Halls of Torment

Halls of Torment scratches the same itch as the old survival action games, with waves of monsters, automatic attacks, and a build that slowly turns into a small disaster for everything on screen. By our assessment, its best quality is how clearly it understands that loop: you choose upgrades, move just enough to stay alive, and watch the screen fill with damage numbers and threats. The trade-off is repetition, because this kind of game lives on runs, resets, and trying one more setup with a slightly different build. In practice it is a busy, relentless kind of play that asks for attention to positioning and timing rather than fancy controls. Compared with vampire-survivor style imitators, Halls of Torment sits near the darker, more old-PC side of the genre. It is most appealing to players who enjoy short sessions built around build-crafting and survival pressure, and its ceiling is the usual one for the genre: once the loop is understood, the appeal comes from variation inside it.