Torchlight: tough enough

The most impressive thing about Torchlight is how well it scales. On a technological level, it can be configured to be playable on netbooks and its colourful cartoony graphics will look charming enough on a souped-up desktop. The game is not without its technical issues — everything seems to freeze momentarily whenever a new monster is summoned, for instance — but it’s a rare 2009 PC game that will run on almost all but the most ancient of machines.

It is in gameplay, though, that Torchlight’s scalability is at its most impressive. This is a game that caters to all skill levels. Played at the lowest level of difficulty, Torchlight is almost a laidback experience. It’s certainly a simple game. You needn’t spend years training in a Chinese monastery to be able to point and left-click. At the highest level of difficulty, however, Torchlight plays almost like a frenetic arcade game, a throwback to a bygone time when you’d pay to be challenged. The action is intense and satisfying, and the threat of permadeath will lead to the development of more sophisticated tactics to keep characters alive. Player will learn to use allies as diversions, exploit defensive skills, pull foes out of large mobs and use snaring to buy breathing room.

The game really comes to life for me when played at Very Hard difficulty with the Hardcore setting turned on. Which is odd. I’m always up for a good gaming challenge but I should absolutely loathe permadeath for dumping me right back at square one, making me start yet another new character to go through the same starting quests, the same tilesets and the same bestiary.

Why am I not aggravated by VHHC mode? I was immensely irritated at having to replay an hour’s worth of content in Final Fantasy XII due to the lack of a convenient saving scheme yet I have few misgivings about losing 12 hours of progress in Torchlight ver. VHHC.

Sure, there’s a wince whenever one of my characters bites it. While it can be discouraging to lose a carefully nurtured VHHC character to an enemy ability you’ve never seen before, the game treats its players fairly and is devoid of the cheap insta-death scenarios favoured by designers who’ve run out of ideas. Still, the VHHC experience ought to be a whole lot more frustrating than it actually is.

Perhaps it’s the design. Torchlight constantly rewards the player with new loot, level-up dings and skill points. It’s easy to achieve something in this game. And quickly, too. Two left-clicks to bring down a grunt, 30 seconds to clear a large mob, perhaps a minute to take down a champion, 40 minutes to complete a Map Scroll sidequest. Restarting from scratch is not the tedious chore it usually is in other games.

However, the real satisfaction of playing VHHC mode comes from knowing I’m getting better; my skills are sharper, my tactics more thoughtful, my decision-making wiser. I know this because my VHHC characters lead longer lives now. They usually live to level 20 before biting the dust and I was incredibly chuffed when my current character hit level 30. I’ve adventured down to levels I’ve never seen before, battling foes and bosses I’ve never previously encountered.

It’s certainly not a game style for everyone. Permadeath, about an extreme a punishment for failure as you’ll get in gaming short of formatting the hard disk, will prove a strong deterrent for most and I suspect few will continue after their first discouraging VHHC death.

This brings me to the only shortcoming of VHHC mode: there’s no inducement to try it. The recent Steam Achievements update provided some incentives to impress others — you can’t view your Torchlight achievements unless you’ve set up a Steam Community profile — but there’s no in-game encouragement to try VHHC. There’s no exclusive item to hunt down, no monument to heroic achievement, not even a high score screen to mark your accomplishment. One of the reasons the classic Microprose games were so replayable was players were always ranked upon completion of a campaign. Winning was satisfying; winning at higher levels of difficulty more so since it meant a higher rank on the scoreboard. How many Civilization replays were spurred by a singular determination to be ranked a lot higher than Dan Quayle? The closest thing Torchlight has to this is, oddly enough, the Load Character screen which lists the age and level of dead VHHC characters.

In a game that’s all about constantly rewarding players, this lack of encouragement to try VHHC mode is a little disappointing. Granted, few will be up to the challenge but it would have been nice if the developers chose to better reward those who were.