If you do opt to go all-in on combat, Torment: Tides of Numenera is a relatively straightforward ‘one movement plus one action, or a longer movement’ turn based affair. It’s not really accurate to say you can make it through the game without any combat whatsoever, but as long as your party are capable of a fighting escape they should be able to handle things. There’s always an option to, say, sway a foe to your way of thinking with a dialogue check, or beat a hasty retreat. Many of these encounters are avoidable, but even the ones which are not have ways out that don’t involve slaying everybody in the room. Each one has a definitive place in the story, and you’ll never just randomly run into a bunch of guys who want a fight. In Numenera conflicts are not inevitable, grinding RPG encounters, they are, in every case, a ‘Crisis’.Īs inXile have always stated, Crisis events are unique encounters. There are periodic moments of turn-based combat too, their oft-avoidable nature neatly summarised by the terminology ascribed to them. It has the same wonderful isometric location ‘maps’ as Pillars of Eternity (and in fact seems to use Pillars techniques in their creation), rich in strange details like fountains of living, purple fish and fleshy, Hieronymus Bosch-like horrors but much of the imagery is external, conjured by passages of text or choose-your-own-adventure style interludes. Just like its main source of inspiration, Torment: Tides of Numenera is overwhelmingly a game of text, dialogue choices, and even more text. What follows is an ocean of reading to dive into. You’re dumped in a barely familiar city (Sagus Cliffs), a place literally built upon the strata of billions of years of forgotten history, with the mystery of your own birth and a dispassionate, elusive creator to confront. Adding an extra metaphysical layer to the tale, your mind exists as an actual, labyrinthine space that can periodically (and usefully) be explored during death recalling the benefits of exploiting your immortality in Planescape. Each of those discarded bodies forms a new consciousness when The Changing God departs, and yours begins to manifest as the body hurtles towards the ground at tremendous speed. In Torment: Tides of Numenera, you are the Last Castoff, a product of a being known as The Changing God who creates and discards body vessels as his consciousness hops between forms. This time, though, your own player character embodies one of those consequences. Again, there are echoes of the previous Torment in the unusual civic rules of the city of Sagus Cliffs, and the consequences of a near-immortal being lost in the pursuit of knowledge above all other cost. That’s in part thanks to the Ninth World setting, which encompasses people, places, and circumstances just as bizarre as the Planes of the original. Purple fish fountain: still the best fountain in games. The tone is similar, the themes familiar (as universal classics of philosophy tend to be), yet the creative whole is largely distinct.
But while it clearly draws from similar ruminations on consciousness, morality, and individual power, there’s enough original thought here to set inXile’s release apart from its forebear. There are some wobbles towards both of those precipitous drops throughout Torment: Tides of Numenera’s novel length, dimension-spanning tale. This is an extremely challenging path to walk, with the tar pits of nostalgic pandering and inferior re-telling awaiting any misstep. Their Torment: Tides of Numenera may use a different setting and rule-set to the 1999 original (Monte Cook’s Numenera, as opposed to the D&D realm now owned by Wizards of the Coast), but the structure, presentation, and themes are specifically designed to evoke its celebrated RPG namesake. InXile’s decision to crowdfund a spiritual successor to Planescape: Torment was an expression of audacious ambition.
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