A Video Game Where Everything, Including You, Dies in One Hit

The world was not crying out for yet another twin stick top-down shooter, but Tormentor X Punisher doesn’t care. It’s loud, filthy, crass as hell, and filled with genuinely interesting ideas. Oh, and it also has the best opening to a game ever?

I’m very into a video game apparently set on the planet Fuck You.

Tormentor X Punisher deliberately obfuscates how some of its systems work, preferring players to organically discover them along the way. But it doesn’t take long before you start realizing there’s far more to the game than running around and firing bullets in every direction, racking up points before you inevitably die.

For one, reloading. Players have access to a shotgun and machine gun, but the machine gun has a limited set of bullets—the last of which is, for whatever reason, on fire. (Who cares?) In order to reload your machine gun, you have to fire your shotgun. You don’t have to wait until the machine gun is out of bullets, and the way you strategically time reloads is one of many fascinating layers.

Also, everything in Tormentor X Punisher, your character included, died in one hit. That includes bosses, too! Finding out their weakness—like shooting them in the back—might require some deducing, but everyone is on the same playing field. It means things get hectic really fast, as the arena fills with bodies.

You can’t turn off the intense screen shaking, it’s part of the chaos aesthetic.

And while the basics of survival involve shooting everything, you won’t last very long without upgrading your equipment. There are no stores to shop at, however, and no currency to use. After a few runs, I noticed the game was rewarding me after certain actions occurred, and a meter was filling up alongside it. Turns out, Tormentor X Punisher‘s upgrade path requires players to kill enemies in unique ways, including, for example, firing bullets off the wall over and over again.

Part of the game’s depth comes from trying to discover exactly how the game wants you to sadistically kill everything, and learning organic ways to incorporate them into your play. Some can easily happen by accident—i.e. having enemies kill one another—while others require you to shift strategy. It makes every run super interesting, based on how the arena begins filling up and which kills you’re able to pull off. (I start with wall shots, and see where the run takes me.)

Right now, Tormentor X Punisher is only available on PC, but here’s hoping they’re able to port this wild shooter elsewhere soon. More people need to play this fun, ridiculous game. It turns out I did need another twin stick top-down shooter.

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