Torii sends you on a thoughtful journey through a striking world, but your steps through this place are infused with a purposeful, angering difficulty.
Ipa’s sister, Lulu, has passed on. You can save her, in a sense, by searching for memories in the surreal, beautiful lands that surround you, though. However, Ipa doesn’t play like your average video game character. She gets tired and needs to sit down to rest along the way. The vibrant landscapes around you can get confusing, and it’s very easy to get lost in them unless you make your own map. The developer has recently released a new mode that alleviates the challenges that these two elements create, but playing the game as intended, you’re going to get frustrated, tired, and lost.
There’s a kinship you feel with Ipa as she gets exhausted and loses her way throughout the world, as pretty as it may be. There’s a sense that you don’t know where to go, but that it’s still exhausting you anyway. The puzzles can be a bit confusing and difficult, and can reach a point where you’re trying anything to get through them. It uses these gameplay frustrations to ask you to consider Ipa’s perspective in loss. She doesn’t have any idea where she is going, and figuring out what to do now is hard. She’s going to get irritated at things and have to try whatever comes to mind to get through. She’s going to be tired and defeated. I couldn’t help but be reminded of my own times of loss when I wasn’t sure what to do, but didn’t feel like I had the energy to do anything even if I did.
Torii takes some elements of games and uses them in an interesting way to mimic some of the difficult, miserable feelings around grief. It’s not all about giving you a hard time (helping characters and exploring memories to find poems is lovely, and the worlds themselves have a poetry to their appearances that whispers hidden meanings to you), but it does some wonderful things with feelings of frustration.
Torii is available now on Steam.
