Torment: Tides of Numenera

As someone who hasn't played PST but is familiar with Numenera, I thought this was a great portrayal of that setting and system. It looks great, the locations are creative and the mechanics are interesting if flawed. Mechanically, the best thing about this game is the Might, Speed and Intellect pools, which can be spent to boost your odds in various combat and non-combat actions. I love this system for 3 reasons: 1) It gives the player agency outside of combat 2) It bridges combat and non-combat and gives both consequences that affect the other, unlike most RPGs where mechanically combat feels like the real game and everything else feels like a shallow, tacked-on 2nd game 3) It creates tension by making you gamble a precious resource Unfortunately, combat itself is messy mostly due to a dodgy positioning system. It's not gamebreaking though, just annoying. Now, the elephant in the room: I've heard the plot copies a lot from PST. Having not played PST, I thought the plot was interesting and felt natural. But if you have, maybe skip this game. But for anyone interested in Numenera, or just interesting non-combat gameplay, I highly recommend this game.

I was really disappointed, nice art but I don't like the rest of the game. I loved Pillars and Wasteland 2 but I don't like this Torment game, everything seems like grinding and not like playing a game. I don't care about stretch goals, although I'm a kickstarter.

I simply adore the new Torment. It was everything I wanted from a new single player roleplaying experience: -Weird, punishing and interesting combat -Odd and intriguing world/lore -Some of the best writing I've ever experienced -Great characters, both conceptually and functionally -Open and deep plot, despite it being very linear This game made me love the Numenera RPG universe, with it's mysteries and wonders. I would recommend it to any experienced roleplaying gamers or any kind of player who enjoys sinking deep into an unknown world, ready to accept the rules of it. ...abd that's all I can say about this game without rambling.

I got this through the kickstarter but followed none of the development so my review is based on the game as played. Overall this is a very flawed game but decent story based RPG. To start with the bad, the writing is so voluminous to the point that I was skipping a lot of the non-dialog text. For budget reasons, each dialog box is full of text simply describing the talker or the location. This could have been solved by showing the speaker in the dialog box like in Fallout but I guess they didn't have the money. For most of the game you can essentially skip combat. But there are a few places that your generally going to get into a fight. The problem is that there's no real tutorial for how combat actually works so you end up making guesses on level up whether this abilities is worth getting for the couple of times you'll desperately need it. As for the companions 2 of them are interesting, Aligern and Rhin. They are both interesting as companions and have interesting quests/storylines. Then there's Erritis who is a fun companion but a very light quest. Matkina is also a good companion but has nothing really going on story wise. Tybir is kind of just okay but Callistege is not great. The problem with the companion system is that you can only have 3 at a time and you can't have Callistege and Aligern in the same party. Since Aligern is actually interesting, Callistege falls by the wayside. Plus she doesn't have much of an ongoing storyline. Oom is not good either, kind of just half-assed. For the good, the locations are interesting (although after the first city not very big) and the story is decent until the ending where it falls apart. Overall if you're looking for a budget version of Planescape Torment or just another game similar to the old turn based RPG then you may want to pick this up. Otherwise there are better games out there.

Didn't back this on Kickstarter. Business practices aside, the game is really good. The highlights are definitely the world building and the Numenera skill check mechanics. Finally, an RPG that puts just as much focus on dialogue and skill checks as combat! There are MASSIVE walls of text, so if you're not big into reading this is definitely going to be a grueling experience. The sound design is fine. The graphics and art direction are a huge leap forward from Wasteland 2. What of the flaws? The big one is pacing. A common criticism is that there's just too much writing. This is puzzling because people who say this usually agree that the writing is mostly good. This means that the crux of the issues, in my mind, are the hours-long stretches of reading flowery prose without a break and not the volume of writing itself. The first 10 hours or so are a slog and a perfect example of this: there are about five or six sections, each can take up to an hour to talk to everyone, and then you have to factor in running back and forth completing quests which are themselves mostly talking. I think I participated in 3 fights within that time. It doesn't exactly get your heart pumping, and I found my mind wandering if I played for long stretches of time. The next big issue is the performance and let's face it: it's not going to get any better. The last patch was months ago but I'd estimate that 50%(!) of all combat I experienced in this game had at least one critical bug. Many of these were full-on crashes or the engine hangings. This is just insane for a dev to leave the game like this. Performance all around is complete trash. FPS went as high as 144 and as low as 22. What's going on here?? If you can handle these issues, the game itself is interesting and unique. Certainly not a classic, but definitely worth your time.