Torment: Tides of Numenera

Oh boy, this is hard to review. First of all, TL;DR: Text-heavy RGP with a good, linear story and turn-based combat. If you like those things, this is definitely recommended. If you don't like reading a novel and a half to finish a game, this is not for you. Torment:Numenera takes you, a new consciousness residing in the castoff body of a god, on a journey through the ninth world - a semi-primitive culture built on the ruins of the advanced civilizations that came before. I am torn about this. I liked playing Torment:Numenera. I had fun, was drawn into the world most of the time. But it won't replace Planescape:Torment in my heart. That is partly because inXile did what inXile does: Remake an old game without much in the way of new ideas. Similar characters, similar story, similar places as the original. What is meant as an homage turns into a clone. BUT if you are new to Torment, and the world and story are new to you, you are almost certainly going to enjoy them. Heck, I did, even though I suspected much of what was coming. The story is definitely the core of this game. Be warned: It is quite linear. You can make choices, but in the grand scheme, the same things happen in the same order. The gameplay is nothing special. Simplistic turn-based combat, not the focus of the game. The exploration system advertises failing tasks, but I found that, most of the time, if you fail, you just... fail. Many small things bothered me: The game seems curiously unfinished. On the minimap, you can't refocus your screen. Zoom is limited, making the world seem small and making it hard to appreciate the full art style. The labyrinth sees surprisingly little use. The trading interface doesn't have an "undo" button. Other things. PS:Torment was not perfect. It, too, was partly unfinished and had, maybe, a little more descriptive text than it really needed. But it was a child of its time. I feel inXile failed to address its problems in the name of being the "spiritual successor".

As someone who enjoyed Planescape: Torment when it was first released and PS:T Enhanced Edition now, and as someone who enjoyed Baldur's Gate, Baldur's Gate II, and to a lesser extent, Icewind Dale, I was very much looking forward to Tides of Numenera. I grew up with RPGs on both PCs and consoles. From the first Bard's Tale in the mid-80s to Skyrim, RPGs have always been the games I look forward to the most. Now that I'm older and working full time and have only a limited number of hours to invest in gaming I find that I mostly play RPGs. Torment: Tides of Numenera is not an RPG. It has things in common with RPGs, but it's mostly like one of the old "choose your own adventure" novels, only without much choice and a poorly realized story. My favorite novels include Tolstoy's Anna Karenina and The Kingkiller series by Patrick Rothfuss. I do a little reading everyday, so I'm not adverse to doing a bit of reading in my games, but even I think that the reading is a bit overblown in Tides. I kept thinking to myself, "Maybe this is the part of the game where I'll get to DO something," Basically, in Tides, you explore very few areas. You walk up to people, read a wall of uninteresting text, choose all of the dialogue options to eventually get a more-or-less positive outcome, reload from your last save point if you get a particularly uninteresting outcome (though 99.7% of the time I didn't even bother with reloading because I just didn't care). That's basically it. There are quests involved where you have to say particular things to particular people, and some where you fiddle with some unknown technology, (all handled through dialogue options), but other than that there's not much "there" there. So what's left is a sort of novel. While the writing is technically impressive, the writers failed miserably to establish an emotional connection with me. I didn't care about the world that I was in, I didn't care about my fellow party members, I didn't care about the Changing God or Sorrow, I didn't care about the main character, and I didn't care about whatever problems/opportunities/personal habits the supporting characters had. Even humor, which can sometimes bolster a lackluster story, was curiously absent - Tides is as serious as a heart attack. I put about 25 hours into Tides of Numenera and couldn't bring myself to finish it. I was happy to uninstall it. Not recommended for people who like to *play* games, or people who like to *read* a good book.

10 hours playing: For my intellectual logical side and for the part endlessly fascinated with everything new complicated and weird it is a delicious feast. Such quirky disorganized world made from different parts of millions of worlds and times. Anything possible. You can stick any oddity there, any person or creature - and theirs presence won’t be weird. Weird is new normal in Numenera. This world has endless possibilities as a playground. Not as much as Sigil, possibly, but that city itself was more organized, structured, wholesome, it had that feel of the crossroad, main one, the Capital of All Crossroads. Living in Numenera is like living in the giant junkyard, filled with all sorts of nonsense, disconnected and random. It has it’s charms, I enjoy world-exploring side of the game immensely, but emotionally it fails to engage me. I do not care for my avatar and for my party, I sometimes feel fleeting compassion for NPC, but that’s all. No deep emotional connection at all. And here I’m really disappointed. I wanted to live in Sigil, my heart was broken for Deionara, I adored Morte and Nordom, names of most NPC from PST are still stuck in my memory, hell, I’ve replayed whole game second time to save every member of my party in the end. This one… it’s one play-through only. One highly enjoyable play-through. In the world where AAA RPG titles have dialogue wheels it’s a lot. I really missed walls of mind-chewing text and crazy ideas and intellect as the main skill. It’s better than I feared It’s worse than it promised to be. P.S. About graphics: Dear InExile, Nameless One is ugly done right, Last Castoff is ugly done WRONG! Why?! My eyes are bleeding every time I move camera to close to them or open the inventory. 20 + hrs playing: It came to the point where I do not feel a pull to continue playing. I’ve just entered Bloom after awfully constructed battle with Sorrow and Specter reveal. All of that supposed to make some emotional impact on me, I think. And I felt nothing. After many hours of playing moving pictures on the screen are still just that There is something very wrong with storytelling in this game. And with graphics. And with voicing. And with animation. And… OK, I don’t know if I’m gonna to finish it just for the sake of finishing with so many good games around and beautiful classics waiting for rerun. Such a waste of world, ideas and predecessor’s legacy! Such a waste…

There's quite a lot to criticise about this game - from the broken promises and unfinished state to some problems with mechanics and pacing. But the world it builds, the story it tells, the characters it unfolds before us, the marvels and wonders, the decisions, revelations and heartbreaks - for me personally, they shine through all of this questionable stuff and elevate Torment: Tides of Numenera to a level where a game becomes an experience I live and savour. If you want your games to be technically slick and like tactical fighting in your RPGs, you should probably stay away. If you want to immerse yourself in a world that will live in your imagination for months, by all means dive in!

Despite some failed promises, Tides of Numenera delivers exactly on what Planescape left me hungering for - a deeply compelling and immersive universe that reacts to my decisions and makes me feel like I'm genuinely exploring something instead of being taken for a ride down a specific script. If you also have that kind of hunger, I _urge_ you to consider ToN with an open mind. Depending on your tastes in story, you might find ToN to be at the same level as Planescape or slightly lower. One thing is for sure - ToN is different in many ways and that's what makes it a true successor. A true successor to Planescape could never be a game that just copies the formula faithfully and expands on the story. That's not possible because the artistic fervor behind Planescape is something that cannot be replicated in the same way. ToN did the only logical thing and crafted its own rich universe with its own specific worldfeel to it. ToN's world combines technology with magic in a way completely distinct from standard magical sci-fi or steampunk-with-magic universes. It's almost seamless - a magical nanite plague is right at home here. The combat is definitely better than Planescape. The system is based on resource pools and the pools can be used on non-combat actions while exploring, which makes the experience feel more tightly knit together between combat and exploration. It's at times, I dare say, fun and interesting, but by the end I grew very bored of it, yet it was still significantly less painful than the boredom Planescape's combat can give. It definitely needed more abilities and more polish and it would have been genuinely good. There are still a few masterfully crafted encounters that are positively amazing in terms of the feeling they give you and the combat system shines there. The overall experience gave me exactly the feeling of _journeying_ that Planescape had given me. It is a majestic addition to the gallery of western "old school" RPGs.