Game:

Torment: Tides of Numenera (2017)

Category:

Review

Duration: 14:18

22 views

0

"Reading," the Nigerian poet Ben Okri said once, "is an act of civilization." Torment: Tides of Numenera embraces this idea, pairing a whole fantasy novel’s worth of quality quest text with a design foundation that champions chatting with enemies rather than running them through with swords. It's a strange concept in the context of most roleplaying games, and Torment: Tides of Numenera delivers a satisfyingly strange world to complement it. It's too bad that the combat falls short when it's actually necessary, but the surrounding world usually presents enough memorable wonders to make up for it.As a spiritual successor to 1999's Planescape: Torment, one of the finest (and strangest) RPGs ever made, Torment: Tides of Numenera embraces its predecessor's isometric design with its use of the capable Pillars of Eternity engine. More importantly, it preserves Planescape: Torment's weird philosophical tone and aesthetic, filling the screen with everything from quasi-medieval markets to entire cities crafted out of meat.Sometimes, admittedly, it clings too much to fantasy trappings despite its setting of a billion years in the future, and its mages and ax-wielding warriors leave it feeling like a take on Baldur's Gate with aliens in the place of elves. Fortunately, it's an attractive vision. It takes place in an era when the strange trash of thousands of dead civilizations – the titular numenera – rots scattered about the Earth, its purpose often long forgotten. It's a world where headless men arouse about as much curiosity as a 3D printer today, where neon-green monoliths zap the unprepared, and where pods packed with demigods sometimes plummet from the sky. For all that, it's also a world where random goons with swords attempt to rough you up if they don't like your looks. I guess some things never change.Above all, though, it thrives on honoring Planescape's emphasis on a protagonist who's not on a quest to save the world. I admire that you're not actually a hero, but effectively garbage – literally. You’re the "Last Castoff," the empty shell of a being called The Changing God who creates new bodies for himself and then dumps them like used Coke bottles once he's ready to move on to another. Others exist like you, and each assumes his or her own consciousness after being tossed aside. Through it all, a horrific entity known as The Sorrow mysteriously hunts down every castoff, and your main goal is never much more serious than keeping it at bay.Fortunately, you're not such a nobody that no one wants to hang out with you. Torment: Tides of Numenera features several companions who can tag along with The Last Castoff three at a time, and I sometimes found their stories as fascinating as my character’s. Take the wise Callistege, who walks around surrounded by flickering clones of herself glimpsed from alternate realities. Or consider Erritis, a warrior whose unstable personality channels Beauty and the Beast's Gaston. Strangely, a disproportionately large
--------------------------------------------------
Source: http://www.ign.com/articles/2017/02/28/torment-tides-of-numenera-review

Other Statistics