The Torchlight games have a painterly aesthetic, with a slightly sketchy, hand-drawn quality to the textures that’s both gorgeous to look at and timeless in style.

We’re now ten years on from the original debut of the series, even though the second game only just made it to consoles.

I’ve been playing through the game on my Switch in portable mode for review, and I’m going to check out the Xbox version soon as well.

I don’t like to play super violent things when I’m out and about with my Switch. It doesn’t seem right to sit in a public coffee shop that’s sometimes frequented by children and lay waste to the land.

I constantly forget how much blood pours forth in Torchlight and Torchlight II.

To its credit, and to save my public playthroughs, the game does have a blood option that lets you turn off the gore. But man.

These games are T-rated! They’re painterly! And yet every monster explodes with comical amounts of blood.

I don’t know why I always put it out of my mind. I always think of Fable as the cartoony RPG series that also has adult content and violence. I should probably add Torchlight to that bucket in my mind.

The blood is a great bit of player feedback to tell you that you’ve murdered something successfully, and when combined with the dopamine rush of the numbers flying everywhere and the loot coming out of things there’s no denying the pure satisfaction of it.

I haven’t forgotten about the reviews I promised were coming 9(!) days ago. They’re all still coming. I’m also playing Borderlands 3 and Kingdom Hearts 3. And I’ve got some exciting audio content coming up in the next week or two also!

I’ve realized that I’m paradoxically more focused when the challenge of the pile is too large rather than too small.