The legions of the Burning Hells spill forth in numbers not seen since the Lord of Terror and his foul brothers walked among us. Wait, it this not Diablo?

Halls of Torment nails the early Diablo atmosphere so well, from the rattling of innumerable skeletons to the scotched ground beneath your feet, that you'll swear you've loaded up a remake of the first two games. The gameplay is obviously completely different, especially early on where you'll be losing constantly to make small bits of progress towards conquering a stage. As with any good roguelite, you'll soon be overcoming challenges you couldn't imagine meeting before with your quickly stockpiling strength. After enough quests are completed, blessings are purchased, and equipment is discovered, you'll even start to find those once insurmountable hordes trivial.

Blessings can be refunded at any time and equipment can be swapped or removed, but it'll be a lot harder to ignore the more powerful traits coming each level or the increased experience pouring from the quest bonus to return to the place on the power creep arc you enjoyed the most. The stages will grow a little too long for the 'just one more run' rhythm of the early game as you routinely reach the end of the 30 minute timer and face off against the Lord of whatever horrible thing is waiting for you there. You'll look down and realize that an entire night has passed in the span of just a few “30 minute” runs that went far longer. It gets hard to commit to sitting down with the game at that point, but it's even harder to complain about still wanting to.

Early Access only seems to mean a limited number of stages, characters, and abilities at this point. The game is already plenty stable. I only saw two crashes in about 40 hours and while there is a bit of slowdown each time the screen fills with monsters and wildly triggering effects, that never made it any harder to guide my character through the gaps in the monster hordes. The visualizations of many of those effects, however, did often make it very difficult to actually see my next move.

Information isn't as obvious as it should be with some traits not meshing with the particularities of some characters and others affecting abilities in surprising ways. Not that there's any more room for information during the runs as level ups and hordes constantly descend upon you. But this can make designing builds a bit frustrating, something not made any easier by the randomness of traits and abilities. Though adapting on the fly is part of the fun with these sorts of games.

There's currently more than enough possibilities to keep anyone entertained, especially for the current asking price. Even if the promised updates, one of which is planned to hit the beta branch on this very day, never came, it'd still be awfully hard to complain about all the Halls of Torment have to offer.

Autumn Sale Update: The previously mentioned planned update has been live for a good amount of time now. It brought a new stage, two new characters, several new abilities, and several new items. These have all been interesting and varied bits of content to explore, but the most important addition since the above review is the new Agony Mode. This mode solves the issue of challenge disappearing with power progression by upping the difficulty based on how well you're doing in a stage. Better yet, this is an optional mode that can be toggled on or off at the start of a stage. The absolute flood of enemies and effects brought about by doing well in this mode can be a severe drain on frame rate and have caused a few more crashes while playing on the Steam Deck. But that is the cost of an ever increasing amount of mayhem, now isn't it?

Information is a lot more explicit now as well. The various stats of individual characters can be viewed before selecting them which is a huge help in noting the non-basic differences between them. Your first ability is also now selectable from the full list of unlocked abilities, removing a frustrating source of randomness at the start of each run.

Most of my issues with the game have already been resolved and there's more content slated for release early next year. The future of Halls of Torment is looking bright and it has never failed to capture me in the same way it first did every time I return to it.