Torment: Tides of Numenera Review

Torment: Tides of Numenera is a game whose lineage is solidly rooted in RPG’s of the past. In fact, the game is a direct successor to 1999’s classic – Planescape: Torment.

Created by inXile, a development company who is almost single-handedly keeping the isometric role-playing genre afloat, Tides of Numenera manages to create a profoundly detailed and intricate RPG experience for the player. With narrative and dialogue written as fluently and elegantly as a novel, Tides of Numenera is an incredibly refreshing and sophisticated example of the video game medium.

Narrative:

Torment: Tides of Numenera offers an intriguing narrative and a world absolutely brimming with lore.

The lore of the game is also fantastic. Examining your surroundings, talking with NPC’s or talking to your own party members will give a huge amount of backstory into current happenings, areas, characters or the Numenera. The game has found a way to create a world worth inhabiting and some lore absolutely worth uncovering.

Writing:

Here is where Torment: Tides of Numenera really shines. The game is written with the quality and complexity of a novel, something that is just all too rare in video games. The depth by which the game will describe a character or an event is staggering with intricate detail and multiple dialogue options always present. The game refuses to dumb itself down to pander to a wider audience and for that it has my commendation.

Here’s where I will issues a bit of a warning however. Whilst the game’s writing is superb, reading those beautifully crafted words may genuinely take around 60-70% of your total play experience. Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t a knock against the game, it achieved exactly what it set out to do, but I just know there are people out there who will suffer from narrative and dialogue fatigue. The game isn’t interested in being a product of mass appeal. It wants to be niche and novel in the current gaming space, even at the cost of its own accessibility.  This leaves Tides of Numenera in an interesting place – it is a great game, but not a game I could recommend to every gamer.

Even as somebody who did appreciate the game’s writing, it occasionally felt like it went too far. This is because Tides of Numenera didn’t utilise the video game medium as well as I thought it could. There was moments when it felt more like a choose your own adventure book than a video game. As an example, the game would describe a sound rather than play it, it would paint a word picture rather than show an image, and it would even describe an entire set of actions, decisions and consequences rather than have the player play them out. Whilst I understand this is an artistic choice, it did sometimes feel like my time wasn’t being respected.

Role-Playing:

Torment: Tides of Numenera offered quite the RPG experience. It was a little shorter than what I expected but there was enough depth for me to forgive it. The questing and mechanics of the game had variety and intricacy and it structured itself perfectly to promote multiple play-throughs. In fact, as soon as I completed the game, a second play-through was exactly what I did, because I wanted to find all the quests and items I knew I had missed, play the game with different party members and spec myself out differently with new skills and abilities. The game also had enough complexity to its systems that I wanted to implement my new found mastery right from the get-go.

Whilst combat can be avoided, I actively sought it out because some of the best moments of that game came from what it called a ‘crisis’ situation. Whilst combat only exists within a crisis, the crisis can often be dealt with via non-combat means as well. A couple of moments in particular stood out where I had to make decisions during a crisis and split my party to achieve multiple tasks at once, it was genuinely thrilling and tense.