Hi there! Were currently working on the next update and we wanted to give you a quick preview of whats coming and what you can expect. The upcoming update wont be a huge one, since it wont contain new levels or player characters. However, the new mechanics that are introduced will take about another week to be integrated and tested properly because they mesh in with a lot of stuff thats already there. Oh, and if you want to avoid any spoilers on what those new mechanics are all about, wed advise you to stop reading right now ;) So with no further ado, heres whats coming next:

The Main Feature

Theres going to be a new addition to your overworld camp, the Cupbearer, a second NPC that unlocks special potions for you. Those potions dont work like health potions that you pick up in the Halls. They are potions that you take with you at the beginning of each run and which are refilled each time you enter the Halls. But what do they do? Well, they basically allow you to do what is most widely known as reroll and banish in this type of game. Two of the currently available potions serve these two functions in the context of traits. You can use the Strong Wine to reroll a trait selection or you can use the Potion of Oblivion to remove a trait (and all its follow-ups!) from the trait pool for the rest of the run. There are two more potions that allow you to do more advanced things with your traits: the Reverberant Tinkture and the Potion of Memories. Wed like to leave their specific functions to your speculation for now, but we think their names are already a pretty good hint. After this update, the potions will only work for traits. But we do have plans to introduce new potions that allow you to have more control over abilities (or maybe even items) in future updates.

How are Potions Unlocked?

There are two types of unlocking mechanisms for potions. One unlocks a potion of a specific type while the other increases the available number of an already unlocked potion. You unlock new potions by finding the ingredients scattered across the levels. Ingredients are only visible when youre wearing the Gatherers Charm, which luckily the Cupbearer will drop into your item stash as soon as he arrives at your camp. Once you pick up an ingredient, you dont have to pass it through the well or anything. Currently they simply appear directly in the Cupbearers inventory. If you want to increase the number of available potions, youll have to find appropriate bottles. Each potion has its own bottle type. They are dropped by certain enemies and need to be retrieved via the well. Once you buy them at the Wellkeeper they increase the available amount of the respective potion.

What else?

Theres still a ton of things in Halls of Torment we want to improve while at the same time providing additional content with each update. We get a lot of feedback from you regarding bugs and balancing issues and were addressing those things one at a time. For instance, summon builds remain less attractive due to their overall performance. We would like to give this part of the game a little bit more work. However, it might take a couple of iterations, since balancing summon based builds is a bit trickier than your typical damage dealing character. Another area for improvement are the final lord encounters. While the Lord of Pain seems to be pretty much where we wanted him, the other Lords are still lacking the refinement wed like to have. Besides all that, there are still bugs to be squashed and in some parts the game is still missing audio. We wont be able to address all of this in the next update, but it should give you a rough idea where were heading. Thank you for supporting us! Cheers Paul from Chasing Carrots