Recent reviews by N15g

Shut up, Wesley Nata!

📝 Halls of Torment starts strong, with a compelling mix of progression and roguelite gameplay, but over time, cracks in the design become more apparent. There's fun to be had, but the later stages of the game reveal balance issues, a reliance on RNG for padding and a lack of meaningful build variety.

---

❤️ The early game is engaging, with satisfying progression tied to achievements. Unlocking new characters, abilities, and gear through steady play feels rewarding—at least for a while.

✅ A huge achievement list (500 total) encourages exploration and goal-setting, especially early on. Unfortunately, mid-to-late game, they mostly just provide gold—long past the point where gold has any real value.

✅ The combat is straightforward and easy to pick up. While lacking depth, there’s a simple satisfaction in stacking raw damage and watching enemies melt.

✅ Runs fairly well on the Steam Deck. That said, elemental builds can tank performance, making crit-based builds not only the strongest but also the only viable option for smooth gameplay.

✅ I spent 79 hours reaching 100%, which speaks to the game’s ability to hook you. However, the late-game grind becomes tedious, especially when RNG starts to take over.

---

The torment sets in...

❌ Sending gear up between runs is a neat mechanic that should allow for diverse builds… but in practice, there’s little variety. Crit and attack speed vastly outperform everything else, making most items feel redundant. The fact that you are limited to only 3 (if you're lucky) shipments, and the selection of items is random, it quickly becomes a chore to fill out the compendium.

❌ Elemental effects are disappointingly weak. It’s nearly impossible to apply enough stacks before enemies die naturally, making mechanics like burn and spark feel useless. Some characters (like the Sorceress) feel extremely weak because of this.

❌ RNG slows the game down in frustrating ways. Late-game artifact drops are completely random, meaning you could waste 20 minutes per run just for a chance at an item. A more structured unlock system would have been far less aggravating, hopefully making the late-game more rewarding than exhausting.

❌ The Vault is confusing at best, pointless at worst. You pay an absurd amount of gold to make enemies harder, but the rewards for doing so are minimal, only a couple of extra torment shards (a very minor stat boost) over a normal run.

❌ The simplicity of the combat becomes a weakness over time. No combos, no meaningful synergies—just stack crit damage and attack speed, because nothing else is remotely close in terms of performance.

---

💭 Final thoughts

Halls of Torment is fun for a while, but its design problems become more apparent the longer you play. The first 20–30 hours are enjoyable, but once you see past the illusion of variety, it turns into a grind without much payoff.

If you enjoy the genre and don’t mind repetitive, simplistic gameplay, you might get your money’s worth. But if you’re looking for deep builds, meaningful progression, and balanced endgame content, this one might not be for you.

🔻 Verdict: Not Recommended (but close to neutral).

📝 An adorable little exploration game that oozes charm, runs beautifully on the Steam Deck and doesn't overstay its welcome. Practically purrrfect 🐈‍⬛.

---

❤️ Adorable art style and animations. It really feels like you're following a curious little kitty around. Everything from pushing things off ledges, pouncing on birds or recoiling in horror from water feels genuine and is frequently hilarious.

✅ Runs perfectly on the Steam Deck. High framerate, decent battery usage and perfectly integrated controls make for a cat-egorically positive experience.

✅ The writing is genuinely funny. I quite literally laughed out loud a few times.

✅ A charming cast of cute critters. You meet a handful of other animals with their own little stories and each is quite memorable and amusing. There's also a payoff at the end for most of them that was quite lovely.

✅ A breezy game to 100%. I clocked in just under 6 hours to complete the game with the help of a guide for a couple of the hidden achievements. A couple are a little grindy (100 cans... really neow?), but nothing beyond what any achievement hunter wouldn't be used to.

✅ Short and sweet. As mentioned above, I got 6 hours out of the game at 100%, with plenty of time just wandering around and exploring of my own volition... climbing anything I could and causing general mayhem. At this length, the game doesn't overstay its welcome and feels satisfying when you finally put it down.

---

🥒 Hissssssssss...

❌ There aren't many that I'd call out... or any for that matter. Maybe the price—it's a fairly short game, but it never feels cheap. In fact, the game is dripping with love and attention to detail. If you're still undecided, then grab it during the next Steam sale. At 25% or 50% off, this game is a steal.

Decent at first, but the last half of the game really feels like a chore.

✅ It's fun combat at first, and rewards good dodging and countering.

✅ Building your castle is pretty fun, albeit clunky.

✅ You can trivialize the game if you want by changing material costs, power scaling etc.

❌ Ultimate abilities are embarrassingly underwhelming with a 2min cooldown. You will get 20x the DPS from auto-attack spamming and few of the ultimates have any noteworthy secondary utility not eclipsed by standard abiltiies.

❌ Due to a conscious design decision for PvP reasons, crafting will not pull from chests... even on PvE servers. You will spend hours either organizing your base or running around trying to find your materials. When you have finally found your materials, you then need to run back and forth between rooms as the game pretty much requires specialized crafting rooms and the rooms are very large. Every time I had to craft something was an annoying chore.

❌ There is little to no joy or discovery in crafting. It is your stock-standard "Replace X material with Y material because Y has higher gearscore"; Upgraded weapons get a new ability for the first two tiers, but later the only differences are minor passives or the incredibly lame "Full set bonus give you +1 gearscore"...

❌ Followers are useless. It costs far too much in time and resources to equip them, and a 20-hour expedition from a follower rewards less resources than 10 minutes of manual farming. Even when follower return rates are maxed in the settings it is hard to see them as worthwhile.

❌ Every late-game enemy and boss fight seems designed to infuriate rather than challenge; Enemy CC lasts way too long and there is no way to mitigate it, meaning that even against low level enemies you will be frequently hit by off-screen abilities that force you to just sit and watch for 4-5 seconds at a time.

❌ Speaking of off-screen... The camera and camera controls are awful, particularly on controller. You need to hold L2 to move the camera, and due to the camera angle you can only really see 40% of combat at a time. With the sheer number of encounters that involve enemies that dash around constantly, or spawn adds behind you, you will be constantly hit by off-screen attacks, or miss your own attacks as enemies move off-screen.

❌ Many enemies spam chaos and fire attacks that leave damage pools on the ground lasting way too long. In many cases these will entirely fill an area leaving you forced to just wait 15 seconds for the zones to clear.

✍️ In conclusion, If you like action-adventure games, vampires and survival crafting... this may be worth picking up on a heavy sale, but unless you're really into all three, your time and money are better spent elsewhere.

Smooth gunplay, gorgeous aesthetic and tons of replay value.

I was drawn to this mostly by the cute characters, but the gameplay really drew me in and I couldn't put it down.

✅ The gunplay is really smooth; Hit feedback is satisfying, critical hit zones are generous and the controller customization is excellent, making playing with controller a breeze. It's a shooter that feels perfectly fine with the sticks on the Steam Deck.

✅ The performance is fantastic, even when things get hectic. Some of the more insane Reincarnation 9 runs may push the Deck to its limits, but for the most part things run very smoothly. On desktop it's a smooth 60 all the time.

✅ Great rogue-lite mechanics; Every character, gun, scroll and blessing feels different from the rest, and with hundreds of options there's no lack of variety. There's a degree of meta-progression in the talent tree and character unlocks, but it's more of a drip-feed power mechanic than anything deep and you will max the tree out before you hit the end-game.

✅ The dopamine will flow. Hits feel solid, crits feel crunchy, the damage numbers fly off in streams of numbers and the crits get more colorful as you hit harder and harder. It feels unbelievably satisfying mowing through endless waves of mooks as a bunny with a minigun. The loot hits the spot as well; There's several layers to weapon stats and inscriptions making sifting through loot for that god-roll boomstick rewarding.

✅ All the past seasons and rewards are still available; You can go back and play the mechanics from previous seasons and all the rewards are still purchasable in the store for the current season. No FOMO here.

✅ The balance; The game starts fairly challenging, but once you push past the initial curve you can tackle the game's 2 intermediate difficulties without much trouble. When you hit the final difficulty (Reincarnation), you unlock a whole new set of gameplay mechanics including an endless mode, and 9 levels of difficulty scale. It wasn't until Reincarnation 9 that I felt like the game was actively trying to be unfair, and even then you can quickly outscale the game if you make it through the first few levels.
As nothing is locked behind the R9 difficulty except for an even-more punishing endless mode, you can always just pick a difficulty that works for you and enjoy that.

💗 The characters are all adorable, and the art-style suits it perfectly; The pseudo-chibi, anthro aesthetic fits the somewhat silly nature of the game and a lot of the charm would be lost with generic soldier #435 running around with AR-47 clipazines.

❌ The UI is not optimized for controller... in fact, I'd go so far as to say it's outright broken currently. In-game is generally fine, despite some absolutely bizarre button mappings, but the main UI is a mess. There are nodes on the skill tree where you have to press a completely different direction to navigate to the next node, and there are some parts of the UI that you cannot navigate to with controller at all.
There's an option for displaying a cursor to control with the stick, but the cursor is bugged and almost always invisible on the Steam Deck.
Some UI elements are untranslated as well, particularly in the button-mapping screen, making remapping the awful default mappings for things like the past season mechanics a pain.

❌ Texture loading in the first map causes freezes the first time you shoot something. My guess is that the impact sprites or the damage number fonts are not cached during the level load and loading them on the fly results in a half-second of frame drops on the Deck. Once loaded it doesn't happen again, so it's not a huge deal.

Absolutely unbeatable for pixel art and indexed-color workflows.


I switched to Aseprite from Photoshop as a lot of Photoshop seems to actively fight against you when you're working on pixel-art. So far, I have not been disappointed... in fact quite the opposite. I've accumulated nearly 90 hours in less than a month, so I would definitely say I've gotten my value for money out of this already.

✅ Color palette management is amazing; The ability to save palettes, extract them from an image as well as various downsampling and dithering algorithms. You can even edit the palette on an indexed image and see the changes on the canvas in real-time. Absolutely unbeatable when you're experimenting with color.

✅ All the tools you need are there, with settings specifically for pixel work; Pixel-perfect option for the brush tool, fully customizable dynamics for your graphics tablet, an extremely easy-to-use Bezier line tool, not to mention the shading mode for the brush that makes shading a no-mess experience; That shade tool is something I now miss when I'm in Photoshop.

✅ Flexible exporting; Not only various formats, but all the options are there for creating sprite sheets of various formats. Between the use of layers, tags and the various layout options during export there are not many sprite layouts that Aseprite will not be able to handle.

✅ And if something is missing, you can just build it; The scripting API is Lua-based with a good chunk of examples to start from. I was able to create a new export option in under an hour that packed up my document into separate back and front sprites and export them all simultaneously. The ability to keybind your scripts means that you can create a whole series of one-button tools if you need to.

✅ And if something is missing from the API, the whole thing is open-source.

✅ Dozens of tutorials, and pretty ease to use in general; The official documentation is pretty thin, but there's a plethora of third-party tutorial content covering both the basics and the more advanced concepts. You can be up to speed and running with the whole interface with only a few hours invested. I recommed AdamCYounis on YouTube in particular.

💗 The whole interface is in pixel art... It's really cute and keeps you in the mindset. The font can be a bit hit-or-miss, but it's not a deal-breaker.

❌ When you run Aseprite through Steam, it counts as a "Game". If I pick up my Steam Deck while I have Aseprite open, the Steam DRM force-closes Aseprite on my PC... thankfully there are recovery saves so no work is ultimately lost, but it's extremely frustrating to have to either close Aseprite when I want a break, or go through the rigmarole of recovering crash data if I haven't been diligent with hitting CTRL-S.
Note: You can run Aseprite and another game at once on the same machine at least... so you don't have to quit out of Aseprite to preview your work.

❌ The app can slow down noticeably on larger canvases. I was working on building a color palette and kept pulling in reference images and expanding the canvas. At about the 1-2 megapixel point I could start to feel everything chugging a little... Not something you'll usually run into though as the vast bulk of pixel work is going to be 1080p or less. If you're designing extremely large, untiled backgrounds that may become an issue though.

❌ The official documentation isn't stellar, particularly for the scripting API. There's a lot of methods that aren't documented, and the ones that are often lack detailed parameter info outside of a single example. Your best bet for learning anything is probably Google rather than the official docs.

I thought I'd quickly see what the game was like before going to bed, and the next thing the sun is out.

Excellent match for the Steam Deck; The resolution is perfect, the battery usage is very low and the controls are very simple.

This game is a cinematic masterpiece; you can tell by the unskippable cutscenes. And justifiably so; If you're going to pay for 4kids-level voice acting, you don't want people accidentally missing out because they've fallen asleep on the escape key.

Also, I am eternally grateful that the prologue covers climbing walls and balancing very slowly across wooden beams... These forced-walking mechanics are of vital importance in an action RPG, and the skill MUST be mastered in a safe environment. Games journalists would no doubt give the prologue a 10 out of 10... if they could count. Actually, they must have had a few on staff because you start at level 10... that's one heck of an off-by-one error. I guess they missed that one in testing. I submitted a bug report though, so I'm sure they'll look into it.

Now, let's cover the important bit... Combat! Oh, is your skill off cooldown? Press it. Now that's what I call a rotation! Everything dies in one hit, so you won't be needing that skill anyway, just bang your head on the left side of the keyboard; you'll get one of the off-CD skills for sure and it _really_ helps with the immersion.

Amazon have definitely hit it out of the Ark with this one; It's like a whole New World to discover.

All up, I'd give the game 7 arks out of 7, but someone censored them all and now they're lost.



This DLC contains consumable content... No ReFuNdS!

Generally good game marred by an infuriating number of game-breaking bugs.

Can't stop playing