Torment: Tides of Numenera
Read all about it, then read some more…
WE DON’T KNOW WHAT you were doing in the late ’90s, but we were playing Half-Life, setting up disappointing bot-matches in Unreal Tournament because V.90 modems were rubbish, and gazing at the BioWare and Black Isle game boxes on the shelf, wondering when we’d have time to finish them. The very best of these, played from the isometric viewpoint of the Infinity Engine, was Planescape: Torment. And 18 years later, we have a “spiritual successor” in the form of TidesofNumenera.
Switching settings from Dungeonsand Dragons’ Planescape to Monte Cook’s Numenera, Tides looks the part thanks to PillarsofEternity’s engine, and explores Tormenty themes of memory, identity, and rebirth. Numenera was begging for the videogame treatment—as much sci-fi as fantasy, it sees a primitive far-future civilization coming to terms with the detritus left by the eight (or more) societies that have come before, their advanced technologies seeming like nothing less than magic, their functions a puzzle that may never be solved. These are the Numenera, and even the soil contains multitudes of discarded technology, you read one character say.
Ah yes, the reading. This isn’t a fully voiced game. If it were, they’d still be recording in 10 years’ time, so great are the conversation options. Due to the sheer amount of lore, character backstory, and plot-critical information to be gleaned from both bystanders and mysterious robed figures phasing in and out of the universe, the need to talk to everyone is great if you want to truly understand this world. When a game is this close to interactive fiction, you are forced to slow down, take a step back, and contemplate what you’ve learned— something of a novelty in a modern gaming landscape that prizes twitch skills so highly. The lack of voices means that when you do run into a character who can make a noise, you know you’ve found an important one. CAST YOUR MIND BACK You are the Last Castoff, a husk left behind when an apparently god-like being transferred its consciousness into another body. As with all castoffs, you achieved sentience—and just in time, in your case, as you crash through a dome and into the Ninth World. Your journey through this world—to find out who you really are as much as understand your “sire”—is up to you. As you wander, you pick up a party, learn skills, and maybe fight a bit—although it’s possible to avoid violence as much as you want. You can talk your way out of any situation, sneak around in the shadows, and influence the Tides—colored personifications of emotion and feeling—with your actions, to alter the way characters react to you.
It’s an enormously deep system, albeit one that can appear opaque. Notifications of shifts in the Tides appear before you even know what they are, and the section of the character sheet telling you which colors are dominant is too small, and not labeled. The whole thing feels old-fashioned, which we guess is part of the point. Games like this still get made— PillarsofEternity, the Baldur’sGate remakes—but are the exception rather than the rule, and when nostalgia is part of the marketing strategy, a little clunkiness and a whole lot of text are exactly what we expected.–