Torment: Tides of Numenera

10 hours into the game, I am disappointed. This is a text adventure made by failed book authors, not an RPG. From the start, you will be bombarded with walls of "unnecessary" text, which makes this game tedious and will fry millennial brains. I'm not advocating a "dumbing down", I'm saying: This is ten gallons of oatmeal, I want a tasty lunch. A game is a collaboration in the art of gameplay, writing and graphics. Tides of numenera is lacking in the gameplay part, which could have given room to breathe between the walls of text. Here, interesting characters will shove their life story into your face just to annoy you. "Hey, if you don't read my tedious boring written info dump, I will deny you s.. gameplay content!". The game designers should have split up the 'info dumps' into sound, graphics, animation and writing,. That's what good movies do. The good: - The setting. The numenera world IS interesting. - The art is ok. The bad: - 'Boring' walls of text. For the sequel, the phrase "Less is more" should be a mandatory tattoo on each of the writers forehead. - Combat is uninteresting. - Music is cold and uninspiring. - Animation made by amateurs. The ugly. - Horrible bugs. The game is still in beta.

First of all, I do not understand the toxicity of this game's community! I try to piece together all the negative reviews and I still cannot explain the reason for all these all the bad ratings, except for unrealistic expectations. Story: the story itself is mind-blowing! I have spent dozens of hours savoring every line of script written, and I'm still far from finishing the game. This game DOES have enough content (as to contradict some of the reviews here), but unfortunately it can be easily skipped. Indeed, one can rush through the game and finish it in few hours, but I imagine that would be a terribly underwhelming experience, filled with funky jargon and out-of place pieces of information (e.g. who's Chila or Ama, what the **** is the iron wind, M'ra Jolios and all this mumbo jumbo?). The whole point of this game, as with its predecessor, is to pay attention to details and to piece the pieces of puzzle together yourself. A big plus would be to read all the "Tides"/"Palimpsest" novels beforehand, since they shed light on many aspects. There is an incredible amount of lore built is such a new title, and the script writers did an amazing job creating this world. And mind me, it is an amazing, original world filled with mind-bending ideas and concepts! Game mechanics: this where I've seen most dung thrown at. Frankly, I can only say it is OK, and enjoyable. Must I remind that its predecessor did not excel either at this part either? The whole turn-based/effort style is OK, not making any conflict sections unnecessarily long. The fact that it was adapted to fit consoles as well as PC, is an admirable effort, and I consider this innovation rather than (as others might think) rip-off. The whole tides business as compared to the classical alignment system is also a welcome diversion. In conclusion, I can say that Torment:ToN does have the recipe which made Planescape:Torment successful, namely an amazing story. Really, this is what defines the two: they are interactive novels, and damn good ones, I must say. And they should be treated as such. Unfortunately the successor has enough innovating elements to confuse and attract the bile of die-hard D&D fans who actually want to play P:T again (I guess).

OK, yes, it's not Planescape: Torment. What is (other than the obvious)? However, it's the closest in tone, feel, ability to provoke deep thought, story depth, and so on than anything else I've seen, and I loved it. People who don't like reading or don't like a ton of reading in their games will probably not like this game (that doesn't mean that everyone who doesn't like it doesn't like to read, of course). Personally, I love a ton of text in my games--when it's well written--and this game delivers. I also like oddball philosophy, tangled plot threads, new and strange places and people, and loads of creativity on display everywhere, and all that's in play here, too. My only two complaints are fairly minor, given how much I enjoyed the game overall. First, the combat. I *hate* the combat. I used to really love turn-based combat, but I guess maybe I've grown impatient these days. It's just...so...slow. However, for me, it wasn't a big deal, thankfully--because I vastly prefer talking my way out of problems in games than fighting through them, so I encountered combat very rarely (only the couple of times that it can't be avoided, I think). Still, those fights I did have to engage in were painfully slow. Second, I felt like there was a lot more story that wanted to be included. There were plot threads that felt like they needed more fleshing out, side quests that were intriguing but felt oddly perfunctory when resolved, that sort of thing. However, there's a ton of content in the game, so it's not surprising that not all of it would be equally fleshed out. Still, I would have loved even more content, even more twists and turns and links between different elements. There were also a few bugs here and there, but I don't think that's unusual when there's so much game, and none of them were game-breaking (at least for me). I suspect many have been addressed in the latest updates, too (I haven't yet played following the big content update, but I plan to soon!).

As a pen and paper RPG, I like playing around in Numenera's setting but the game mechanics are pretty flimsy and low stakes. That's basically all you'll get here out of Torment: Tides of Numenera. The premise of Torment is that you fall out of the sky one day, with no memory of who you are, and with only a broken mystery device that'll give you any clue as to who you really were. You are presented with two potential companions, who hate each other. Like all companions in the game, they start off very promisingly, but ultimately they're pretty inconsequential. You then go to town to solve a variety of different side quests, to get you closer to fixing The Holy MacGuffin. I played the game under the assumption that it'd be fixed nearly right away, and then the plot would kick off, but NOPE! That's the whole game! You chase after this mystery device. Each subsequent area you move to gets more and more constrained, until a tiny little railroad track of plot takes you directly to the Big Bad's doorstop. "Join me or die." Etc. One major difference than in PNP is an extremely broad wealth of character building options. That's not the case here. Your options are: Fighter, Mage, Thief. If you don't intend to play the game more than once, pick Mage. They are psychic and they can read thoughts, and this adds character depth to the people you interact with. Skill checks in this game are beyond useless. Just spend your Fudge Tokens and you'll nail each one. Combat is a mere afterthought. Supposedly, this game raises philosophical questions, as its namesake Planescape: Torment does. Nah. Just enjoy the scenery and flavor. I want to say this though, this game has the absolutely without question the best descriptions of vendor trash and worthless junk I have ever seen in any video game ever. That's something, I guess? The game is fine, if you like reading. I beat it, which is more than most games I've played. 2.5/5 for being wholy mediocre with a little bit of fun writing.

I see a lot of down rated views based on unmet expectations. I can't comment to that, but having gone into this game without any expectations, I was enthralled. I was hesitant to play this after reading there is very little combat. But once I started, I didn't really care about the combat. I was too engrossed in this wildly imaginative world to care.