Planescape: Torment is often praised as being one of the most amazing and engrossing story-driven cRPGs out there. And for a good reason. So it is often expected to see games try revisiting or sometimes outright emulating the ideas from said game. When you call your game “Torment”, with just the subtitle mentioning the tabletop RPG system and setting, perhaps you’re being a bit too on the nose with your influences. Is the game itself reliant on the game it references or does it feel unique and good on its own? Perhaps, it’s a bit of both.
The setting of Numenera is genuinely intriguing. Unlike a lot of settings commonly found in RPG titles, this is supposed to be far future of Earth, billions of years and several civilizations after today. It’s a world reminiscent of fantasy ideas, yet full of cyberpunk or sci-fi elements, with artifacts, magic and a lot of odd phenomena having some kind of scientific explanation and often several centuries of history to it, probably long forgotten. City can be full of weird mechanical monsters people avoid, strange flying geometrical figures you might not wish to touch and ancient machines and portals that lead somewhere, and no one knows where. Lands get hit by nanite-based winds mutating everything on their way and a conscious giant blob of flesh moves along the land while serving as a city to those desperate or mad enough to live there. This world just oozes interesting stories and characters and it feels like you can learn something exciting just around the corner.
Sadly, specifically in Torment: Tides of Numenera this never really happens like that. You visit plenty of odd places, meet lots of strange people and travel with a bunch of curious individuals, but somehow, despite there being an example of this working in Planescape: Torment (which was none less strange), this game never feels like a complete coherent experience. The places are interesting to look at and they seem to live their own interesting ways until you interact with them and suddenly feel as if the place is just decorations and a playground, ready to bend any way you will bend it and then disappear forever when you leave it. And despite the themes, this doesn’t feel godlike, like changing the world, rather, this feels like playing with toys. Characters pop in and out, mostly with no real impact or consequence. Which sadly includes even your companions, who have the potential to be really good, but always feel limited by the script. And thus, it’s hard to form genuine connections to the events or really make you question yourself as a player outside the game, something that this game clearly wanted to do.
It has lots of great tools for it, which is even more sad. Everything is built around the idea of a possibility of solving pretty much everything without starting a fight, including already being in a fight – you can still manipulate items or talk to some people while in a fight and talk them out of it. The RPG mechanics, the stats, the skills are also all designed to give you really interesting ways to solve things in many different ways. The whole concept of stat pools, and “effort” using those stat pools (until you rest or find another way to replenish to pool) is genius and motivates you to plan for what you should and shouldn’t try doing. And there’s this whole concept of choose your own adventure memories that are mostly optional but bring and interesting element to the story. All of this is brilliant! Might be a bit overwhelming for those, who don’t like reading, but that’s what this game always planned and wanted to be, so can’t blame the game here. But amazing nonetheless.
Yet, it all also becomes a bit of a problem when you realize that indeed most of things can be done just by talking as such, just like in Planescape: Torment, there’s a “right way” and a “wrong way” to play the game. And the “wrong way” will be less fun and less full on the story. A pretty good, if less impactful than it wants to be, story that is worth checking out. Though, sometimes the weird occasional bugs get in the way. Or when you feel like the best solution is to fight, you’re treated with a rather tedious take on turn based combat that, in bigger events, just takes forever to finally end. Game does uses it in creative situations, thanks to that ability to talk and interact during the battle, but even during those more “puzzle-like” battles the turn-based structure is more of a chore than excitement. Then you probably can also mention that the game gets less and less full on interesting ideas as it goes, with most care put in the opening act and later story bits just kind of happening one by one. And the fact that some of the things that Kickstarter backers were promised never made it into the game…
I liked the game. I liked what it tried to do. I like how it tried to revisit some (and a bit too much and too similar if you ask me) ideas from Planescape: Torment. I liked the music by Mark Morgan. I liked some of the character lines that felt truly fresh and unique. I liked the setting and hope to see more games set in it. But this feels more like a stepping stone for something great to happen sometime later, than a game that will remain in memory. It’s not a title I would really want to revisit, but I hope it’s a title that can inspire people to learn from its mistakes.