Torchlight is a game that’s good at putting you to sleep. Seriously, if ever there were a game that could put me to sleep faster, for whatever reason, Torchlight is that game. Normally it’s impossible for me to fall asleep at a computer, but Torchlight has claimed victory over my consciousness, and lulled me into slumber via endlessly and pointlessly clicking. There just isn’t anything in the system that’s compelling without also being frustrating. Interactions are little more than incentive to keep playing, but what incentive can there be to keep playing Progress Quest without ever making any progress?
The problem is just so. With most games, the player is intended to figure out and overcome, thus gaining a sense of power over similar experiences, or be uniquely disempowered, where the player never feels a true sense of control, just more or less based on their skill. In Diablo, the game that obviously inspired Torchlight, the reality is that you effectively have power over all that comes before you, and all that comes before you will be experienced quite often, an experience that is eased into. In Torchlight, everything stays roughly at an even keel with the player, never allowing the player to feel uniquely in control of the situation.
In a game with variable soup occurring everywhere all at once, such uncertainty will either lead to boredom and required grinding, or reliance on some other aspect to retain interest. However, there’s not much there to rely on otherwise, as the art style is about what’s left, since the story is described almost at the level of a neanderthal, “deep dungeon, go down.” Easy enough to understand, giving a clear goal to the player, but the dungeon is not internally motivating. There’s no real mystery to its random generation, as the morphology of the experience never actually changes, each area eventually becoming one more slog.
Unfortunately, one more slog is all the game ever amounts to, and aside from managing the exploration of enemies that explode on contact, there’s nothing here to enjoy. Thinly veiled attempts at providing humor, whimsy, anything really to change or shape the experience fail spectacularly. The goal of the game might be to figure out why anyone would play a game that is not only a clear copy of an old game, but a copy that is nowhere even close to as good as the original. Or perhaps you need a game to help you with your insomnia. Assuming you lack the necessary obsessive-compulsive disorder to be enamored with this type of game, a keyboard pillow happily awaits.
Recommended: No