A Grindy, Dungeon-Crawling Take on the Survivor Genre
A quick caveat: it was during my playthrough of Halls of Torment that I hit my ‘Survivors’ fatigue point. My 2025 has featured Achilles Survivor, Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor, Megabonk, some Doom-like Survivor called Serious Survivors and now this. I’ve tried not to let it factor into my score and review, but after a couple of dozens of hours in Halls of Torment, it’s fair to say that I feel tormented by the entire genre. I’m going to take a self-imposed Survivors break after this.
Halls of Torment was something of a surprise-drop on Xbox Game Pass, arriving with little fanfare and a modest £7.99 price tag. ‘Modest’ is a pretty good term for Halls of Torment generally: it certainly doesn’t look all that much, seemingly cribbing its graphics from a ‘90s Forgotten Realms title or original Diablo. The monster design is about as cliched as they come, with skeletons and demons out the wazoo, and we half-expected to see a Beholder creep round the corner. If we were judging games by presentation alone, Halls of Torment would get some kudos for nostalgia but otherwise score badly.
But while Halls of Torment is modest, it’s got enough about its progression design that makes it worth tucking somewhere in the mid-section of your backlog. It’s not essential, but it will satisfy someone with a love for the genre.
And What Exactly Is A Survivor?
For those who don’t know what the genre actually is, it’s basically a twin-stick shooter where the player doesn’t necessarily have to do the shooting. You move about arenas, dodging enemies while most of the attacking is automated. Taking the shooting out of the player’s hands means they can concentrate on other things, like escape routes or how best to progress the avatar. Because every thirty seconds or so, a new Hades-like interface pops up and the player can choose from three or four (four in Halls of Torment’s case) buffs and boons. These buffs level up and the player becomes increasingly powerful, which is a good thing when the enemies are doing the same.
Halls of Torment very much adheres to this formula. There are six levels, ranging from graveyards to frozen catacombs. Pick one, and you’ll be lumped into it with precious little in the way of damage or survivability. Luckily there aren’t many enemies either, so you can pew-pew a few and pick up the resulting gems to level up. A Damage boost here, a Critical Chance boost there, and suddenly you’re more of a threat.
The ratchets in Halls of Torment come in a few shapes. There’s gear, which is fairly rare and slots into a D&D-style ragdoll, with room for rings, gloves and chainmail – that sort of stuff. These can be chucked into a well and kept for a future session, but more on that later. Then there’s the level-up boosts which are your bread and butter. These are the health, crit, damage and regen boosts that we mentioned before, and there’s a smattering of rare ones among the common. And finally, there are the passive abilities, gained mostly from bosses and two far-flung locations on the map. Snag these and they socket into one of six slots on the avatar, raining down lightning (amazing), sending out walls of fire (even more amazing), or swinging a giant metal ball about your person (surprisingly less amazing). These passive abilities are the VFX animator’s dream. They pop off with the subtlety of a Peggle ‘Ode to Joy’, destroying swathes of enemies at once.
As you would hope from a Survivor, the upward curve feels great. Some of the character classes (oh yeah, there’s a good dozen of these) start a little too pathetically for our tastes (the Shieldmaiden and wonderfully named Landsknecht struggle in the early stages), but after ten or so upgrades, the going gets easier. You can have thirty or forty enemies on screen at once, but they’re often dead before they can even get close to the avatar.
Like a Boss
Bosses arrive with blue and red bases to mix up matters. They tend to bother you with environmental damage and the need to dodge, so it’s often best to kill them first. They’re a little generic, often oversized versions of smaller enemies, so it’s all the more surprising when they break that rule. Our favourites (or least favourites, depending on perspective) are a mounted horseman and hydra on the Forgotten Viaduct level, and they have collectively ended our runs more than any other boss.
Die or reach the end of a level (a megaboss appears after twenty minutes of survival) and you hop back home with some persistent rewards. NPCs can be found in levels, which in turn give you benefits at the camp; gold can be traded for upgrades to base stats; potions can be made; and the Tormented Souls of dead bosses can be used to access the Shrine of Torment – a method of playing harder levels with greater rewards.
But douchiest of them all is the Wellkeeper. Not only does he require you to a) find a decent gear piece, then b) chuck it into a well within the level, he makes you c) pay through the nose to bring it out of the well. It’s entirely possible that you will have to kill 5000 enemies to earn enough coin for him to pull a ring out of a bucket. What a douche.
If it’s not clear from the description, there is plenty to both do and work towards in Halls of Torment. You’ll never feel like you’re done. Each run will end with a number of decisions about exactly how to spend your coins. Is it more important to get a Pickup Radius buff, or that ring which summons demons to fight for you?
Grinding our Gears
Our problem with Halls of Torment, and which ties into the opening paragraph, is that we did not wholly want to play another run. There was always a lingering thought, out of shot, that maybe I was done. Some of that’s to do with my Survivor-itis, sure, but I think most of it comes from how big of an ask Halls of Torment is. A single session is twenty minutes. You can’t speed that up: you have to survive for that period of time and THEN fight a boss. There’s something about holding that knowledge in my hands: I will, almost definitely, be doing the run for 25 minutes.
Halls of Torment can’t provide enough reassurance that this run will be much different from the others. Sure, I will have incrementally improved a stat or gear piece that makes things easier. But the enemies will be the same, the minibosses likewise. If I have gained the NPC, magical journal page or done the light-puzzle from a level (Halls of Torment likes chucking in some neat level wrinkles), then it’s unlikely that I will find anything new, either. And the level-ups are so skewed to the common rarity that they’re rarely surprising either.
Which is to say that Halls of Torment has a shelf life, and that shelf life kicks in far earlier than the progression systems and unlocks. I didn’t resent playing another session – far from it – I just wasn’t hugely enthused before every run, and I had to be confident that I had 25 minutes to spare.
A Demanding Grind with D&D Charm
Putting aside my growing Survivor fatigue – and I dearly hope that I have been objective and it hasn’t factored into my score – there is a cracking example of a Survivor game here. Halls of Torment gets the basics right, with a cavalcade of progression systems, and an intuitive dodge-a-thon at its core. Sure, it’s ugly, but that ugliness comes with a certain Advanced Dungeons & Dragons charm. The ‘but’ is that it demands too much. The time-investment and grind, for reasonably limited progress, was too much for my personal taste.
But hey, some people like a bit of grind. If you’re fine with threadbare rewards from your Survivors-a-like or dungeon crawler, then Halls of Torment isn’t much of a risk. At a very humble £7.99 or an install from Game Pass, you have a compact little battler that, at the very least, gets the blood pumping for its first few hours, and offers a multitude of ways to personalise after that.
Important Links
Clear Your Schedule – The Just One More Run Addiction of Halls of Torment is on Game Pass! – https://www.thexboxhub.com/halls-of-torment-is-on-game-pass/
Buy from the Xbox Store (and play through Game Pass) – https://www.xbox.com/en-GB/games/store/halls-of-torment/9NMNMS626R59/0010
