As someone who enjoyed Planescape: Torment when it was first released and PS:T Enhanced Edition now, and as someone who enjoyed Baldur's Gate, Baldur's Gate II, and to a lesser extent, Icewind Dale, I was very much looking forward to Tides of Numenera. I grew up with RPGs on both PCs and consoles. From the first Bard's Tale in the mid-80s to Skyrim, RPGs have always been the games I look forward to the most. Now that I'm older and working full time and have only a limited number of hours to invest in gaming I find that I mostly play RPGs. Torment: Tides of Numenera is not an RPG. It has things in common with RPGs, but it's mostly like one of the old "choose your own adventure" novels, only without much choice and a poorly realized story. My favorite novels include Tolstoy's Anna Karenina and The Kingkiller series by Patrick Rothfuss. I do a little reading everyday, so I'm not adverse to doing a bit of reading in my games, but even I think that the reading is a bit overblown in Tides. I kept thinking to myself, "Maybe this is the part of the game where I'll get to DO something," Basically, in Tides, you explore very few areas. You walk up to people, read a wall of uninteresting text, choose all of the dialogue options to eventually get a more-or-less positive outcome, reload from your last save point if you get a particularly uninteresting outcome (though 99.7% of the time I didn't even bother with reloading because I just didn't care). That's basically it. There are quests involved where you have to say particular things to particular people, and some where you fiddle with some unknown technology, (all handled through dialogue options), but other than that there's not much "there" there. So what's left is a sort of novel. While the writing is technically impressive, the writers failed miserably to establish an emotional connection with me. I didn't care about the world that I was in, I didn't care about my fellow party members, I didn't care about the Changing God or Sorrow, I didn't care about the main character, and I didn't care about whatever problems/opportunities/personal habits the supporting characters had. Even humor, which can sometimes bolster a lackluster story, was curiously absent - Tides is as serious as a heart attack. I put about 25 hours into Tides of Numenera and couldn't bring myself to finish it. I was happy to uninstall it. Not recommended for people who like to *play* games, or people who like to *read* a good book.
