Torment: Tides of Numenera: A “Review”

I have an odd relationship with “Torment: Tides of Numenera” (henceforth simply called “Torment”).

*Loose Spoilers to Follow*

I never played CRPGs, really. I tried to get into “Planescape: Torment” back when it came out, back when I thought any RPG would basically be FFVII (my first real RPG) but I learned very quickly this was not the case. I’ve tried “Baldur’s Gate” and – even more recently – “Pillars of Eternity” which I even backed on Kickstarter for some reason, despite not really enjoying that type of game. The thing is, I want to enjoy it. I like an RPG that really sets me in the world and explores how one person can change and effect so many things.

Modern RPGs (“Skyrim” or “Fallout” or even “Final Fantasy XV”) don’t have this feel. As these once-niche titles move into the world of Triple-A development, certain sacrifices need to be made, namely that of “consequence gameplay” – by this I mean, in “Skyrim” your decisions are extremely binary, extremely localized on one spot or character, and have no lasting, major impact. You pick a faction in the war and you change who inhabits some castles and forts. But nothing really changes in the game, no drastic alter universe stuff in one playthrough or the next. At the end, you’re still gonna yell at an ancient, time-stopping dragon in heaven until he disintegrates. This is so that players of the game don’t ever miss out on any content in their 100+ hour game. Most average consumers will only play something that big once and they want to be able to see and do it all. This cuts corners and makes the impossible, possible. How can the highest rated assassin in the land also be the chosen dragon slayer, the most daring thief, a friend to all the governing bodies across multiple cities, explore alternate realities, and be married and own three houses? The answer: so one player can see every last bit of content.

This creates a feeling in me, as a player, that I’m not really living in that space. If “Fallout 4” has me searching for my son in a world that is alien to my character, he should never once stop and go “thanks, Preston. I will go check on that settlement again”. But “Torment” reassures me that all the over-abundance of content and narrative dissonance doesn’t hamper every game, and with that long winded into, let’s get into why “Torment” was exactly the game I wanted while still being mostly mediocre.

For starters, I played this on a PS4 (yes, yes, with a controller. Pitchforks and torches you say…? Hm…). I had a blast. Right off the bat the game presents you with a completely different RPG gaming experience than I’ve been used to for some time. It is text heavy, there is very, very little voiced dialogue, and there is no choice wheel for decisions. Instead you have a list of options and some of them are radical. Case in point, depending on what you do in the opening minutes of the game, you simply and brazenly die before you even get control over the character, or even see what the character looks like. Hell, you even get a trophy/achievement for doing so. All because you can make a choice that is outside of a morality system or a simple “I’m a serious person/I’m an angry person/I’m a sarcastic person” options presented in most games.

This kind of decision making is on point throughout the experience and when I say you can’t save everyone, I mean it. A choice early in the game might mean someone is simply dead later and you’ll never see their quests. Sleeping too many times during a murder investigation means – surprise! – more murders happened in your absence. Buy a slave and free him, help him get a job. Will he show back up later and dramatically alter a sequence of events out of love and loyalty to his savior? I mean, probably, but I’m not going to spoil the details, here.

This bleeds into your interactions with the companion characters, who are all interesting and unique, but sometimes you have to work to find and utilize them. One bloke from early the game left in anger and though I could re-recruit him later, I left him alone. Fuck that guy, he didn’t trust my judgment. And there is supposedly a whole character I never even ran into. And the people you do quest with have backstories and choices to make as well, some of which are minor as hell but others have huge implications, like whether or not they basically become a god. Sometimes your choices will have your party members vanish from the game entirely, far earlier than you’d think. This is because the game world has consequences and is frank about it.

Past the choices, how do I feel about the game? Uh, mixed. Very, very mixed.

Visually the game is stunning. The world of “Torment” is bizarre, grotesque, beautiful, nasty, synthetic, alive, and rapturous. Given the nature of the story, this all makes sense, but when you’re in the bowels of a creature one second and the next you’re in a sleek, silver alien ship overlooking the purple surface of distant planet, and you understand that the only thing separating these two combating visual styles is a load screen? You know you’re in for a wild ride. This also allows for an insanely diverse number of different characters and models, though some of the finer details are left to imagination and text windows. The audio is also great. Most of the voice acting is par for the course and the music and sound effects are fantastic. I’ll never get the sound of causing a shift in Tides out of my head.

But that’s it for praise. Everything else is a negative. The story of the game is so esoteric and dense that – for once – I used a game’s built-in codex to remember names, places, and events that were crucial in the early hours and are coming back now, 40 hours later (total playtime was 46 hours, rounding up). I understood the story (of fallen gods, grieving parents, and outer-dimensional forces of nature) and I enjoy doing work to dig into a narrative, but this was too much with a ton of filler. And while I did say that the companion stories were interesting, it’s unfortunate that they all end up boiling down to “A or B” as far as their endings. Granted, almost all of these choices were neither “black or white” but still, they all end in similar ways: let them go or ask them to stay. It was disappointing.

Short version: There’s a dude named “The Changing God” and he’s been around forever. People love him, people hate him. He’s called this because he changes bodies. But when he leaves one body, it becomes a Castoff, a living, thinking, new entity with wants and needs of its own. The player is the Last Castoff and it’s his job to understand his place in the world at large, amongst the other remaining Castoff population, and why an extreme negative force named (seriously) The Sorrow is hunting them down. It’s fairly standard fantasy/sci-fi stuff, but there is an interesting series of layers underneath that make it a touch better, though none of this is extremely well handled.

Gameplay? What gameplay. I enjoy a game that lets me outthink my enemies, and this game has some wild examples that. But it all rests on virtual rolls of a die, as well as proper stat placement for the build you want. Let me break that down. You have three main stats: Strength, Speed, and Intellect. Depending on how you want to play through the game and its many, many encounters with skill checks, you’ll dedicate most of your energy on one of those three. I spent a near infinite amount of points on Intellect so I could weasel out of fights and it worked. Sometimes convincing someone I’m god, other times bending an entire living city to my will. It was neat. But when the game forces you into combat, you are screwed if you don’t have the right party members to supplement the stats you didn’t increase. Granted, this is a game with few Game Over instances (when you die you are removed from the world and can go back whenever you’d like) but that ends up making for a tedious experience. And don’t get me started on stealth options. Going through a massive bug next to sneak out eggs was a joke. I just slaughtered everyone.

And as much fun as being a boy genius was, by the end of the game I had so many levels and abilities that far-reaching conclusions with dire ramifications for the known universe were simply mine to make if I wanted, there was no chance I would fail when I could just 100% every decision I had to make. This removes some tension and risk that really highlighted some of the crazier bits from the early hours, where a mistake never meant you lost the game, but that maybe that poor outcast you wanted to help will get lynched now, instead.

I got nothing out of equipping Numenera, ancient devices with wild, crazy abilities. I usually just sold them. I didn’t use Oom, the free DLC character, at all. I really didn’t understand how the Tides worked or why my game came with a map of places that aren’t in the game. Maybe they are? I dunno. I hate that you can never go back to a previous location once you leave. I really, really wish more of it had been voiced. And the main plot, while incredibly interesting, is cliché ridden and trite on the surface and half-baked at its core. Some of these complaints are based on my play style and, sure, that’s a plus (“play it your way!”), but certain gameplay mechanics, like the devices mentioned, are poorly explained and feel cumbersome rather than curiosity-inducing.

I don’t think I will play this game again, though I will think about the world and the people in it for a long, long time. The plight of the Last Castoff is one I’ll likely to never forget, and that’s a good thing. I just wish the rest of the game rose to meet its world’s greatness.