David’s Retro Rewind: Torchlight

It’s time to turn the clocks way back once again, folks. Our destination is the year 2009 to have a look at, according to some Rush lyrics, the Torchlight which once illuminated the “tobes of Hades.” Or, to phrase that in a way that’s much easier to understand, the subject of today’s Retro Rewind is the first game in the Torchlight series of Diablo-esque action RPGs. Before I started working on this article, I had no idea Torchlight was released all the way back in 2009. I guess the universe has decided I don’t have quite enough reasons to feel old.

In case my use of the phrase “Diablo-esque action RPG” didn’t clue you in, Torchlight is a fantasy, class-based, dungeon-crawler that will expect you to do a borderline obscene amount of clicking your mouse. I hope you don’t have any accessibility issues that would make that problematic for you, because Torchlight will show you no mercy either way. You can pick from one of three classes: the Destroyer, the Vanquisher, or the Alchemist. Those are, respectively, needlessly fancy ways of renaming the Fighter, Rogue, and Mage class archetypes common in fantasy RPGs. However, each class can deviate from its archetype in certain ways.

The Destroyer is the classic sword-and-board wall of muscle who’s designed to absorb damage just as effectively as he dishes it out. However, he also has the ability to call upon spirits of his ancestors that have various effects in combat. The Vanquisher doesn’t rely on stealth as much as you might expect, but she does employ traps in combat and focuses on hitting hard and fast from a safe distance with ranged weapons. The Alchemist focuses on casting elemental spells and summoning different types and quantities of minions to do all the heavy lifting of combat for him.

There’s no character customization whatsoever in Torchlight, so you’d best hope you like the look of at least one of the playable classes. The lack of customization also applies to one of the most prominent aspects of Torchlight’s core gameplay loop, namely your pet. When creating your character, you get to choose between a dog or a cat who will serve as your faithful companion, both in and out of combat. Since you can’t customize your pets and the default cat happens to look like a beloved cat I lost a couple of years ago, I named my Torchlight pet after her.

As I alluded to, your pet will gladly join you in the thick of combat to add to your damage output. However, that’s far from the only way your pet can help you, even aside from the emotional support you feel just from having them there (unless you’re a heartless monster). Your pet can act as a beast of burden in that it has its own inventory of items it can carry, just as you do. This can come in really handy in terms of making sure you can pick up more loot and/or important quest items you find.

What’s more, with one click of a button, you can send your pet back to the nearest town to sell everything in its inventory and bring you back the gold. That enables you to clear out your inventory and make some money while you’re in the middle of a dungeon without having to interrupt your dungeon-crawling and return to town yourself. Unfortunately, though, these transactions are strictly one-way: You can’t tie a shopping list to your pet’s collar and have them buy anything for you while they’re out and about, as amazing as that would be. Ah well, an adventurer can dream.

You read that right: You can order your pet to find its way out of the current dungeon and back to town so it can walk up to the first merchant it sees and sell everything it’s carrying. More often than not, your pet will accomplish all of that and return to your side within two minutes at most. You might be wondering how any of that makes sense thematically, not least because of the presumable human-to-animal language barrier. The answer there is simple: The shopkeepers clearly don’t waste any mental energy questioning it, so neither should you.

During my time with Torchlight, I decided to play as an Alchemist on the hardest difficulty setting. Even then, I wouldn’t call Torchlight’s hardest difficulty setting particularly challenging, unless you have accessibility concerns about all that constant mouse-clicking. Once I started to get a feel for the Alchemist’s available play styles, it didn’t take long to find what felt best for me. Even though the Alchemist is likely intended to focus on summoning minions to fight for him, I’ve tried to incorporate that into a play style that ensures I won’t be completely useless once I run out of mana.

I doubt politely asking a large group of enemies to amuse themselves for a couple of minutes while I catch my breath would work out very well, so I’ve always made sure I’m carrying decent melee weapons as a backup plan. As you probably know, if you have any experience with RPG archetypes, squishy caster classes don’t usually like to get up close and personal in fights, but sometimes you can’t avoid that. Try and find yourself either a two-handed weapon or a pair of one-handed weapons that suit your preferred type of elemental damage, and you’ll often be alright.

That play style has served me well enough so far. During particularly difficult fights, I might have needed to guzzle down health and mana potions like I’m the first customer at a bar five minutes after Prohibition was overturned, but I usually did (eventually) win. Even if I didn’t, I haven’t encountered any enemies in any dungeon that have regenerating health. Because of that, no matter how many times you die, you’ll return to the fight with full health while your enemies won’t. That ensures that, so long as you’re patient enough, you are statistically guaranteed to eventually triumph.

The subject of your character dying brings me to a few major points in Torchlight’s favor. For starters, even though your character can die, your pet cannot. If your pet’s health bar is depleted, they’ll just drop aggro and flee from combat until they’ve regained enough health to jump back into the fray. When your character dies, you’re given three options. You can either resurrect at the exact spot where you died, respawn at the entrance to the current floor of the dungeon you’re clearing, or reappear in the nearest town. The first two options have potentially steep costs attached.

Resurrecting exactly where you died will cost you some of your character’s experience points and fame level. Respawning at the start of the current dungeon floor costs a certain amount of gold. Reviving in town costs nothing, though you might have to manually trek back to the point in the dungeon you’d reached when you died. Considering those potential drawbacks, I’ve never seen a good reason to use the first option. It’s the most costly in terms of character progression, and you might get overwhelmed by enemies and die again within seconds of resurrecting anyway.

Resurrecting at the entrance to the current dungeon floor can be handy when you’re not far past the start of the current floor. In those cases, the gold cost is usually worth paying to save myself time. Depending on how far into a dungeon I was when I died, it’s actually been most consistently convenient for me to respawn back in town. If I died, chances are good I was planning to return to town soon anyway to sell my unwanted loot, turn in finished quests, and restock on potions. That convenience outweighs the potentially long return trip to the dungeon.

In closing, I guess I should address the ever-important question of whether or not I would recommend Torchlight. Well, considering its age, you can usually grab it for dirt cheap during most Steam sale events. That would allow you to try it out without spending much money on it, though you might have to play it for more than the two hours Steam’s refund window allows to determine your thoughts about it. Torchlight also bears a few quirks of its age. That said, if you won’t be hampered by accessibility concerns and you enjoy this style of game, Torchlight is worth checking out.