TORMENT: TIDES OF NUMENERA
Wish upon a falling star
The spiritual successor to Planescape: Torment gets weird
Developer inxile entertainment publisher techland Publishing price $ 44.99 available At steam, gog torment.inxile-entertainment.com
WILKS: I’m something of a fan of Monte Cook and I have been for a while. While I liked his work on D&D 3rd Edition and on d20 Call of Cthulhu, he really came into his own as a game designer when he left Wizards of the Coast and started Monte Cook Games. Numenera and The Strange, his two games based on the Cypher rule system are right up my alley. They have a simple but flexible system and settings that actively encourage anyone running a game to get more than a little weird. Numenera, the RPG world in which Torment is set, has a great premise, in a way predicated on the Arthur C. Clarke adage, “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
Set one billion years in the future, Numenera proposes a world built on the remains of countless previous civilisations. It’s post-post-apocalypse in a way. Civilisation has developed again around the technology left behind by those that came before. Some technology makes sense and is used in a manner befitting its design. Other technology is alien. The air swarms with nanotechnology that some people can manipulate. Strange creatures both from Earth and other dimensions coexist with machine intelligences. It’s an odd world but one almost uniquely suited for the spiritual successor to one of the greatest RPGs of all time, Planescape: Torment.
it’s a refreshingly weird and alien take on classic fantasy and scifi tropes
HOLLINGWORTH: Torment really is a loveletter to its successor, too, from the isometric game engine, to its world of weird and often more than a little grotesque creations. In just one of the game’s areas, there’s a forge built around the always-firing engines of a vast, grounded starship, a bipedal insect invasion emerging from the walls, and vats of gently undulating live meat byproducts sat next to a food cart.
Oh, and a random dude with no head who only says “bixxt” and “criiik”.
In fact, there is so much weirdness, so soon, that Torment can feel a little overwhelming. And even the main plot is almost literally out of this world. You play someone known only as The Last Castoff, your body once but no longer a vessel for the mysterious Changing God (whose cultists think you are just the BEST THING EVER), and the game opens with you falling from a great height before smashing into a glass roofed mausoleum and then waking up in construct made from your own psyche and… It’s a lot to take in! But one thing it isn’t is pedestrian, and it’s a refreshingly weird and alien take on classic fantasy and science fiction tropes. Can you dig it, Daniel?
WILKS: I definitely dig it. In keeping with modern RPG sensibilities, the first 30 minutes or more of the game are just taken up by character creation - not in the traditional rolling dice and looking through rulebooks sense, but in the fact that you actively play through character creation, solving puzzles and answering questions to flesh out exactly who The Last Castoff is. The Cypher system
that Torment is built around is simple when it comes to stats and classes - there are only three of each - but within the system there is a lot of nuance when it comes to character creation.
After working my way through the maze in my head and answering questions Voight Kampff style, the result spat out for me was that my version of The Last Castoff was a Clever Jack. Jacks are jack of all trades, not specialising in any specific area. The Clever part of the class title means that she focussed primarily on Intellect, the stat covering knowledge, cunning and charisma. The two other stats, Strength and Speed have equally broad purviews. You rolled a Nano, right David?
HOLLINGWORTH: A Perceptive Nano, no less. Nanos are effectively spell-casters, able to manipulate the raw nanotechnology that infests most of the world of Numenera. But, basically, it means spells. The third class is the Glaive, who are basically your classic warriors.
To be honest, that’s kind of what I thought I was aiming towards with some of the decisions I made during the early game, and once you’ve completed that part of the game, you do get the chance to change what the game thinks you should be; I thought I’d play something I don’t normally, and stuck with Nano.
The stats are certainly elegant, and the related skills and abilities are easy to understand. Levelling is a little odd, though, with each level being made up of tiers, and the ability to pick a single upgrade to a stat or skill with each tier. And, thankfully, you earn XP for all kinds of things, from talking to people, completing quests, and more. And speaking of, well, speaking, hoo-boy there is a lot of it. I must admit, I do prefer my RPGs - at least my videogame RPGs - to be a little more action-heavy; Torment is much more cerebral than most similar games, and the game’s stat economy - you spend your stats to ensure success in nearly everything, and once spent you need to sleep to restore your vitality - really does push players to talk first. Thankfully, the game is pretty well-written, and conversation trees and skills related to interaction make it a very rich experience.
But that same stat economy makes playing an actual fighty character really difficult. You’ll be taking a LOT of naps, and I must admit that constant awareness that skill-use is a resource really took me out of the game. But then, I’ve never liked that mechanic, either on the tabletop or in a videogame. But you’re doing pretty well with just talking through the game, aren’t you?
WILKS: I am - aside from the tutorial I have had exactly one fight against some extraplanar beings that I saw in a mirror and they didn’t appreciate me looking at them. That fight was a little rough but I prevailed thanks to stacking a heap of negative “fettles” (status effects) on the enemies through using a bunch of different skills that lower defence and accuracy. I did get into two other “crises” - that’s the Numenera word for a battle situation - but I talked my way out of one fight and used the environment to turn the enemies in the other into, if not necessarily allies, then at least non-combatants. There was one other fight but that was in a psychic realm with a bunch of NPC support, so I’m not sure if that counts.
Spending stats does come across as a little restrictive at the early stages of the game, but that’s deliberate, I think. I means players have to be wary about how many stat points they use, if any, in case they are needed later. In addition to raising stat pools and buying new skills and abilities, at some thresholds you can also buy “edges” for stats. These mean that there is an extra level of success on any skill related to that stat, so you may not need to spend as many points, if any, to succeed - someone with two edge in intellect would have the same chance of success as a character with the same skill and no edge spending two intellect.
I’m really digging the game and can’t wait to have a little down-time to explore more of the Ninth World, but it doesn’t sound like you’re having as much fun as me. Is it just the stats getting you down?
HOLLINGWORTH: Yeah, working on Edges can really start to make you feel a lot more competent, but I think my main issue is that the game seems to obfuscate a lot of its mechanics, not to mention its setting. The latter is due to the fact that - classic trope warning! - when the game begins you have no access to any memories. This does get explained, and it means a player’s lack of world knowledge is reflected well in game, but it can be a little frustrating. The game’s lore is deep and more than a little unforgiving.
But it’s as if the game wants that mystery to extend to how the mechanics work. For instance, while it’s great that the game does away with the usual good/evil axis of morality, and replaces it with a five-colour system that’s not really about morality at all, it’s hard to keep track of what each colour represents, let alone how developed you are in each one, and what that means. Being told you’ve just scored some Paragon points may be a little old-hat, but a pop-up saying you’ve just earned a tiny amount of blue is less than useful.
And while I don’t want to harp about the stat economy (I am TOTALLY going to harp about it), it’s so easy to run out of points early in the game that just one encounter can see one or more of your stats (and your party-members’) zeroed out, meaning you need to rest to get them back. But so far I’ve only found one place I can sleep, so that means getting out of a fight (or just dying, as that at least gets you back near one of the main hubs), and then moving through three or more areas, each requiring a ponderous load time. The setting itself is rich and immersive, but the constant loading when you’re moving from
location to location - as much of the quests require - is more than a little frustrating. I think that’s my main issue - the game is good, but a lot of it is really frustrating me. That and the crashes, but that may just be me.
WILKS: No crashes here, but I do get where you’re coming from when it comes to the backtracking and repetition. Things do open up, but for the first 12-15 hours of the game you’ll be running around the same half dozen or so screens, talking to various people to progress quests or at least get some information to help you progress a quest. There are only two places to rest in the first hub as far as I know, one unlocked through a quest and the other through currency. It does feel a little restrictive, but later you can buy or find healing items that work on replenishing stats. As far as the trope goes, I know what you mean, but I think it’s very deliberate here, both as a spiritual successor to a game all about someone uncovering their past, and also due to the fact that I have a feeling that the entire game is essentially about character creation. The Last Castoff is a blank slate, and each action influences how and when they remember things about who they were before the Changing God deserted them. Each person you talk to can potentially fill in blanks about the character, or give you an opportunity to make a concept more tangible.
I can’t believe we’ve made it all this way without actually talking about the Numenera. This catch-all term for technological items from previous civilisations is a major aspect of the setting and character of the game. Numenera come in three tiers; Oddities, Cyphers and Artifacts. Oddities are strange devices that don’t do anything particularly useful but are cool and can be sold for cash. Cyphers are single use, unstable items. Players can only carry a few before the clashing energy fields of Cyphers begin to cause negative effects. Artifacts are permanent items that can be used in perpetuity. In addition to weapons, armour and gadgets, there are also what are called bonded artifacts. These are biological or cybernetic augments that can seriously affect the way you play.
HOLLINGWORTH: Yeah, the gear is all really interesting, and I can already tell that the game is going to take things to a wholly epic level of power by its end. But I have to admit, it’s not a game I can see myself sticking with, at least not with my character as it currently stands. The game is undeniably epic, and very well-written and designed, but not enough to make up for backtracking, the at times repetitive conversations, and the early roadblocks. The game works best when it’s fresh, and the weirdness is, well, weird. But the sixth time you walk past the same mysterious construct of glowing alien metal that mystery gets pretty mundane.
Though, I have to admit, I am kinda curious about that headless guy. Daniel, are you sticking with it?
WILKS: I want to learn his headless language and add it to my repertoire. Yeah, I’m definitely going to be sticking with it. This is very much my type of game. I always get stuck into a deep new mythology, and I am undeniably attracted to strange narratives. I’m looking forward to finding out more about the Changing God, and maybe punching him in the face a little. Abandoning a body while it’s falling at terminal velocity is just mean.
undeniably epic, and very well-written & designed, but not enough to make up for backtracking