Tormentum II Review – Marvelous, Miserable Madness

Tormentum II Review 

Life imitates torment. Or is Tormentum II the other way around? Tormentum II is a dark, surreal point-and-click adventure beckoning players into a nightmare world teeming with grotesque creatures and even scarier choices.

Inspired by H.R. Giger and Zdzisław Beksiński, it’s the standalone follow-up to 2015’s Tormentum: Dark Sorrow, a bigger-and-broader continuation of OhNoo Studio’s particular brand of psychological horror. Developed by Łukasz Rutkowski and Piotr Ruszkowski over eight years, Tormentum II is an apt title for this labor of love — for what is making art but torment we choose to engage in?

Our protagonist David is an artist and game developer living in a dystopic future where escaping into his simulation is far preferable to eking out a living among the poisonous smoke settling over his city. I can only wonder what Rutkowski and Ruszkowski see when they look out their windows.

Tormentum II wears its influences on its sleeve. The game opens with a Philip K. Dick quote. This is shortly followed by David stating his love of classic sci-fi novels by Dick, Arthur C. Clarke, and Stanislaw Lem. There are also a fair few less “prestigious” genre influences pushing their way to the front: The Matrix in a pillbox here, Elden Ring in a bonfire babe there.

These references feel earnest, even if their ubiquity makes the world just a tad less interesting. Still, earnestness takes one a long way in my similarly earnest book. Tormentum II is a game made by people who want to share the things they love. From its cyberpunk opening to its fantasy trappings, this haunting and dangerous world reflects all the work it takes to create such immersion. There’s an earnestness to the protagonist’s self-aware reclusiveness, too.  Openly pondering why he prefers to spend his life drawing characters and coding worlds, David feels like the developers themselves bleeding through. That personality drips, drips, drips its way through this eerie, atmospheric world.

The Old Ways 

The love of point-and-click games is clear in every step. On one level, I love devotion to old-school styles of playing games — innovation doesn’t mean shedding everything that made something fun in the first place. I enjoyed many of the puzzles and minigames all the more for their backwards-facing solutions, partially because the game wasn’t torturing me with its difficulty on top of it.

Unfortunately, that love for classic point-and-click game design also holds Tormentum II back. The ease of solving puzzles feels like the developers’ choice for dealing with the age-old adventure game problem of the player getting stuck because they can’t psychically intuit that they’re supposed to stick the toothbrush in the electrical socket (or some other supposed digression). Too often, I would figure out a solution only to be immediately interrupted by a cutscene or gameplay issue that prevented me from finishing the puzzle. The problem isn’t necessarily that the puzzles are too easy or too difficult. Rather, the game occasionally gets between the player and their own deductions.

A Cruel Choice 

My biggest frustration was how often the game bum-rushes the player into a choice that they don’t know they’re making. Then, it shames them for doing something cruel. I eventually got the hang of it, but it left a sour taste in my mouth to know that I was leaving a trail of despair behind me. This, all because the developers didn’t quite trust me to do the wrong thing when given the option.

Also, I don’t love the timed puzzles, but there are worse evils in this world — and far worse evils in Tormentum II. There’s a difference between making a player uncomfortable with the consequences of a choice and making them unsure whether they were given a choice at all. Tricking is a strong word, though — if I had to guess (and isn’t that all we can do?) I would hazard that the developers’ total immersion (an intentional parallel between themselves and their protagonist) caused them to lose track of what newcomers would find during their descent into Tormentum II’s psychological horror-style madness. After eight years spent inside this particular mindscape, perhaps it’s difficult to remember which parts feel intuitive because you created them and which are completely opaque to someone seeing them for the first time.

Overall, the game’s influences sometimes crowd its intentions. In the moment, it’s occasionally more conceptually interesting than fun to play. That criticism was also lobbed at the first game. Eleven years later, some of that same tension remains in Tormentum II.While OhNoo’s artistic vision has grown considerably, its point-and-click mechanics remain firmly rooted in the genre’s past. Sometimes that’s a strength; sometimes not.

A Beautiful Nightmare 

And yet, as a work of visual art, Tormentum II is extraordinary. The art truly is Giger-esque, and it’s also truly gorgeous. You can feel the love, labor, and all eight years of development in every one of the 200 hand-drawn scenes. You also feel the disturbing and encroaching dread that permeates this game’s atmosphere.

The world is frightening, but it is never careless. Every strange creature, decaying structure, and impossible landscape feels like it was drawn by someone who desperately wanted you to see it. Better yet, it is rarely hopeless.

For all its frustrations, Tormentum II has given me plenty to chew on. Like one of its great creatures of the night, I’m not sated yet. I want to see more games by OhNoo Studio. That’s a big ask, I know. I promise I’m not saying I need another eight years of your lives like an ever-twisting ouroboros from one of your drawings. It’s just so hard not to want more when this Tormentum II feels like a step in a longer journey. Perhaps this is simply the type of game the developers are interested in. The puzzles need only be exactly what they are. But if OhNoo Studio is hoping to take that next step, well — I’ll be there day one.

***PC code was provided for the purpose of this review.***