Whatever action you choose to attempt, success will almost certainly come down to Effort, an extremely simplified dice-roll-and-character-bonus-based mechanic straight out of the Dungeons and Dragons mold. In the 30-plus hours I spent with Torment, there were only maybe five times where turn-based violence was the only course of action. You’ll loot abandoned murder robots, talk to gods and monsters about their daily problems, and pick your way through dialogue trees to open up new paths in quests both mandatory and optional. Otherwise, though, the vast majority of the game is focused on exploring the world and conversing with its characters. You can focus on combat if you choose the game's sole combat class at the start and then intentionally pick every fight you can thereafter. Torment is more of an RPG in the pen-and-paper, Dungeons and Dragons sense than the Dragon Age sense (in fact there's already a pen-and-paper RPG set in the Numenera world). Or you might just be amused by the cartoonish, Don Quixote-like "adventurer" who responds to voices in his head. You might adopt an ex-slave and dive deep into her religion's endless pantheon of gods. Your NPC party members provide an emotional core to cling to in this strange storm. You're not meant to understand everything, and once you care enough about the plight of the characters, nations, and factions therein, you don't have to understand it all. Once you have a foothold on the cast and setting, you can appreciate the all-pervading "weirdness" of the Ninth World.
I understood that life is cheap in the Ninth World and characters can come and go in an instant. I accepted that my first party member, Callistege, existed as a gestalt of every version of herself from every possible timeline. After keeping at it for about an hour, though, I was eventually able to slip into the otherworldly politics, characters, flora, fauna, machines, and machinations of Torment. The game's post-moon-explosion introduction is a bit of a slog as you read reams of text and struggle to understand a good half of it. Remembering so many made-up words and phrases can make it difficult to connect with Torment's world, empathize with its characters, or even know what the hell is going on half the time.īut it kind of works. If you think that introduction involved a lot of complex proper nouns to keep track of, you’re not wrong. Numenera have a deep impact on every nook and cranny of life in the Ninth World, so you'll run into and recruit all kinds of characters that are just a little bit off, whether due to quasi-magical interference or plain ol' poor decision-making, just like in Planescape: Torment.
This means that, at times, you'll be worshipped, feared, or both as you navigate the world and discover its "Numenera"-artifacts from previous civilizations that are so technologically advanced they might as well be magic. They have their own cults, armies, and well-known agendas that shape the universe. As such, just like in Planescape: Torment, you begin the game as an amnesiac immortal.Ĭastoffs and the Changing God have already had a massive impact on the Ninth World by the time you arrive as smoldering orbital discharge. Each time he "casts off" such a shell (every decade or so), that vessel wakes up as a new Castoff with a mind of its own. One of the most obvious callbacks is your main character-"The Last Castoff” is the latest of many nigh-immortal bodies to be created and once inhabited by "the Changing God." Your sire has flitted from body to body for hundreds of years, running from some multi-universal nightmare called the Sorrow. That intention shows in the game, too, in ways both obvious and intentionally obscure. You could liken it to Baldur's Gate or even Diablo, but the game's name alone makes it clear that this is specifically a successor to Planescape: Torment, and it was even pitched as such in its 2013 Kickstarter campaign. Once Torment begins in earnest, the game assumes the look of any number of top-down RPGs from a bygone era. Nearly all of the sometimes slimy, often depressing, and always cerebral story that follows this explosive introduction is conveyed in words, not in images and sounds.
Of course, you don't actually see any of this happen. A moon explodes over the game's setting (simply called “the Ninth World”), and your avatar comes hurtling out of it toward the ground. Torment: Tides of Numenera opens with a literal bang.
Torment tides of numenera callistege Ps4#
Platform: Windows (reviewed), Mac, Linux, Xbox One, PS4 Game details Developer: inXile Entertainment
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