Have you ever played Diablo 1? Graphics in HoT straight up look like they were ripped from the og diablo 1. Also, both of them have a very similar loop: you go to the dungeon, you kill a bunch of stuff, you come back to the hub area. I never fancied Vampire Survivors before I had the chance to play HoT more than a year ago, and the similarities in graphics and gameplay loop between it and the first diablo were THE reason that made me buy and play the game.

EDIT: yes, Halls of Torment is the actual best in the genre. I’ve played most of the famous ones (Vampire Survivors, Soulstone Survivors, Holocure, Death must Die, Deep Rock Survivor, Pathfinder Gallows something…), and HoT is clearly a cut above the others in how solid it is built and how great it iterates on the ‘survivors’ trope. A game that is technically not a survivors but scratches a similar itch and has been hogging a lot of my time right now is Kill Knight.