It started out promising, but unfortunately didn't convince me at all on a narrative level. The game is not called "Torment" for nothing and clearly wants to be a spiritual successor to Planescape, but in my opinion it fails completely. The themes are not nearly as well presented and generally not as profound as in Planescape. Overall, I had the feeling that they wanted to tell a lot of stories without really delving deeply into the topics addressed. I don't think I'll touch it again. I was really looking forward to the game, what a shame.

the world of torment: tides of numenera is as fantastic and epic as its gripping narrative. each step you take in the ninth world is a mystery - the next object or person you run into may just be inane or leave you thinking for a while. charming.

it's main strength is that it still manages to create a deeply grounded and personal adventure that stands out in a complex, mind-bending science fantasy. i think that there is something truly compelling about discovering yourself as an empty husk in a chaotic world.

A beautifully crafted love letter to Planescape: Torment.

However its most unique and compelling aspect (its setting) becomes one of its biggest detriments.

(Context: I've ran the Numenera TTRPG for about 4 years over since it was released) Its setting is VAST. Maybe too vast sometimes. And can be an avenue for compelling questions about humanities mark on the well, the grander cosmos and the vastness of history.

However, Numenera is at its best when these aspects loom over your players, just out of view. All the while you're playing a sword and Sorcery game none-the-wiser most of the time.
Unfortunately, Tides of Numenera takes the opposite approach with its story telling and whilst intriguing those looking for a slower burn or more personable story are ganna find the game lacking.

What's here though is great, and how the mechanics of the TTRPG are implimented into the video game are really cool. If you're a fan of Planescape: Torment I highly recommend.

it was quite interesting but the first act had a bug with two quests being impossible to complete and idk it left me quite frustrated that this was not fixed in the years after the game was released, with me finding threads that were years old on the same issue and that had no solutions... just left a bad taste in my mouth and i kinda stopped after i entered the. uh. tomb maze thing? idk how to even describe it but i was just mindlessly going through levels hoping for something to happen and then just gave up. i do hope i pick it back up someday, the world and story it was giving were quite good, and i'd like to experience it in full, and maybe there's a fan patch that fixes the bugs idk

Planescape: Torment is one of the best role-playing games in the history of the medium. Its arcane, existentialist storytelling which challenged the player's beliefs, and gameplay which rewarded player choice and expression made it the best for everything cRPGs had to offer. Its legacy cannot be understated. If it wasn’t for Torment the way wouldn’t have been paved for the RPG genre to draw inspiration from to recreate its magic. Especially for some of the more direct inspirations. One of the most obvious examples comes from Knights of the Old Republic 2. Which tracks since the remnants of Black Isle/Interplay developed it, including the lead writer recycling many unused ideas from Planescape: Torment to form the foundation for the game. Recently, this is also clear in ZA/UM’s groundbreaking hit, Disco Elysium. The developers constantly cited Planescape: Torment and its peers as major inspirations regarding the narrative and game design. The presentation and typography alone, being lifted straight from Torment, shows how much they loved wearing their influences by their sleeves. Released between the two games came a third spiritual successor to Planescape: Torment made by, interestingly, InXile.

A quick rundown: when Black Isle/Interplay started going down the shitter, mostly financially, three different developers would eventually spawn from its untimely death. These would be Troika (founded by OG Fallout creators: Tim Cain, Leonard Boyarsky, and Jason Anderson), Obsidian (founded by two noteworthy Black Isle veterans: Feargus Urquhart and Chris Avellone), and InXile (founded by the original founder of Interplay, mostly acting as a producer except for Wasteland which is his baby, Brian Fargo). Out of the three developers who inherited the legacy of Black Isle/Interplay, InXile might be the worst of the bunch. I mean, I guess that’s hard to say now since Troika only made three games (which is ironic given their name) and has been long fucking dead thanks to Activision, and Obsidian’s old guard of talent has long since jumped ship with only the Chad J.E Sawyer remaining (Pentiment looks like it could be special). Yet, InXile has nothing that seems to hold a candle to either Troika’s premature, unfinished masterpiece in Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines, or Obsidian’s genre-defining classics like KOTOR 2 and New Vegas. I like Wasteland 2 just fine, and though I haven’t gotten around to it yet, Wasteland 3 looks pretty neat, but it doesn’t quite own up to the roots these developers owe themselves to, and have continued to strive for in different ways.

Knowing all this context is interesting because here you have a legacy developer, one who originally had a hand in developing the many excellent role-playing games that cultivated in the West, trying to make a deliberate spiritual sequel to one of said games, and somehow — none of this added up for a worthy successor to Planescape: Torment.

Tides of Numenera may not be offensive as far as spiritual successors, or hell, even sequels to towering classics can end up being. I’d even hesitate to say this is devoid of any interesting merit or value to justify its own existence. The premise is a very interesting twist on Torment’s, whereas in that you play as a man reconciling with the traumatic scars of every person he used to be, in this, you play as someone who grew consciousness out of the many lives from a body changing god who discovered the secret to immortality and is forced to deal with the accountability thrown on top of you while figuring out who you are now. It’s very inline with how high concept and surreal Torment famously is, except now in the backdrop of a more futuristic setting, but the execution is so jarringly uncharismatic and dull. The companions are some of the most remarkably forgettable I’ve come across in the Interplay/Black Isle/Troika/InXile/Obsidian lineage of RPGs. I’m actually struggling to remember their names because they’re so devoid of personality and character. Compare this to Planescape: Torment which had such a colorful, complicated gallery of companions that stick right deep into your mind after playing. Each with their own special quirks, needs, wants, beliefs, and personal tragedy which parallels the themes explored through The Nameless One. You remember Morte’s comical wit and how deceptively intriguing he is underneath that persona he puts on. You remember Dak’Kon’s crisis in belief and his depressing servitude towards The Nameless One. You remember Ignus and how much a pyromaniac he was who hated your guts because of your past actions. You even remember Nordom who, on the surface seems like just a gag-like character, is fascinating because of his mere existence grappling with independence and mortality. I can’t say any of this to the companions you can encounter for how much of a nothingburger they blend into together.

This also goes towards the general writing and presentation as well. The flowery yet thorny written prose and dialogue from the original Torment is rendered but a shallow, empty shell that is just “yeah, that is indeed writing and text doing what it's doing alright”. There’s no depth here; none of the genuinely thought-provoking nuance, the humor, the romance, the edge, or much of anything resembling an actual human being wrote this. The game feels like an unfocused mess of minor stories or events that just happen with no strong through-line to make it feel cohesively paced as an experience. The Ninth World should be this high science fantasy world that feels weird yet lived in but the uninteresting bog standard NPCs that populate it kills the idea. Also, I don’t know why this is such a problem with so many modern cRPGs but why is it hard to make a visually distinct and appealing looking world? I want to chalk it up as just being difficult to present good art direction and aesthetics into a usually low-budgeted isometric game but Planescape: Torment and the original Fallouts still have exceedingly powerful visual direction through their creative menu designs, distinct environments, colorful characters, and vivid atmosphere that holds up especially today where that’s becoming difficult to find. Even Disco Elysium has some of the most stylized yet realistically gorgeous art direction to have ever been presented in a video game, and that’s a modern cRPG too, so Tides of Numenera really doesn’t have an excuse.

I want to understand the critical praise this got and see if there’s truly a solid game underneath this that can stand comfortably okay next to Planescape: Torment, but no matter how many hours I’ve put to work my way through (which is like a total of 5-6) I just couldn’t give less of a shit. Maybe there is a shiny diamond in the rough to be found later but I doubt it since this seems to only see Torment for the forest rather than the trees. And if you were on hard copium and desperately looking for something to fill in the void like a post-ME3 BioWare fan, even willing to crowdfund a Kickstarter to satisfy that itch, then you’re much better off playing Disco Elysium which is a far more ambitious and respectful spiritual successor.

Disclaimer: I Kickstarted this game.

I abandoned this game pretty quickly.

It is intensely verbose, with a ton of lore and world history it wants to tell you. Every interaction with an object or person is overloaded with jargon and (fairly well written) prose -- it got tiring pretty fast for me.
Unfortunately, none of the writing hooked me into the story or the world, so there wasn't much to keep me playing. It feels like the writers think the mere existence of a mystery is enough to drive my engagement. I had a similar experience with Planescape: Torment, so I guess they succeeded as a spiritual successor in that regard.

There are some systems that seem interesting around limited use items that have wide ranging effects, but I think these work better in a tabletop setting where creativity is easier to execute on. As presented, they were either uninspiring, extremely restricted, or just weren't front loaded enough that I got much out of them in my short playtime.

There is a certain type of CRPG fan that loves games like this, but it definitely isn't for me. If you want a well written, interesting, narrative CRPG, Disco Elysium delivers better across the board in terms of character motivation, narrative, and systems design.

I loved her! Very well-written. Much like Pillars compared with Baldur's Gate, it doesn't quite capture the mind bending off-the-wall vibe as Planescape: Torment, but it's a really well crafted, focused and grounded (as grounded as something this high concept can be) story that does a good job of landing the human and character impact of it's magical sci-fi nonsense premise. Every quest is based in story and character, and you're often making choices with no fully Good or Bad solution, something I really value in an RPG

[Anamnesis] Try to recall Torment: Tides of Numenera by InExile Entertainment: FAILURE.

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i think some people think of me as a bit of a hater at times, which makes me feel bad because I generally like most games I play and talk about, and even ones I don't think too highly of, like Elden Ring, have things about them that I appreciate. tedious negative formalism is, for me, the retreat of the disappointed romantic, and if i do end up there, it's only because I have tried and failed to love something. so please, know that when I say that I do, in fact, hate Tides of Numenera, it is because it is a genuinely rare occurrence for me: a game that repulses above and beyond anything it might have to offer.

i finished this fairly comprehensively when it first released and while I liked it quite a bit back in 2017, my fondness for it fades to an proportional degree to my strengthening fondness for the original Torment.

in a sense the problem is that I resent having to refer to Planscape: Torment as "the original Torment". there is a naked cynicism to the title that is hard to ignore, an almost desperate call to arms for fans of the original to treat this with the weight that something evoking a beloved work warrants. and yet, it rings so hollow. part of this is because by any reasonable metric, planescape: torment has plenty of sequels, there being a clear throughline of thematic exploration and continuity of staff from that game into the likes of Knights of the Old Republic 2 and Mask of the Betrayer, so this game tattooing "TORMENT" onto it's skin feels unnecessary at best and deeply insecure at worst. but the larger problem of the name is that this hollowness and insecurity seeps into the game itself.

a game like this really shouldn't be reminding me so strongly of Dark Souls 3 or - god forbid, The Rise of Skywalker - but those comparisons struggle to leave me when I weigh Tides of Numenera in my mind, this game that so desperately needs to be seen as a true successor to Planescape: Torment that it strains at every opportunity to deliver surface-level reference after vacuous call-back.

tattoos were part of Planescape, and so they are part of Tides of Numenera! except here the tattoos are given a weight and significance by the writing that is afforded only by the fact that they are a reference to the original. tattoos were important in Planescape because they represented the permanency of your past actions and effects on the world. tattoos do not leave us - and neither do our actions and the scars they leave on the world. there is no similar thematic resonance to the choice to use tattoos in numenera. the symbols are, as abstract symbols, important to it, but grafting them onto the flesh of the protagonist says nothing, other than "remember planescape?"

these kinds of embarrassing references are everywhere, but the one that got me to switch the game off in disgust was when you find a Bronze Sphere. The Bronze Sphere in Planescape was deeply important in that game, but its importance was something you had to discover. You can - and many do - simply ignore and forget about it once it first leaves your possession, to treat it like the insignificant bauble it seems. It's only by choosing to keep it - a choice that says a lot about your Nameless One, because the only reason you'd keep it is that you know it was important to a past version of yourself that you increasingly learn to be almost unimaginably cruel - all the way to the end of the game, do you finally learn what it is. in numenera, you find a bronze sphere - proudly labelled as such - in one of the first areas you have access to, a bronze sphere that, essentially, acts as little more than a place for your companions to hang out when you aren't with them. it is a rote mechanical feature that clads itself in one of the most resonant and evocative images of the game it's so desperately trying to summon within itself in order to afford it a weight derived entirely from the audience's recognition of that image in a completely one-dimensional way. it is planescape: torment reduced to brand recognition, a funko pop of the nameless one, dak'kon in fortnite, a disney+ limited series about fall-from-grace. it is the mcu-ification of a singular work that is very, very close to my heart. it fucking blows ass so much oh my god.

part of me wants to resist labelling this a truly terrible game. the writing is, in a vacuum, thought of entirely as a book of disconnected sci-fi short stories you can wander through, engaging, in the moment. there are some characters that work: I think most of the stuff surrounding the character of Rhin is genuinely fantastic and represents a genuinely thoughtful exploration of parenthood, the kind that the medium is historically lacking in. there are moments where the various mechanical concerns of the game - the crisis events, the resource management game you play through wandering the world - do come alive. the soundtrack is actually kind of fantastic. but what's it all in service too? this story, that has no ideas of its own, and is just stripping the scar tissue from one of my favourite games and selling it back to me on Kickstarter? this game that is torn in a dozen different directions by a dozen different writers with no cohesive ideas other than Being Like Planescape? i could begrudgingly admit that there are things Of Interest to be found in this game. but I don't want to, and nor do I think I should. i think i should reject this embarrassing, ambitionless, written-by-committee sludge as the failed attempt to colonize the affections of those who were earnestly affected by the travels of The Nameless One.

so much of the modern media landscape is built entirely on selling you back hollow tokens of your memories in the shape of lightsabers and web-shooters and synths and kids on bicycles. but what we remembered wasn't ever as important as why we remembered them. and because Torment: Tides of Numenera is so singularly focused on the what and not the why, it isn't much of a surprise that it's been so comprehensively forgotten: there's nothing about it to remember.

Beaten: May 03 2022
Time: Idk probably 25 Hours
Platform: Xbox Series X


Honestly I think Torment: Tides of Numenera is a more interesting game to talk about than its predecessor, even if it’s not (by my measure) a better game. It’s conflicted and sprawling in pretty much every way that a work can be, and the ways it frays are almost all tied in to the idea that this is a followup to Planescape: Torment. Somehow though, much like KOTOR 2 (and if we’re being honest, Planescape: Torment itself), the rough edges and scraped skin where the work’s intentions crumble into oblivion just end up feeling endearing to me.


What’s remarkable about Numenera is that this knotty dissonance is tied into the setting at a foundational level. Numenera is a ttrpg set something like 1 billion years in the future on earth, after many (8 in particular) grand civilizations have risen and fallen, leaving every inch of the land coated in history and relics of ages long past. It’s a setting about discovering old, odd, or broken things, and it’s tied to a system that drops all pretense of simulation from the style D&D usually goes for in favor of simple mechanics to drive a more exciting story. Put simply, it’s a world of 70s and 80s pulp-hard sci-fi stories layered on top of and inside each other, like taking pages out of every Isaac Asimov book and rearranging them in a random order. I Love It.


What this means for the game is that it’s probably ok if your story has ends laying on the ground that don’t really relate to anything, because it fits into the larger whole. The first Torment is a tidy game, a game where just about every scrap of dialogue felt like it was thematically driven by the same forces (with the rough edges of the game being the amount of combat, which wasn’t driving that same thematic point, and was much more common than I remembered and also much more than this game lol). That’s a lot of why that game is so beloved, I think. You rarely get a game that focused and thought out, and yet so expansive as well.


Numenera hasn’t been as well remembered, and in fact seems like it’s fallen out of public discussions over the 5 years since its release, and I think that untidyness (or the non-standard mechanics that mix typical cRPG design with Numenera’s Cypher System in a way that *I* like but definitely feels a bit weird) has a lot to do with it. In fact, besides those two reasons, I can’t imagine why it would be forgotten. The quest and hub design is just like, intensely good, with a lot of the quests being some of my favorites out of any RPG I’ve ever played. Quests often lead into each other, tying up in unexpected ways, or branching out in a way that truly enhances the scale of the world.


Putting itself next to Planescape was always going to be a losing battle, but I thing the minutiae of Numenera should earn it a place next to its brothers (Tyranny and Disco included) as one of those games that mixes Adventure games, RPGs, unhinged creativity, and emotional devastation together unbelievably potently. It’s a great game on its own merit, and deserves a reevaluation. I hope it gets that second look sometime
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Well written as a Numenera game with a good and unique setting, though not as well paced and focused as Planescape, and unlike the original Torment, the best moments come from stories unrelated to you. Interesting characters and situations fitting for the setting. Can avoid combat if you want to. Interesting results can come from skill failure, events, stat changes, ability to use tide powers. Merecasters were a good addition, giving you short stories you can play through either showing off other parts of the Numenera world or giving you more information on story relevant characters and events.

Dominant tide rarely effects anything and the amounts you get can feel unbalanced or oddly chosen but the idea is relevant to the story. Small areas keep everything very close which can lead to some ridiculous things like someone telling you to find someone or something that is standing right next to them.

I played it when it first released before some fixes and additions likely made some improvements and it is well worth playing more for the stories you discover and the people you meet than for the main plot and certainly more than the combat would be if you decide to fight when you can. One of few games that makes it easy to avoid almost all combat through conversation or planning and one of the few that makes failure (or results that would normally seem bad) both amusing and potentially helpful.

Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/837074637838221312
https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/837141554095480832
https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/837158689526067201
https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/837179681388404736
https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/838287076109910016
https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/838884740090359808