Tormentum II

Tormentum: Dark Sorrow was one of the first games I ever Let's Played - possibly my second one if I had to be specific. Even though I'm not a fan of the Aliens franchise, the H.R. Giger-inspired art style was still intriguing enough for me to give the game a try. Once I played it, I found it to be good overall, with gameplay and story that were both decent and engaging, but with an ending that seemed more or less definitive and thus, I never really gave much thought to the game after I finished it. So, color me surprised when, over a decade later and seemingly out of nowhere, we have...

DEVELOPER: OhNoo Studio

PUBLISHER: OhNoo Studio

RELEASED: July 23, 2026

RATING: N/A (though the game does deal with dark subject matter)

AVAILABLE: Steam

PRICE: $19.99 (with free demo)

Well, I say "out of nowhere"...it's apparently been in the works since 2018, but I had zero knowledge of it until an announcement on Steam roughly a month before its release. It's also a standalone sequel, meaning you don't need to know anything about Dark Sorrow beforehand. That's good, because it means anyone can jump in and play...but also because it calls what you do know about the first game very much into question, but that's a discussion for later. Also, I'll try to avoid spoilers where I can - mainly for Tormentum II - but if I have to spoil something, I'll mark it like this (highlight to read) ||if you see this you have to subscribe to GDE on Spectra and Youtube, them's the rules, I don't make 'em up :-P|| What I can say, however, is that Tormentum II improves on Dark Sorrow in almost every way.

The game opens in an unnamed city in the year 2088. We play as David, a VR programmer who has been plagued with unsettling dreams about a strange chest which seems to be calling to him. Meanwhile, he is very close to completing his latest project, a VR simulation he calls "Tormentum". No sooner does he obtain the processor he needs for the sim than things start taking a turn for the weird, and before he knows it, David ends up transported into his simulated world, almost immediately being locked in a cell with seemingly no memory of who he is or how he got into this world.

Honestly, how many monitors does one man need? Also of note: the screens have some Easter Eggs for those who have played Dark Sorrow.

Just like the Hooded One (what I've taken to calling the nameless protagonist from the first game), David has a journal into which he'll sketch various things of note...but also just like the Hooded One, the journal ONLY contains sketches, and there were times - mainly when I was coming back to the game for another recording session - when I felt a quest tracker or some kind of note feature wouldn't have gone amiss. II's journal, however, is soon joined by a new feature: a map, as there are far more places to visit in Tormentum (the world) than there were in Tormentum (the game) and, as a result, Tormentum II is a much longer game in general. A typical run of Dark Sorrow might be around 4 hours long; my initial playthrough of the sequel more than doubled that at just over 10 hours.

Some other improvements this game makes to the Tormentum formula include a hotspot indicator, the ability to zoom into each scene, and multiple save slots. One area where I feel T II takes a step backward, though - and I realize this comes down more to my personal preference than anything else - is with the dialogue presentation. In Dark Sorrow, character speech was given at the bottom of the screen in paragraphs which I feel were just the right size in terms of how much text was on the screen at one time; you could easily get through someone's monologue in 2 or 3 clicks. In the sequel, characters' lines are now shown over their head, in much smaller chunks, meaning more clicks to get through everything and there were multiple times when I had gotten the gist of what someone was saying and was ready to move on, but they just kept on rambling to the point where I became more annoyed the more I had to click.

A comparison of the two dialogue presentation styles, with Dark Sorrow on the left, and T II on the right

At several points in Dark Sorrow, you would be presented with a choice of two actions. In most if not all cases, one option was very clearly a "Good" action, the other was an "Evil" choice, and the choices you made, including one at the very end, determined the ending you got. This mechanic returns in Tormentum II and, not to say it wasn't good in the first game, but I feel it's handled WAY better here. The choices you have to make are not nearly as cut and dry as they were before, and you really have to ponder hard before making what you think might be the correct decision. You won't necessarily know right off if you've done a good thing either; you could be two-thirds of the way through the game before a choice you made early on and forgot about suddenly comes back to possibly bite you, and if you're not careful, you could end up locking yourself into a bad ending before you even realize it (care to guess how I know?). Thankfully, as mentioned earlier, there are multiple save slots but you still have to be careful, as there are only eight of them (technically nine, but one is dedicated to the auto-save).

Which is the right choice? Is there even a right choice to make?

Tormentum II's story, as with its predecessor, is told well on the whole, with an enjoyable cast of main characters, but it does have a couple of missteps. For one, I don't think we needed David to have amnesia. Often, when a game has an amnesiac protagonist, it's in service of building up to some shocking, or at least significant reveal, and it looked like T II was trying to head in that direction and have David realize "Oh, wait, this is my world, I created all this"...except the player already knows that because we saw it in the beginning of the game so the whole amnesia angle really doesn't pay off unless there's something in another ending I missed (to which I should note, I've only played the game once as of writing this, and I intend to replay it at least once more).

Secondly, we have the big question I teased earlier in this review: how exactly do these games relate to each other within the overall chronology or universe of Tormentum? In Dark Sorrow, it's revealed that ||the whole game took place in some kind of purgatory within the Hooded One's psyche||, and as mentioned before T II is a standalone sequel, so they're seemingly unconnected...but then why are there images from the first game on David's computer monitors, not as a blink-and-you'll-miss-it bonus or Easter Egg, but very prominently displayed? Heck, the loading screen that appears every time you run the game shows not David or anything from this game, but Dark Sorrow's Hooded One. There seemed to be a possible hint of a connection in the late stages of T II with a reference to ||"multiple worlds"||, but beyond that, nothing. My initial theory when I first learned of the nature of T II's story was that maybe the Tormentum series was going to be a sort of Twilight Zone of video games: an anthology of otherwise unrelated stories taking place in the twisted world of Tormentum. Having played through Dark Sorrow twice (I replayed it recently to refresh my memory on its story), and now its sequel, I'm still not sure one way or the other if that's the case, and I feel like just a tiny bit more of an explanation would have gone a long way.

Even David's outfit once he arrives in Tormentum is reminiscent of his predecessor.

Still, I recognize my confusion about the connection between the two games is a me problem because, again, I happen to have played Dark Sorrow. You don't have to. You can jump right into Tormentum II without any prior knowledge, and I can safely say it will be well worth your time. I hope we get more entries in the Tormentum-verse...and hopefully, we won't have to wait another decade to see them!

If you'd like to see how exactly I arrived at the opinions expressed in this review, then keep an eye on my Spectra and YouTube pages, I'll hopefully have a Let's Play of the game coming soon!

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