Castle Torgeath: Descent into Darkness Review

Hot off the heels of my brief love of Skyrim, I jumped right into Castle Torgeath because I wanted something similar but much shorter. First person melee combat is a rather rare occurrence, so I like to get them when I can. This is no real shock: melee in first person can be rather underwhelming and simple and Castle Torgeath is no different.

Before I begin properly, I should say that this is my second attempt at reviewing Castle Togeath. My first attempt was cut short by an update that removed many of my problems with the game, and drastically improved many areas. At that time, my review was all-but-complete, but I felt that the changes promised by the patch notes warranted another look and after that additional time spent my views on the game changed enough to make me want to rewrite the review entirely.

With that PSA out of the way, Castle Torgeath is a rather frustrating game. Frustrating because there is an exceptionally good game in there, it just needs a few tweaks for it to get there. The combat is a little too slow, especially with the magic - there seems to be a wind up animation that I can’t see which causes a rather significant delay in casting spells. This was in the melee too, and while that has been significantly improved since I first started playing it could still do with some additional improvements.

Enemy damage also needs another pass as the damage seems to apply even if they miss the actual swing. From what I can tell in the heat of the moment, melee attacks hit if they would at the start of the swing. Ranged attacks, especially the arrows, are also quite hard to avoid because they seem to have quite a large hitbox and move very quickly. With health potions often being quite the commodity, these can feel like cheap hits and I died a lot.

Dying forces you to load up a save and I suggest saving manually often, especially after clearing a difficult room or completing a boss fight. The auto save is supposed to be every ten minutes, but I’ve had it fail to do so for up to half an hour. It also sorely misses a quick save function as you have to go into the pause menu to save and for something that I feel you need to do quite often that’s a lot of unnecessary clicks.

For some reason there is a food bar that decreases with time, rather rapidly if I were to pass judgement - the protagonist can wolf down three meals in the space of an hour and still not be full. Keeping this bar filled is essential, as if it empties you will die, but for such a harsh punishment there is no benefit. This system is seemingly only in this game to be a nuisance, and yet this could be so easily fixed: add a slight automatic health regeneration when the food bar is filled. This won’t make the game that much easier, but it would certainly give the food bar a more interactive role in this game.

The levels in Castle Torgeath are all a series of rooms connected by a sprawling weave of corridors. There’s no rhyme or reason as to why this corridor has a strange bend in it, but it does and you have to walk around it probably more than once. To aid with this - particularly on the second level which is straight up a maze - is the newly added minimap. I’m so glad that they added this in, but I found myself no longer exploring because the map is revealed from the beginning of the levels so I could see which way I needed to go to progress.

This took away quite a lot from the game, which does a half decent job of telling multiple stories through the environment. I say half decent purely because these stories are told through notes and books scattered throughout the levels, and while they each tell a small section of the story they can be big text dumps. This is especially noteworthy in the dialogue between characters you meet in the dungeons, as they’ll drone on and on and actually say not much at all. But, everywhere that a note says somebody died there is an appropriate skeleton or blood stains on the floor and walls, and there are a lot of other small attentions to detail in the world that really show that these events did transpire.

There is a good degree of enemy variety, too: from spiders and scorpions in the first level to demons and haunted skeletons in the last. Each model is nicely animated and there’s a lot of detail, particularly on the armour pieces the orcs wear. My one complaint with the animations are the death animations, which are all canned and can look quite out of place when they get hit with a mace and fall forwards - though with some of the enemies I can understand why they don’t ragdoll. There are also special enemies that appear whenever they feel like it, though supposedly after a set amount of time. These are really dangerous if you don’t see them spawn because they do a lot of damage and are best dealt with using range.

Throughout Castle Torgeath are ghosts who can give you a single buff at the cost of items you’ll pick up throughout the world. I initially thought that these were permanent buffs, but they’re on a timer and you can only have one active at a time. This is where I wish the dialogue was more concise because it does say that when you buy the buff, but not in a place that I read until I was forced to double back for more.

Collecting all of the random items I encountered turned out to be a rather significant detriment to myself because you apparently have a max inventory size, regardless of the inventory tab. I was attempting to pick up potions that I really needed for nearly an entire level before I realised what the negative sound effect playing when I tried to pick something up meant. There was nothing that I saw in my inventory screen or UI in general to tell me that I had limited space, so this really did stump me for a long time.

This has turned out a lot longer than my original draft. The fact of the matter is I really like this game, in spite of its flaws and shortcomings, and I wish beyond all else that it was just that little bit better. Everything that I’ve listed here are little frustrations that I have, and they never stacked on top of each other to make me want to stop playing. If you’re into the old-style dungeon crawlers this might be right up your street, and I think it is worth the asking price.