Recent reviews by Marxist

I backed this game on Kickstarter - I'm just really slow about playing new games. This is worth a play, but for me it was a middling success. The existentialist themes of Torment are certainly there, the plot is interesting, and there are some really great characters and character moments, but the pacing of the game is off.

You really need an expository character that grounds you when the worlds are as strange as they are in this game. It is very, very strange, maximal strangeness. Because that contextual character isn't there, I often felt like an ape just randomly pushing buttons and seeing what happens because you don't have any context for the information the game is giving you. This also affects player agency, because your choices don't have as much impact when you don't understand why you're even making the choices that you are - you're just pressing responses in dialogue IU's because they're there. Another issue is the NPC sprite design. There are lots of weird races in the games setting, but you can hardly tell that in most cases as all of the sprites just look like adult human males of sometimes different color.

Stuff I really liked:
- The mechanics and leveling system were really interesting
- The art style of the locations was really cool
- The overall plot was great
- The philosophical themes were there.
- Merecaster dialogues were *awesome* in many cases. I hope that sort of thing finds its way into this genre more widely.

Stuff that I wish was better;
- More context needed in nearly every location (though the Bloom, despite being one of the weirdest places, had a lot of context characters and so felt very smooth).
- More interactions with NPC party members

I found the game to be quite fun. The shooting and levels are interesting, the music is great. The enemy and weapon/build variety was lots of fun too. The boss battles can get pretty annoying - but that's basically what you get with boss battles in these games. Definitely worth a few play throughs.

This is the kind of game to take a few day's vacation and really just sit and play. It's a masterpiece.

I gave approximately 20$ for this game. I have played around 2 hours of it now and feel that every bit of it was worth it. Visceral shooting fun with great music and design to back it up. Levels are, for the most part, interesting and varied without feeling super linear *or* trapping you into constantly retracing yours steps to figure out where exactly you are. The map is very nice, but it's rarely needed as the level design is rather intuitive after a modicum of exploration. The art direction is very appealing to me.

All I can say is I have 0 regets, yes take my money I don't care.

If you've never played this game you've made a mistake, and now it will live on, hopefully, for decades to come.

Here is a more indepth analysis now that I've had time to *really* play this quite a bit:

Changes:

1. The UI is totally different and more like Baldur's Gate. I'm fine with that, the scroll wheel always gave me trouble because I spent too much time bouncing around in it trying to figure out what I could do in a given circumstance. The UI is a little less ergonomic now, but since you can edit your hotkeys, there's no real reason to not just use the hotkeys and save the UI + clicking for really odd-ball tasks.

2. Multiple auto-save slots. This is really handy because you sometimes press q at just the worst possible moment, or realize that you made a dreadful error too late into the future.

3. Zoom function - it looks really nice, and I've always enjoyed Beamdog's EE's for giving me the choice as to *how* zoomed in I play. Maybe I'm just blind, but I really don't notice pixelation and things like that (or I have a lower res monitor that's nearly 12 years old... that could be the case too).

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The Bad:

At release here on the PC there are a *few* very minor bugs still yet - you likely won't notice them unless you're on a non-windows operating system and happen to get unlucky.


The point of the EE edition here isn't to make a boatload of money for Beamdog - does anybody seirously think Torment is a cash cow? It's more like the art-house movie that all the critics rave about, and everybody claims to have seen, but nobody has actually watched all the way through, nor do they intend to look into it too deeply. The issue is that for those of us who *do* really love Torment, the game is becoming too old to run reliably. I myself, and several folks I know, have run into issues where the OG version of Torment simply is non-functional no matter how many mods you install or how much fiddling you do with the .ini files. It's particularly bad if you use higher end peripherals whose drivers interact in unexpected ways with Torment's keybindings.

With this edition we'll (hopefully) have a relatively more future-proof version of Torment that will last for another 20 years before some other update is needed.

The game that turned me into a giant nerd :(

Minimal effort required to get running on win7 system, excellent game. Great soundtrack, good atmosphere, excellent art direction, really fun level design, natural RPG progression. Everything you could want out of an RPG.

I adore this game. It's a little overwhelming at first, but if you're one to go ahead with it anyways, it completely rewards you.

This may very well be one of the best games I've ever played.

This is exactly what I wanted.