Serious Sam: Tormental

Serious Sam: Tormental is a twin-stick shooter with rogue-lite elements. It takes place within the mind of Mental, the antagonist of the Serious Sam series. Mental's frontal lobe serves as a hub area. The player chooses from one of several player characters, starting with Sam "Serious" Stone and unlocking further characters during gameplay.

They traverse procedurally generated rooms within multiple thematic stages. Each room contains enemies that need to be defeated before the player can progress. These enemies use either melee or projectiles, both of which inflict damage on the player character. The character can simultaneously use two weapons: a primary weapon with readily available ammunition and a "serious" weapon with high power and limited bullets.

Serious Sam: Tormental was developed by Gungrounds, a Croatian indie game studio. It was the studio's second game after Rocking Pilot, which was co-developed and published by Mad Head Games in May 2017. Kristian Macanga and Guy Unger initially developed a game titled Spitfire or Spitfire Inferno, which they modelled after Geometry Wars. They had previously collaborated on a game for the "Indies VS PewDiePie" game jam held in November 2014.

While exhibiting Spitfire Inferno at the Reboot InfoGamer conference in Croatia, it was acknowledged by members of Croteam, who tracked the team's progress across further events—Reboot Develop, the Slovenian Games Conference, and the Central European Games Conference—and eventually invited them to Croteam's business incubator programme. The Gungrounds team grew over time, adding programmers Ivan Gabriel Juričić and Goran Tomašić, as well as artist Ana Marija Lončar, whom the team had met at Reboot InfoGamer 2018. Additionally, Croteam's Roman Ribarić, Andrej Smoljan and Damjan Mravunac acted as producer, sound effects artist and composer, respectively. Gungrounds used the Unity game engine since the team members were already familiar with it and because it supported multiple platforms.

Serious Sam: Tormental received "mixed or average reviews", according to the review aggregator website Metacritic, which calculated a weighted average rating of 66/100 based on five critic reviews. Daniele Cucchiarelli of The Games Machine enjoyed the game's humour and found it to fit with the rest of the series. He commended the expansive arsenal and challenge the game poses, as well as the "nice" and distinguishing art style. KC Nwosu, in his review for The Escapist, similarly enjoyed the art style, which he believed fit the series better than those found in other entries.

He regarded the movement and shooting mechanics as "adequate" but lamented that obtained weapons and upgrades "never reach the necessary level of absurdity to excite players to go another run". Cucchiarelli faulted several technical issues and saw the game as failing to be inventive, while Nwosu thought that the game was "incredibly small in scope and gives way to tedium much quicker than its replayable structure should allow".