Game Reviews
Torment: Tides of Numenera
Tales from 1,000,000,000 A.D.
I’m going to begin this review with a scandalous confession, one that might see my contemporaries point their fingers and cast me out as an exile to be shunned among the gaming world.
I’ve never finished Planescape: Torment.
In my defence, by the time I could purchase and play RPGs at will, it was 2005. I cut my teeth on Baldur’s Gate 2 through pure accident (a friend bought me a copy and said ‘hey you might like this!’), and by the time I had a steady income, Neverwinter Nights 2 and Dragon Age Origins ruled the roost. I did try a few times to get into it, but in the 2010s, Planescape: Torment’s UI has not aged well at all.
With that said, even I was interested in seeing inXile’s spiritual successor, Torment: Tides of Numenera. I knew enough of P:T’s legacy to appreciate it was one of the great RPGs of all time, and I understood it was cerebral, weird, different from your standard ‘click-on-what-you-want-to-die’ RPG engines. Since its announcement on Kickstarter several years ago, RPG diehards were drooling over this one, and I wanted in on the ground floor for once. And so I picked it up and gave it a shot.
The premise is intriguing; TToN (as I’ll now refer to it as) is set a billion years in the future- a concept I grappled with given not just humanity but mammalian life as a whole hasn’t existed for that stretch of time yet — on Earth after the fall of eight great civilisations all built on the ruins of each other. Science has evolved so much, and so much has been forgotten or taken for granted; that Clarke’s old adage runs true; technology is indistinguishable from magic in TToN, treated more like relics and artifacts than pieces of tech.
It’s the story of a powerful nano (Numenera’s equivalent of a mage; with a technical bent) known as the Changing God, who’s used this technology to effectively become immortal by transferring his consciousness between bodies. The kicker; each body he abandons gains sentience when he leaves it, becoming their own person. At the time of the start, there’s hundreds, maybe thousands of them running around. You are the latest of this line of Castoffs.
The game starts the second you’re born and the Changing God hightails it out of your body for reasons unknown. You’re left with very little information in a strange world you have no knowledge about — and this is a fantastic way to start with a blank slate in the bizarre and weird world of Numenera, where you really need to play as someone unfamiliar with the world to best learn about and understand it yourself. Understanding it is not optional. This isn’t a game you can blunder through; you’ll be reading a lot, you’ll be thinking a lot, and you’ll be making some hard choices. You won’t be doing it to save the world, you’ll be doing it to survive and learn who you are in a deeply personal adventure.
I don’t want to go into too much more detail on the story or setting, because to be honest half the joy of TToN is in unraveling its mysteries. Suffice it to say that it’ll take you on a journey of eldritch abominations, psychics, cannibal cults, aliens, mutants, sentient spinning-tops, robots, the works. Even your potential companions run the gauntlet of the bizarre; from the multi-reality-spanning techno-mage Callistege to my personal favourite, the designated hero Erritis, who believes himself to be the main character of the tale and you to be the hanger-on (we’ve all known an Erritis in real life).
The classic good/evil, lawful/chaotic alignment scales don’t come in to play here. Instead you have ‘Tides’, which are for lack of a better descriptor, personality types and traits defined by your actions; for example if you ask about the nitty gritty cerebral details, you’ll lean towards the Blue Tide, which is a Tide associated with mysticism and the pursuit of knowledge. If you act on instinct or impulse you’ll lean towards the Red Tide, a tide associated with artists and musicians and other emotional souls.
You’re not just tied to one Tide either; I myself managed to have both the Blue Tide and the altruistic Gold Tide as my dominant tides. My only disappointment with the Tides as a system was that there seemed to be so much more that could be done with them. Hopefully inXile will consider this for the inevitable sequel.
Like Planescape: Torment before it, you aren’t locked into one approach to your journey. You can resolve the majority of the game’s problems effectively any way you want to — it’s extremely rare that there’s one approach to a particular problem. You can fight your way out, talk your way out, run your way out, even manipulate your way out.
To give you an idea; even as a glaive (the equivalent of a warrior) I engaged in combat maybe three or four times over about 25–30 hours, instead resolving my problems mainly through a combination of diplomacy, logic and outright arguing my enemies down. It’s a game that encourages you to see a decision out to the end, and generally there are no ‘wrong’ answers — with that said, I did take glee in finding the ways you could screw up so royally as to get one of the very rare game overs, usually by doing something hilariously stupid.
On that note, it’s not all golden in TToN. It’s a good thing I didn’t have to do much combat, because… well, it wasn’t that much fun to be honest. Granted, Infinity Engine fare has never been known for its gripping combat, but the handful of fights I got into really just seemed to be put in there to satisfy the people who want to brawl their way through things. It’s nothing new really — move here, click on what you want to die, use special abilities, etc. Even the difference between builds really didn’t seem that much. It wasn’t bad, it was just… meh.
The latter quarter of the game appears to come out of nowhere as well; it feels a lot like there was more they intended for us to do but it didn’t quite make it. I understand inXile are getting some backlash about that; as someone who didn’t back the campaign I can’t honestly comment on that. Perhaps we could one day see a Director’s Cut of some kind that might flesh that missing content out; I feel that’d really add some shine to that final slog.
Ultimately, TToN is a fun ride, a bit of a callback for the good old days of RPGs like Tyranny and Pillars of Eternity before it. It won’t hold its own against the other big Q1 2017 releases like Horizon: Zero Dawn, but it’s a fun and quirky little diversion. I’m new to rating games, and I’m hesitant to do so, because I’m generally pretty positive about games. But if I had to, I’d go with a 8/10.
Read about it directly from inXile at https://torment.inxile-entertainment.com/
