Torment: Tides of Numenera

I'm leaving a positive review because ultimately it is a Good Game. Not a great one, however. And I'm going to use this text box to complain about some of the things that bug me about it.
The writing is... "good". Competent. Workmanlike. Blessedly, mostly free of typos and stylistic solecisms. But it is *absolutely* missing that spark that makes Planescape: Torment such an evergreen classic. And there is SO MUCH of it, it really throws off the game's overall pacing, *as* a game. It's a cliché to say this about this game at this point, but it really is more like reading a doorstopper novel than playing a CRPG, in terms of what the vast majority of your time is spent on. I read doorstopper fantasy/SF novels all the time, and I found myself skimming dialogue because it's incredibly wordy and starts to blur together into sludge. It's a shame, because if you take any one dialogue in isolation, it'll have 3 or 4 incredibly cool ideas packed into it. But when you have to read 10, 20, 50 of those dialogues to get through a 2-hour gaming session, the brain fatigues.
It also doesn't help that you quickly notice a certain writerly rhythm from which the narrative voice never really deviates.
> "One sentence of dialogue. A second sentence of dialogue." She drags her hand through her hair. "Another sentence of dialogue." She spreads her hands. "Another sentence of dialogue. A wry quip." She grins.
This is how 95% of dialogues with NPCs are constructed. This basic pattern, over and over and over and over. It starts to feel very rote, very formulaic, like the vast amount of text in this game was assembled in a giant industrial Mad-Libs factory. It's "good writing" if you take any one of these dialogue snippets in isolation, but quickly becomes repetitive and grating.

A flawed gem. Tides of Numenera is actually a decent enough game with an interesting world, lore, characters and story. It was marketed as a spiritual successor to Planescape: Torment, but admittedly it isn't as good or as memorable.
It was very divisive at release because of broken Kickstarter promises, but in my opinion honestly it is a better game than many give it credit for. Tides of Numenera has some neat ideas, especially when you interact with the Numenera - the remaining technologically advanced artefacts of prior civilisations long extinct. The actual purpose of Numenera has been long forgotten, but they still have uses in the game. These artefacts are so advanced, that they seem like magic to the inhabitants of the world - who all live in a society that is roughly medieval in terms of technology. It's one of the few games (Caves of Qud being the other game) that made me feel like a dumb baboon flinging ancient technological artefacts at my enemies, hoping that those artefacts kill them.
Having said that - it's not a combat game, and the combat you can start is for the most part pretty bland and boring. However combat is almost entirely avoidable if you build your character correctly. You don't have to fight and can approach your problems in many non-combat ways, through dialogue or interaction with objects in the world. There is a cool mechanic called 'Meres' that lets you live out someone's life in the past, then also change that past, which has implications for the present reality. It's one of the better written parts of the game and I wish the writers created more of them.
One other thing about the game - the atmosphere is unlike any other RPG game I've played. It's kind of like a post-post-post-post apocalypse, but mixed with this mystical, dream-like, fantasy quality as well. A lot of this is brought out by the beautiful 2D visual environments you explore and the amazing music that accompanies them (seriously whoever did the music captured this world perfectly).
Ultimately, it is a game about the story, your character's journey and the choices you make and the consequences. The writing is overly verbose and could of done with some editing, but the themes and concepts it explores are interesting enough to hold my attention.
If you can get it on sale, it's well worth the sale price.

Dubious recommendation. The imagination and world-building are second-to-none; every character you talk to has an interesting story to tell. It's just a shame that talking to characters is pretty much the only thing there is to do.

Tides of Numenera is primarily of interest to freaks like me who enjoy experiencing everything the cRPG genre has to offer. In this respect, it is on the good end of the scale, but nothing exceptional. The ways it tries to emulate Planescape Torment are annoying and cause the game to handicap its potential in ways that are heartbreaking to witness. Two examples out of many I can point out are Aadiriis and Sagus Cliffs. These are respectively mirrors to Ravel and Sigil. And while Sagus manages to come off quite well in this comparison, Aadiriis does not. She is a far less charismatic and engaging character.

It might seem unfair to compare Torment to Torment. But in addition to taking on the name itself, the game also constantly calls attention to it, from similarities in plot to constant irritating references found throughout. Bronze spheres and Adahn namedrops are found throughout the game. In fact, I bet the game would be much more enjoyable to someone who hasn't played Planescape simply because they wouldn't spot all the references. The game willingly takes on the challenge of being a spiritual successor and falls short in this regard. The antagonists aren't as interesting. The player-character is created in a way that mirrors The Nameless One from Planescape, but in a way that makes it completely uninteresting to play as them. And lastly, the game isn't as funny or cohesive as Planescape. A minor point, I know, but everything counts. It is at least a lot less gross than Planescape.

The reason I still recommend the game is that when it isn't trying to be Planescape, it's great. Fantastic most of the time. The game is wonderful when it focuses on this new world of Numenera. The setting is wondrous, with an almost infinite amount of strange things to uncover. You walk into a portal and suddenly find yourself in the middle of a battlefield where every person on every side is you. You find a blob creature of psychic matter that can manifest into the real world through your skull. A machine is using probability to turn a group of women into copies of its maker's dead daughter. This and so, so, so much more can be found in Numenera.

The way the game engages with themes of agency and identity is mostly mediocre. But when the game gives me a box and lets me experience another person's life, and then promises that I get to do it again, I love it. I do. This theme of yearning to be different people, to experience different lives, to wear others' skin and watch wonders through their eyes, rings true to me. How wonderful it is to find a game that empathizes with me and my daydreaming. Unfortunately, the game is this good only a couple of times.

The mechanics are essentially meaningless and superfluous, but that is doubly true for the other Torment. So that is at least consistent. The combat encounters found in this game are, for the most part, bland, and the crisis mechanic, where you talk and perform skill checks mid-combat, is underutilized. In short, this game is good, but not as good as what it compares itself to.

It's a well written game, which is good because there is a lot of reading.
However the core gameplay isn't really anything special.
As a successor to planescape torment, it falls short. But if you engage with it as it's own thing it can be a good time.

Negative reviews have simply no taste in what's good for them! :3
This game is a absolute masterpiece, i am grateful that i was alive to play it, it is a incredible experience and very well writen <3

Sad it took me so long to get to this one,
If you make a game that has so many characters with extra layers of descriptions and dialog (whether they are alien, not from this dimension or simply undead) the game slowly stops to feel like a game and starts being a visual novel. There is nothing "ordinary" about this narrative. I dont think boring humans exist anymore, or if they do their numbers are really low, everything you see is either an alien entity, a cosmic entity or some sort of a robot with its own special back story. (I did enjoy the Bloom quite a bit) and everything has to be special or twisted in some way.
Now lets talk about Tides - or special "castoff powers."If you play as a magic user you will use nanites and cyphers (magical devices) to cast powerful wizard like spells, but Tides (the force that only castoff's can use) is a force that ONLY gives you special dialog options, which yes they are relevant to the story, but otherwise do NOTHING ELSE in the game. Oh you get a small symbol painted in the corner of your avatar to match your dominant Tide and you can fiddle with Oom for some bonuses, but thats it.... Tides are completely irrelevant, it doesn't matter which Tide you use, or how you use them.
Game is fun, insane, imaginative and nothing like Ive played before, and at times it feels a bit short - like they could have added more chapters or explored more cities, but trust me its not short. It feels like you are reading two very long books about your characters adventures, and just when you got the hang of it they start throwing you into the past with long chapters and decisions and subtext of subtext etc etc. Story could have been told much more straightforward without diluting it so much, and the different POV'es certainly dont help.