I forgot about just-launched horror game Tormenture when ravelling together this week’s round-up of potent PC releases, but thankfully, Maw disciple Fachewachewa was on my case in the comments. It’s one of your ‘cursed video game’ videogames in the spirit of Inscryption and Pony Island, and based on a quick blast with the demo, it seems lush.
It’s set in the 1980s, a premise I now automatically find horrible because I was born in the 1980s and that was, like, a million years ago. You’re a kid who’s playing a legendary 8-bit game that’s said to be possessed by evil spirits. The experience sees you alternating between the surprisingly labyrinthine space of the game, and the increasingly threatening environment of your bedroom, where terrible toys abound. Did you have one of those phones on wheels with eyes as a kid? Whoever invented that deserves a spell in Arkham Asylum.
Sadly, my efforts to make headway in Tormenture’s 8-bit component were constrained by the limitations of my own work laptop, which ran it a steady 10fps – this being one practical difficulty of an experience where all the notionally potato-PC-friendly elements sit within a hi-fi 3D environment. I assure you that my laptop is not possessed by restless ghosts. It is simply extremely shit. Ah, if only I had a Steam Deck like the borrowed one James Archer insisted on taking back from me (Tormenture’s Steam Deck compatibility is currently unknown).
Still, I did play enough to form the impression that this could be a doozie. The trick is that the game within the game is quite fleshed-out. It’s not, so far, just a slammed-together Atari facsimile, but an open-ended and quite intricate puzzler, made up of labyrinths and locked doors and roaming spooks. One of the early puzzle rooms has you tempting out a zombie hand to push a button. The 3D component, meanwhile, is enchanting, with additional conundrums that are more in keeping with latter-day horror games, and lots of period bricabrac that slowly grows sinister. Or rather, more sinister. Don’t look at me like that, phone.
Downsides? Well, it doesn’t seem as loopy as Inscryption. The clear love of throwback memorabilia on show could make for an overly comfortable chiller on the whole. But why content yourself with my aimless speculations? I don’t even have a proper PC to play this on. The game’s demo is still live on Steam at the time of writing.
Another thought Tormenture inspires is that games from Atari’s halycon era make natural Halloween fodder because the default state of the screen is darkness. Nowadays, we’re used to desktops that blaze like stained glass windows at full noon, with barely any negative space at all. Bring back those cavernous CRT graphics, I say. Make me feel young again.