Tormentum II

Introduction

Tormentum II picks up, in spirit rather than plot, eleven years after 2015's cult favourite Tormentum: Dark Sorrow. Players take on David, a simulation designer who wakes trapped inside his own creation on a prison island, and must explore a series of surreal, hand-drawn locations to find a way home. Developed and published by the two-person team at OhNoo Studio after roughly eight years of work, it released 23 July 2026 to a "Very Positive" reception: 101 of 110 total reviews recommend it, and this review reads a 100-review English-language sample covering nearly the entire population. That overwhelmingly positive score sits alongside a genuine, specific debate among longtime fans about exactly what kind of sequel this is.

An eight-year wait, and art that justifies it

Almost every review in the sample, positive or negative, agrees the wait produced something visually extraordinary. "This game will show you some of the most beautiful macabre art available today," reads one review, and another calls the whole experience "first and foremost a deep dive into art. Gothic, punk, grunge, metal, at times gross, at times glorious, always epic art." Reviewers repeatedly cite the game's roughly 500 individual hand-drawn background images — including dedicated close-ups — as a step up even from the well-regarded original, with several comparing specific scenes directly to the H.R. Giger and Zdzisław Beksiński art that inspired them. The dark, metal-inflected soundtrack draws similarly consistent praise, with one reviewer writing simply that "the music and sound design... elevate every scene and pull you even deeper into its dark atmosphere."

A visual novel wearing a point-and-click's clothes

The sample's clearest fault line concerns structure, not art. "Tormentum felt like an HOG without hidden objects, and it had a fairly simple plot. Tormentum II feels more like a visual novel," reads one detailed review, a framing echoed almost word-for-word by a negative review: "it feels more like a visual novel than a P&C adventure game. But the story is incoherent and most of the time I don't understand the narrative." A separate critical review goes further, arguing the large cast works against the story: "the game introduces over 30 beautifully drawn characters, but they blur together. Everyone acts like a prophet speaking in heavy metaphors, and almost nobody has a clear voice." This isn't a rejection of the writing outright — many reviewers on the positive side call the story "deep" and "cryptic" as a compliment — but it's a real and repeated disagreement about how much dialogue the game asks players to sit through relative to the first game's sparser approach.

Puzzles take a back seat

The second major and even more consistent complaint concerns difficulty. "The puzzles might be a bit too easy. There was never a point where I felt I really need to think about how to proceed," reads one review, and a near-identical sentiment recurs across the sample: reviewers describe the game as "considerably easier than Tormentum 1," note that "the solution was hinted at by the protagonist for no reason," and say they were rarely, if ever, stuck across a six-to-ten-hour playthrough. Crucially, almost nobody in the sample treats this as a dealbreaker on its own — most frame it as a trade the developers made deliberately, shifting focus toward story and choice rather than obstruction. Whether that trade pays off is largely what separates the sample's few negative reviews from its overwhelming majority of positive ones.

Choices, branches, and what the achievements confirm

Where the sample agrees almost entirely again is on replayability. Reviewers repeatedly highlight the game's morally ambiguous choices and multiple endings as a genuine strength: "I love the multiple endings, although it is overwhelming to track them all," reads one review, while another calls it "rather seldom to have so many branching paths in an adventure that actually changes the outcome." Steam's achievement data backs this up directly: alongside high-percentage story milestones in the 70-96% range consistent with most players reaching the game's midpoint, the list includes a cluster of distinctly named late-game achievements — including one as rare as 6.7% and another at 8.5% — that read as alternate, mutually exclusive endings rather than a single linear completion path, hard evidence of the branching structure reviewers describe.

Value

At NZ$29.99, Tormentum II sits at a fair price for a 6-to-10-hour, single-playthrough point-and- click adventure with meaningful replay value baked into its branching endings, and the sample raises no notable complaints about price relative to length. Several reviewers who spent a decade wishlisting the game frame the price as an easy, immediate purchase regardless of playtime, and the achievement data's spread of ending-specific unlocks suggests genre fans willing to replay for different outcomes will get considerably more than a single run's worth of content out of it.

Final Verdict

Tormentum II delivers exactly what eight years of anticipation promised on its most important front: extraordinary, Giger-and-Beksiński-inspired hand-drawn art wrapped around a genuinely branching story with real consequences. Where it divides its own fanbase is in trading the original's puzzle-first, sparser atmosphere for a heavier, visual-novel-style narrative and noticeably easier obstacles — a deliberate choice that mostly lands, judging by a 92% positive score, but one that a vocal, thoughtful minority of longtime fans genuinely mourn. For anyone drawn in by the art alone, or looking for a story-rich, choice-driven adventure with real replay value, it's an easy recommendation; for players who loved the original specifically for its puzzle challenge, it's worth tempering expectations first.