Tormentum II is a hand-painted nightmare, eight years in the making, about a god its creator never made

Eleven years ago, a two-person Polish studio put out a point-and-click adventure that looked like nothing else on Steam. Tormentum: Dark Sorrow was a grim, hand-painted descent through a world lifted from the canvases of H.R. Giger and Zdzisław Beksiński, and it landed at 92 percent Very Positive from players who came for the atmosphere and stayed for the dread. Tormentum II is the sequel almost nobody expected to actually arrive. It lands July 23.

OhNoo Studio is still just two people, Piotr Ruszkowski and Łukasz Rutkowski, and they have spent close to eight years drawing this one by hand. In an era where storefronts are filling up with cheap generated art, a game that took most of a decade to paint frame by frame is its own kind of statement.

The trailer makes the pitch better than any description can. Every screen looks like a painting you would stop and stare at in a gallery, if the gallery were also trying to unsettle you.

A story about a god you didn’t create

The setup is where things get pointed. You play a game creator obsessed with one goal: building a world populated by characters as intelligent as real people. A mysterious package arrives carrying a strange processor. He installs it, disturbing visions start bleeding into his waking life, and the line between him and his creation dissolves. He wakes up imprisoned on an island inside the very world he built.

Then comes the hook. The people he meets keep talking about a god who lives on a distant island. A god he never designed. A god he did not create.

There’s a knowing irony in a hand-painted game telling a story about a creator who loses control of an artificial mind he brought to life. Whether OhNoo plays that as horror, cautionary tale, or something stranger is the question the game exists to answer. Either way, it is a sharper premise than most adventure games bother with.

Bigger, darker, and branching

Scale is the headline change from the original. Tormentum II spans more than 150 areas across roughly a dozen islands, several times the size of the first game, and the studio is leaning on that space to make the world feel like a real place rather than a corridor of puzzle rooms.

The choices carry weight too. The game is not fully linear, and the decisions you make test your conscience rather than your logic, branching toward more than one ending depending on how you treat the characters you meet. That was already a signature of the first Tormentum, and here it is the backbone.

Worth a wishlist

Tormentum II launches July 23 on Windows, macOS, and Linux. OhNoo has set the price at 19.99 dollars with a 15 percent discount for the first two weeks, and there’s already a free demo on Steam if you want to feel out the mood before committing.

Here’s the honest caveat. The original Tormentum was carried by its art and atmosphere, and its weakest link was puzzle design that leaned easy and a little thin. Eight years of work does not automatically fix that, and a gorgeous world is not the same as a gripping one to actually solve. If you bounce off slow, contemplative adventures, the sheer size on offer here could feel like more of the same rather than more to love.

But if you want something made with obvious care, that looks like a nightmare worth framing and treats you like an adult with its choices, this is an easy one to keep on the radar. It is the rare 2026 release you can point at and say a person drew every inch of it. Wishlist it, play the demo, and if you like your indies atmospheric and grim, our best indie games of 2026 so far and the moody Midnight Walk review are the right company for it.