Torment: Tides of Numenera

Torment: Tides of Numenera had a highly successful kickstarter campaign. Harnessing the nostalgia people have for Planescape: Torment and promising a spiritual successor to it, inXile Entertainment managed to gather more than four times their initial goal of 900k USD. That's a lot of money even when considering the cost of game development. Then again, simply throwing currency at a game is not guaranteed to make its story good enough to be comparable to such a classic.

Thematic successor with much to prove

I feel the word 'torment' is in the game's title solely to establish the tie-in. There are countless parallels and references to Planescape: Torment -- even one same minor NPC -- but there is no looming, inescapable torment in Tides of Numenera in my opinion. At least not to the same degree.

The Nameless One's counterpart in Tides is the Changing God. Like the Nameless One, the Changing God has something tragic in the past and an unending life that was meant to allow some kind of solution to be found. However, the lengthened existence is proving difficult due to the universe being in disagreement with it.

Unlike the Nameless One's amnesiac reincarnation cycle, the Changing God retains their memories but creates whole new bodies for themself every few decades -- only to discard them later. These castoff bodies gain consciousness and personalities of their own and likewise tend to be notable individuals.

You play as the latest of these castoffs -- or the last one, rather (as the game foreshadows). Your character is pretty much a blank state and maybe because of that I didn't connect with the Changing God/Last Castoff story like I did with the Nameless One.

You can at numerous occasions recall a memory of something the Changing God experienced, similarly to how the Nameless One can recall the memories of his past incarnations. In Planescape: Torment, a memory may have been of an incarnation of an alignment very different from your Nameless One but it always felt to me it was still to some degree the same person. In Tides, the memories never felt like something from my character's past life; it was always something only the Changing God had done.

Planescape: Torment also did masterful job by never detailing the First Incarnation's deeds. It isn't as easy to disbelieve of something whose details are never told to you to be so terrible that changing one's nature wasn't enough for atonement. The Changing God however has something very specific motivating them, which again disallows that connection since it doesn't feel like your story.

You can make the game go the other way too. When meeting people, you can claim you're the Changing God; not just a mere castoff. It's that Planescape: Torment philosophy of belief being the force moving the Planes. Will something hard enough and it becomes reality. The Nameless One can tell people he's called Adahn and doing so enough times causes a character of that name to pop into existence. (Adahn also happens to be the name the Changing God went by while in now-yours body. Yet another reference.)

But even if you decide to become the actual Changing God, torment just isn't there. Sure there's a thing after you (like the shadows in Planescape: Torment) but running away from it is not the torment-from-regret the Nameless One experiences. The not-you Changing God doesn't seem like someone to heavily feel regret either.

The Tides

There's an alignment system of sorts called the Tides, which I really liked -- probably because of colors. Your actions determine which Tide or two (or all/none of them) are your dominant ones, your Legacy.

At one point I consciously tried to go for the Expert legacy, the combination of Blue (wisdom, reason, insight) and Silver (power, admiration, fame). It seemed like something a powerful person would be. It also turned out to be the Changing God's Legacy later on and I felt pretty clever for a moment.

I never got my Silver high enough to significantly surpass my Gold (compassion, empathy, charity) for it to become dominant. I had already completed too many quests in a goody-two-shoes way. Towards the end of the game my Legacy also shifted into mono Blue. I feel like that can happen rather easily as simply asking about stuff tends to increase the Tide, although I did also choose the Blue answer when the game's big question came up.

What does one life matter?

Tides of Numenera doesn't hype up its theme as much as PST does, though it is clearly there considering the Castoffs. But you don't hear the actual question until it is presented to you. In Planescape: Torment I got shivers running down my spine when Ravel finally demanded what can change the nature of a man. That wasn't the case here. I did consider my answer a few minutes, though. It was a proper philosophical dilemma.

Torment: Tides of Numenera is at times able to reach the level of greatness of Planescape: Torment but it definitely isn't as adeptly crafted. It too often feels wordy just for the sake of being so. The game doesn't have nearly as strong a thematic structure to it as Planescape: Torment. Neither are the companions tied to the protagonist as closely. They have their own separate stories from the Last Castoff.

The lack of focus seems to stem from the setting itself. The Ninth World has ruins of civilizations upon ruins of civilizations. Ancient artifacts of unknown purpose, Numenera, get unearthed every day. It is a world where everything imaginable can happen. A great setting for Monte Cook's Numenera pen & paper RPG no doubt but I think I prefer Planescape in this case.

Planescape: Torment is outlandish too but the D&D ruleset gave me something familiar to grab onto back in the day. Tides of Numenera doesn't have even that. I tell myself that's the reason I played the game for 8 hours and then left it for months until returning to finish it. The game world was too bizarre. I really disliked few of the mechanics too.

I've seen some comments on Reddit claiming you can avoid all combat in Planescape: Torment. I suppose technically you might able to run away from a lot of it but there's definitely no way to talk your way out when encountering already hostile enemies. I think the redditors got the game mixed up with Tides in which you are very few times actually forced into combat (or crisis, as the game calls it). You can literally play hours on end without a single encounter.

In my opinion Planescape: Torment has better pacing thanks to the more plentiful combat. You're not just reading all the time. With Tides having a turn-based system, the lack of pointless encounters is indubitably a good thing, however. Its combat is (at least eventually) better than the older game's too.

Uncommon game system

The main game mechanic of Tides are your pools of Might, Speed, and Intelligence. The more you spend of a pool on an action, the likelier you are to succeed. The mechanic works in combat and dialogue, which is nice. However, making checks in dialogue chance-based is poor design when you can easily save beforehand and reload if things don't go your way. The game claims failing checks is as interesting as succeeding at them but I feel that is one of its features it oversells.

In early game there's bit of a stress element to the pool mechanic. Your party's base skills and pool maximums are low. You don't know if you need to save up for something. Combat is terrible; you empty all your pools to be able to even hit enemies and then half of them are still standing. Scarce consumables and resting restore the pools but the game claims the latter might fail time sensitive quests. I wonder if that's really a thing.

In late game the situation gets turned the other way around. You likely don't even need your party to help in checks as the Last Castoff can do everything themself without ever emptying a pool. In combat enemies get steamrolled by your surestriking attacks. The system stops mattering entirely. Again, I feel like the Numenera rules/setting are better for pen & paper.

Tides runs on Unity as was to be expected. InXile got help from Obsidian Entertainment who had already figured out how to set up isometric RPGs on the engine. Having a head start like that probably allowed them to surpass Obsidian tech-wise -- I didn't encounter long loading times or poor performance like in Tyranny.

There didn't appear to be many bugs either. There was a particularly nasty one though which prevented me from completing a quest. Considering the quest's reward, I'm surprised the bug hasn't been fixed by the developer. I was able to dig up a solution from a multi-page Steam forum thread. Some glorious person had bothered to edit in an alternative quest completion trigger in the game's xml files and I was able to get my Rings of Entanglement.

The rings make their wearers share their fettles (buffs and debuffs), which allows some really cool combinations. It would've been a shame if I hadn't gotten the trinkets in my playthrough. It's features like these, these moments of brilliance that might make Torment: Tides of Numenera worth one's time.