Torment: Tides of Numenera

Game keeps crashing/freezing right at the start when I exit the first area after falling from the sky.. Completely unplayable.. Looked everywhere for a fix, tried what was suggested.. Nothing. Waste of money.

I've just finished T:ToN. Pros: * Interesting stat mechanics, where not only stats like health have a drainable pool but also attributes (might, speed, intellect). * These stats and skills (lore, persuasion, quick fingers etc.) are heavily used in dialogues. * Alternative solutions in combat (crisis), by dialogue or by interacting with devices. * Nice visuals. * Excellent journal. Cons: * Quite short. I've played 26 hours while finishing all side quests I could find. * Quite linear. There are 3 main areas which are visited one after the other. All of them have sub-areas and indoor areas, but all in all in doesn't feel like you have freedom to explore. For me it was too text-heavy. Of course I wasn't surprised as it was well known before. I skipped a lot of text. * The setting is just too… strange, complex and mystical for my taste. (Difficult to describe.) You're traveling in your own mind, relive and alter past events through devices, meet strange otherworldly "humans" etc. For mee it's too much. If everything is special, nothing is special. I prefer more classical fantasy (or sci-fi) settings. * None of the NPC (except companions) have portraits. All in all I it was fun to play. I've rated it 7,5/10 on my personal fun scale which is a little weaker than PoE, Shoadowrun: Hong Kong, Shadowrun: Dragonfall, and Expeditions: Conquistador, on par with Technomancer and WL2, and better than TDE: Blackguards, Mars: War Logs and D:OS (7/10).

i played this about 11 hours sofar, last time today. i would not recommend this game, its slow and boring reading simulator really.. in my 11 hours i had only 2 fights and one of those were in tutorial.

Good story and depth in some characters but the world feels pretty alien to me, the language too (cypher, numenera, fettle, tides??). The world contains very different and unusual places. Good design but some where bland (the mind construct, a flying ground in empty space), some disgusting (I don't want to play in a giant stomach for 2 days). Places don't offer much interaction. Items were useless/weird. And there are too many of them. I never used cyphers or artifacts. If you don't fight, you don't need money or items anyways. I just used passive skills, no magical skills as 99% of them are only useful in combat. The philosophical interpretation of choices makes sense but the representation via color is not intuitive: good, neutral, evil would have sufficed. What means indigo and silver for example? While the game suggests that choices have impact I did not feel it often during the game. When you interact with the past this is awesome. But all actions in the present? nah. There is even a full choice how to end the game no matter previous choices. The main character is quite hollow. His purpose could have been fulfilled by anyone (or omitted without changing the story). I liked the main plot though but you only find out the missing pieces at the very end. Companions were strange. The first two are shady and in clinch, so I ditched them directly. Matkina was cool and has a background too including banter with several NPCs. Taking the crazy guy who had a crush on her might have been fun but my party was full though I had no clue what to do with the child and the blob. They never mattered. The RPG system is ok but if you leave out what makes it special you would not miss it. Combat was tedious, you have to wait a lot. So focus on dialogue, never fight. Story +1, Graphics +1, Music +1, Sound +0.5, Design +1 -0.5 rules, -0.5 alien world items and language I round up as I see parallels to Planescape Torment and backed the game. It is good but not a masterpiece.

Alright, so, here's the thing. If you go into this game expecting something like "Baldur's Gate" - your going to be sorely disapointed. If you go into it expecting Wasteland 2, your going to be disappointed. Really, really disapointed. A lot of people who say how much they love Planescape: Torment now forget how universally ignored it was at first, how little money it made, and how many people complained that it had "too many words". I remember, the first time I tried it as a teenager, thinking it was slow-paced and boring, and only coming to love it when I was in college, years later. This game has more in common with a book series then it does with something like BG2 or Skyrim. Its not something you can go to mindlessly veg. into. Its more like a book you'd curl up and read. Don't think of it as "a really plot heavy version of Pillars of Eternity" - that game is a linear slug-fest compared to this game. Think of this as the greatest, most in-depth choose your own adventure game ever made, the likes of which will, I almost guarantee you, never be made again. Almost everything that happens in this game is dialog-based; and almost every minor NPC has a whole story and life behind them, with multiple branching approaches... if you happen to discover them. And you probably will miss most of it, the first time through. Here's an example. While it was downloading, I read reviews, and people kept complaining they never encountered any combat, one guy said he hit one combat scene in 12 hours that I read. This didn't bother me, I play RPGs for the story, for the world, for the living another life. So I made an intelligent, charasmatic nano with no combat skills, and a bit of snark. And it let me play that. ....and I got into perhaps 5 combats in the first two or three hours? And had my face BEAT IN every single time. And it wasn't the end of the game, or the end of the world. Like many a spunky literary hero, I picked myself up each time, and kept on going. I restarted a bit in after that, and ended up not hitting a single combat for what felt like forever, and solved all of my quests in entirely different ways. The second time, as well as the first, I was basically playing an intelligent, charismatic character...just a bit more straitlaced. And everything was different. I'll admit, when I got my face beat down in combat, I was pretty annoyed. I think its too tough, and it needs patching and balancing. But I can't say it wasn't realistic. I was talking smack and didn't really have the combat prowess to back it up, and reality ensured. I didn't have anything resembling a combat build, I just felt like talking smack instead of avoiding combat. And not many games will play that straight with you. Likewise, one of the adjustments in this game is that it doesn't play by the rules. In normal RPGs, failure is bad, and success is good. This game doesn't necessarily penalize you for failure in terms of mechanics, or reward you for success mechanically, either. It CAN...but it doesn't necessarily do that. Instead, sometimes failure leads to unexpected opportunities. It tries to be a 'story simulator' in many ways - it wants to give you room to tell a story within the confines of the game, rather then have you play in its story. Its not for everyone. And its combat system may be a bit too unforgiving - its hard for me to say, given how I played, but I did feel frustrated. But perhaps I deserved to be, with how I was playing. I'll say this - the game has guts, and heart. But thats because its not really a game. Its a four million dollar work of Interactive Fiction. And I doubt anyone will ever make something like this again.