Best independent PC game this year, and a perfect introduction to hack-n-slash RPGs as long as you can handle the colorful cartoony style. It's designed to run with minimal resources and even has a "netbook mode" which strips down the graphical experience without spoiling the gameplay, so you'll be able to get it up and running in some manner on most PCs.

Torchlight has some cool advanced features, including randomly redrawn maps every time around, a shared stash for all your characters, and the ability to "retire" your hero and pass on his best weapon to your next incarnation. Replay value is better than many other games of its type.

There is a choice of three characters, though (as yet) you can only play one of them per game. One is a strong melee character, one is weaker and specializes in ranged weapons, and the third is a balance with the ability to summon helpers in battle. The game utilizes the same pet system as Fate, perhaps because it shares one of the creators of that game, so you have a choice of dog or cat which will accompany and fight with your hero, carry some of your inventory, and even perform one or two spells on your behalf. You may also send your pet back to town when it can no longer carry any more inventory, and it will "sell" those goods and bring back the money for you.

The only mini-game here is simply stopping off at a fishing hole from time to time to catch some fish for your pet, which you may feed it later to have it morph into a more powerful character.

Weapons can be purchased, though it's easier to simply collect ones that you find along the way and you can sell the ones you don't need. Some weapons and armor have sockets into which you can insert gems that you find, using the power of the gems to enhance defensive or fighting values, and you may even collect pieces of several entire outfits, each of which is enhanced overall by each extra piece you wear.

Enemies are reasonably varied, and level up more or less as your character does. There's little strategy here, other than repeating levels and taking side missions so as to build your character stats early, but the difficulty is set just right, making even the predictable battles enjoyable for a long time. The end-game boss is appropriately huge and although not particularly hard to beat, you'll need to have collected some useful spells and plenty of health and mana or be prepared to dash back through a teleportation portal to get more.

Although the game is currently single-player only, an online multiplayer version is strongly rumored to be in the pipeline and is likely to arrive before a sequel to the single-player game. Meanwhile, the makers have recently released a free construction tool for modders, so that new environments and characters can be designed by fans. It's early days yet, and the tool is complex and not particularly intuitive, but eventually we should be seeing some interesting additions to the Torchlight world.

The graphical style of the game has to be seen, and you'll probably either love or hate it when you do. The world and characters are largely constructed from less polygrams than you'd expect, so as to keep performance up, but the designers have used a cartoon style that really works very well most of the time and has a distinctive charm.

Given that there's a free demo, and the full game is so cheap, if you think you might be interested in this one there's no excuse for not trying it out. I must confess to having stayed up into the small hours of the morning with it, something that the jaded gamer in me doesn't do, that often.