Torment: Tides of Numenera

Mechanics The characters have a pool of three status: might, speed and intellect. These are depleted with your actions during combat or dialogue. For example, to deceive someone, you need to apply points from your intellect; to pickpocket, points from your speed. In combat, you use your might, speed or intellect to cast abilities or make your attacks more powerful and accurate. This seems like an interesting system, but its implementation falls apart very early in the game. Due to the edge attribute, which allows applying a number of points into a task without any cost, your party will be doing max damage with the maximum accuracy and passing all the skill checks for the conversations without spending any points. This isn't in the endgame, but after the very first big area. For the dialogue, this isn't a big deal, but for the combat, it makes it easy and thoughtless. Setting and plot Numenera never feels like a real place. It's artificial, like if some RPG fan wanted to write a fanfic, but couldn't make his mind about what. There's werewolfs, robots, sentient plants, aliens, dragons and a cyberspace, but it never comes together. Those things are just there, never interacting with each other in any meaningful way. Your party consists mostly of RPG archetypes, with the exception of one interesting subversion. Even the main antagonist, an interesting character at first, falls back into the mundane by the end of the game. The worst aspect of this game though is how poor of a RPG it is. Games like Witcher or Deus Ex - that have you playing characters with a lot of baggage - give you more interaction options than a game that has you playing as a literal empty vessel. This game favors some specifics kinda of alignments. Players who like roleplaying as evil will find themselves short on good dialogue options.

If you want to review Tides of Numenera, you need to decide upfront if you will measure it against Planescape or not, because it's a deal breaker in this case. If you want something like Planescape was, then you may skip this game entirely, but in case you are just after a great and modern roleplaying game made in the last years then Numenera is absolutely recommended. The world itself is a bit overwhelming as it's on the constant edge on sci-fi and fantasy, featuring tropes from both kind of universes, that may make the more experienced reader feel like it is suffering from a kind of schizophrenia like Star Trek: Discovery. There were massive number of writers involved in the game, that led to greatly varied quality of quests and story parts you will meet as a Castoff. The main point of the story will be to make up your mind about the idea of a kind of self-made godhood and immortality and how to judge such actions. There is a reason why the story still works so well, but I don't want to include any kind of spoilers here as someone who haven't played Planescape is in for a real treat. Even though you have limited options throughout the game and these options force views on you, somehow it manages to make you keep playing with the illusion of real decisions. This is honestly the best a video game can achieve. A serious aspect of the game is that you can solve almost every single encounter without using violence, that seems like a good idea but given the world and realistic problems in Numenera, easily becomes silly a lot of the time. A common solution is to frighten and intimidate others, persuading them that you are tougher than you look – something you can be successful at even against like 8-10 fanatic cultists and such enemies that leads to awkward dialogues and silly situations. I wasn’t rushing the game through yet it took 21 hours to complete that is decent for someone like me who doesn’t have that much time to play, but could be considered short by some.

I understand why Tides of Numenéra got a mixed public reception. The game is almost entirely marketed around it being a spiritual sequel to Planescape: Torment, which I think raised expectations too high and incited negative comparisons – it doesn’t help that it feels too similar at times, especially in its first few hours. But in the end, while T:ToN shares the premise, isometric perspective and esoteric writing of PS:T, it manages to find an identity of its own and is fully successful as a text-heavy, story-based RPG. The writing is consistently good and goes to great lengths to immerse players in the strange universe of Numenéra. Each time you take a step in the game, you’ll be exposed to a different aspect of its fantastically weird sci-fi worldbuilding and unique aesthetics, while each quest you undertake is a tangled of web of unique characters, unexpected twists, irreversible choices, and chances to build the personality of the protagonist. The roleplaying isn’t the strongest I’ve seen, but it does a good job of making you feel like your decisions are shaping the hero's fate and the world around them – notably through a very interesting alignment system. Gameplay-wise, the combat system has interesting mechanics but is a slow mess – thankfully, hostiles encounters are rare and can often be solved through lateral thinking or even avoided entirely. Some game design issues are hard to forgive: for instance, allies only gain XP when they’re in your party, and it’s not always clear when you’re about to reach a point of no-return in the story. Despite their jankiness, I enjoyed a lot of the mechanics - like how points can be spent for each skillcheck. In the end, I can only recommend T:ToN. It’s derivative, yes, and those who want an experience truly reminiscent of PS:T should probably play Disco Elysium or Tyranny instead... but it’s nevertheless a unique, high-quality RPG with good writing, many memorable moments and characters, and a lot of replayability.

Ruined beyond redemption by the writers' raiding of multiple copies of thesauruses, ordered brand new (or nearly new) from a Mazon. O unhappy day! The purple prose tries far too hard and falls flat on its pampered and spotty fat rear end every time. It is this which strangles the game more than any other fault it may have, and there are many. Sort of interestingly. this could well be a modern phenomenon! in gaming. Divinity OS also read/sounded like an excrutiatingly hammy amateur dramatics society script too often. Were you really expecting PS: Torment to be eclipsed or equalled? Keep looking.

I liked Torment, but it's not a perfect game. To break it down easily... The Good -Torment has one of the biggest, most intricate, and best described worlds in video gaming. Pretty much everything can be looked at, and even vendor trash - Each individual piece, mind you - has a story -While individual characters aren't rendered in much detail, the world as a whole is gorgeous -Engrossing story -All the systems of the game work well, from leveling (Which is done in tiers), to the stats, to the problem resolving skills. You can fight and talk you're way out of just about anything -Torment often rewards failure - Even if you lose at a task, you can still win, or get an interesting result. It really dissuades you from save scumming, which keeps the game moving forward, instead of redoing the same thing for hours. The Bad -In many ways, Torments world is TOO big. The huge wave of individual details often hit you so frequently that it becomes hard to focus on each one. While I can remember the world as a whole quite well, I'm at a loss over many of the smaller aspects of it. Characters often start to run together, and even your party members become indistinct in the face of the world -Mandatory crisis (This games version of combat) distribution is inconstant. If you play through with the intention of avoiding them at all cost, you'll succeed for the most part - Until the very end of the game, where they dump several on you in a row, which no real way to resolve them before hand. You can still resolves these events peacefully, but the lack of previous exposure makes the game feel like it's changing the rules on you -The ending, while satisfying, feels out of place, with several assumptions the game has made for you getting overturned in rapid succession with no prior warning. It feels like the game, in many ways, ran out of rope Overall An enjoyable game, and a true story book experience, that unfortunately gets mired in it's own expansiveness