R. Giger as well as Zdzislaw Beksinski. They are strange and disturbing, giving you a distinctive feeling that you aren’t in a world you would ever want to be in. The atmosphere is tense and unwelcoming. With each atrocity you see you’ll find yourself wondering more and more just what is going on in this place. Your character is an observer for the actions around him as he tries to escape, so you get an eye full of the beautiful visuals constantly.

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The music is also distinctly creepy and the sounds are deep and ominous. Ghostly moaning and distinctive orchestral pieces punctuate each action you take. When something gory happens it will sound like it happened right in front of you. The overall atmosphere makes the game stand out from the countless other games trying a similar theme. We don’t know what our character looks like; we only know that he’s different from everyone else in the place. He’s a human, but with the cape we can’t really tell how human he really is, but the cape looks so distinctive that it essentially becomes part of who he is as a character. This leaves him shrouded in as much mystery to the other characters as he is to us, which is a nice touch to the overall environment of the game.

Almost every important thing in the game stands out, so it’s hard to miss anything while you’re going through the castle picking up items to aid in your escape. The only thing that does blend into the background is the parchments that contain clues for solving puzzles. Not all of them do this, but in environments where the colors are lighter and match the color of the parchment, it’s very easy to miss them. The good thing about this is that backtracking isn’t painful like it can be in some other games; you can easily just press on of the arrows on the side of the screen and walk back to where you were, which you’ll be doing a lot in this game.

You will also be collecting items in order to solve the puzzles and progress further through the game. Some things are straightforward, some things are not and it requires the player to use their skills in order to solve it, just like most point and click adventure games. There will be times you take pause while playing the game and try to figure out just how you’re supposed to do something. This game has no difficulty settings available, so the player may find themselves at a loss with a few puzzles if those particular ones aren’t their strong suit, especially since not all of the puzzles have clues to help you solve them. Those that don’t tend to be on harder side, especially if you aren’t paying attention.

Each time you get an item it’s almost guaranteed you’re going to need to use it somewhere soon, requiring you to pay attention to your surroundings. There may be times where you’ll use the wrong item in the wrong area and Cloak Guy will snark at you on how you won’t last that long in the game. While your character does take notes on certain things, it might not be a bad idea for you to do so as well. Even though each room is distinctive, Tomentum - Dark Sorrow is an easy game to get lost in, but not in the usual sense.

Tomentum is very immersive and the player might find themselves trying to remember where certain things were because they were too busy being in awe of the world around them. This isn’t a bad thing, though; it’s just a sign that the artists and the level designers wanted to give you an environment that you can find yourself fully engrossed in. This is probably why they made your protagonist mostly silent other than a few snarky comments he makes here and there to get you immersed in the world, more so than being immersed in the characters. There is a small issue with that: the characters themselves don’t seem all that that interesting. Are they distinctive? Sure. Will you want to find out more about them? Other than a few, not really.

The majority of Tormentum - Dark Sorrow is based around the environment and the world you are in and the world itself is a distinctive world more so than the characters that are in it. Everyone seems like they are just pawns in the grand scheme of things, which is a great concept, but it feels like some parts of it are missing. A lot of this stems from the fact that your character doesn’t really have a distinctive voice other than occasional comments when you mess up or when observing things. Cloak Guy just seems a little generic and it’s a little disappointing because there could have been some great moments between him and the various individuals he interacts with. The characters seem to be talking at him rather than to him. You can never say anything in response, which makes the other characters’ philosophical speeches to you about good, evil, ethics, and other such things seem to fall a little more flat because you can’t respond. They’re essentially having these entire conversations with themselves.

The beginning of the game starts you out with a quote from Immanuel Kant that states:

"Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never merely as a means to an end, but always at the same time as an end."

For those who don’t know, this is part of Kant’s Second Formulation of his Categorical Imperative from his Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals. It states that a human should never be used as a means to end; they should always be treated as a human being with their own set of ideals and morals no matter what. These factor into the moral choice aspects of the game itself giving the player a hint for what sort of choices are to come. This game does follow Kant’s teachings, which means there’s a lot of “Pure Good” and “Pure Evil”; everything you do in the game is one of these two things. There is no neutrality – which can be a turn off for some – especially near the ending where one choice seems like a good choice when it’s actually a bad one. Kant teaches that morality is duty-driven and near the end of the end of the game there’s one choice where you can say you’re driven by duty to tell the truth. This means that, to you, it’s a good action. At the end of the game though, when you’re being evaluated by a deity (which also goes against his teaching of morality, in that it should be evaluated through reason, not theology) and you will think you did nothing but good, you will be told otherwise. This issue only gets worse when you realize your character can’t say anything in his defense during this. So there’s no philosophical debates, your character is just a terrible person according to the game since you thought an evil action was good.

The main character just doesn’t react at all to anything so he just stands their like a statue and will very seldom react to things he should probably react to. Or he just monologues and we are supposed to get an understanding of his character from that but it’s hard to. He appears to be a puppet on strings being lead around by the player rather than an actual character. There’s really no real emotion coming from him other than mild disdain or exhaustion and it seems to factor more so into the player’s reactions rather than his, which creates a sense of dissonance between the player and the main protagonist.

With all that said, Tormentum - Dark Sorrow is a game that will make you think about the nature of good and evil as well as various other philosophical topics. Its artwork is fantastic, gameplay is straightforward, puzzles challenging and is everything someone would want in a point and click adventure game. Other than a few missed opportunities, Tormentum - Dark Sorrow needs to be played by anyone who can get their hands on it.

Angelina Bonilla, NoobFeed (@Twitter)