Torment: Tides of Numenera

I wouldn't say I loved it, I backed the game. The turn based combat is painful, slow, feels clunky. It's a roll your eyes moment when the combat starts and there's more than like 5 enemies. The story was pretty well done, and I have to give them credit as far as writing goes and the level of depth of the ninth world (and previous worlds.) It had a lot of awesome concepts and nothing seemed bland. The music was really lousy, just flat honesty here. The combat music was dull, I complained during the beta that it should be improved and they kept the original score. Not saying my opinion is right, but if you hear it you'll be disappointed if you've ever played the original PS:T. Of course, Bioware's baldur's gate engine games all had an orchestral style phenominal "turn up the speakers and get it in your feels" score. The characters were neat, I can't complain too much about them. I'm not a fan about the 4 party max system (kind of like Tyranny by Obsidian), while it does offer multiple playthroughs to experience the characters, it can really make combat a nightmare depending on whom you chose. The character-to-character interaction is there, they each have a decently developped background as well. I've played through it a few times, it offers decent replay value, though the difficulty tends to be a bit unbalanced. Also with the turn based system, screwing up combat is painful because it's like 20 minutes of your life you just wasted. Would I recommend it? Not really, unless you're a huge fan of heavy reading and depth in a game and not so much production value, it's not worth it. If you can snag it for $20, go for it, but otherwise don't pay more. I backed $160 and received about a $40 value of game, they really s**t the bed on this one. Even delaying it one year it still turned out somewhat of a turd. Personally, I won't back InXile ever again, they screwed up Wasteland 2, and now they screwed up Torment. Not that I don't admire their work, just for 4 million or whatever we raised, they could've done much more. My advice? Get PS:T Enhanced by Beamdog, while it's nothing new, it's beautifully done and unlike the original PST with widescreen mods isn't likely to crash. Rumor has it beamdog is going to try their hand at a sequel, while most reviews will tell you they make poor content, I do have more faith in them than InXile. Plus they acquired an original developer of PS:T so it should be *decent*. "What can change the nature of a fan?" "This game."

The guys who kickstarted this clearly had no idea what they wanted, beyond some notion of being "epic" or "grand" or "as deep as a Chris Nolan movie." But not really any sense of what that meant or how to get there. The same tropes that were used to actually build a world, characters and story in the first game are used to build disjointed, sort of pretentious, vignettes in this game. Even the trailer beats you over the head with trite overexplaining. The trailer for PS:T didn't have a single word. It showed, it didn't tell.

I really like the game so far.

It is scary how scary this game is at hitting all the right dark humour buttons. Simply Because it is just a game that hits.

It's a lot less beige and grey than Planescape: Torment but has many of the same good story beats and characteristics. As someone who really enjoys games with the premise "Strange Person has to read 600 000 words to restore their memories again", this one's a hit.