Torment: Tides of Numenera is an oldschool text-based dungeon crawler disguised as a late-90s CRPG. And I have to admit… this one just did not do it for me.
The majority of the game is read rather than played. A lot of what could be conveyed visually is instead described in long-winded blocks of text. The writing style is functional in the sense that the words flow well enough and there aren’t many grammatical errors, but beyond that it isn’t that great. For example, with the exception of two or three outliers, none of the characters have their own voices; they all read like they’re the same person. This could be a byproduct of how localization works in the modern global economy rather than a limitation of the writer’s abilities.
Tying into my gripes with the writing, this was the first time I’d been exposed to the Numenera setting. In my opinion it’s awful. To elaborate… hypothetically this is a science-fiction setting, taking place over a billion years into the future, where artifacts produced by nanites (read: science-magic), by bending the laws of reality or by genetic tampering are a common part of daily life. These artifacts are the titular “Numenera.” Most of the denizens of this world don’t seem to have the slightest clue as to how any of this works nor do they really care; the fact that it works at all is good enough. As a result the setting feels much more “high fantasy” than “sci-fi.”
The existence of Numenera artifacts comes across as a thinly veiled excuse to make possible any idea that can be brain-farted into existence. On that note, a lot of creative liberties are taken concerning the flow of time and dimensional limitations. Multiple time machines exist, having been weaponized by opposing armies, and as a result nothing makes all that much sense from a narrative perspective. When a plot point is ridiculous on its face, it generally gets hand-waved away with vague “esoteric” language. Did a thing just happen that completely invalidates a previous story element? Who cares! That thing happened in the past, in another dimension. Now we can move forward as though that previous event never occurred. The overall effect is that you will quickly stop caring about the plot at all. Anything I or my opponents do can be rendered pointless by hopping timelines or dimensions or whatever, so why bother.
The “Tides” part of the title refers to the alignment system. There are five colors: Gold, Silver, Blue, Indigo, and Red, and each of these colors represents a different life approach. Gold, for example, is your typical self-sacrificing Lawful Good “Paladin” sort of outlook, while Red represents giving into your passions, in ways that are often dark or predatory. Different dialogue choices will boost different Tides, and one of them will become dominant. I got through the entire game without having any idea as to how any of this impacts anything, outside of slightly changing some dialogues and some post-script text during the credits.
Combat is turn-based. While functional, it is kind of bare. Speccing your characters for combat is a trap anyway: most encounters (referred to as “crises”) can be skipped with the right dialogue choices and skill checks. Skipping encounters often produces an outcome that is more favorable. As a result, not only is it possible, but there is actually an incentive, to play the game for several hours at a time, maybe even a dozen, before engaging in combat.
So what is there to do instead of combat? The answer: lots and lots of dialogue checks. Expanding on that, I would say that there is a "correct" way to play the game, in the sense that more player choice becomes available (player choice is ultimately the only thing that's really rewarding here). That “correct” way is to create a character that can handle dialogue checks exceedingly well. You'll want at the very least to excel in one particular category of skill pool (there are three: Might, Speed, Intellect, with Intellect generally being the most useful in dialogue, and Might being the least useful). You also want to try to raise all non-combat skills to at least the “Trained” level: Persuasion, Intimidation, Deception, Quick Fingers, all three Lore categories. If you start as a Nano you can read minds from the beginning of the game which is actually kind of cool, and one of the few unique features worth mentioning in a positive context. Functionally what mind reading entails is that you will get some additional orange text during some dialogues, representing the thoughts of the person or entity you’re conversing with. This makes it a lot easier to determine the motivations of a character, which often means that it will be easier to isolate the best way to resolve a quest for your particular playstyle.
It took me 60 hours to beat the game but if you skim-read through the volumes of text you could probably get it down to 30-40. Outright clicking through text and not reading much at all might even get you down to sub-20 hours. I encountered multiple UI glitches, all of which could be resolved either by restarting the game, or minimizing/maximizing it. There was one quest that flat-out could not be completed due to a glitch and had to be fixed by adding XML code to a config file to restore dialogue tree triggers. If you're wondering how this game ties into the late 90s classic Planescape: Torment (which I have played), the answer is not at all, outside of some of the themes of the main story being pale imitations of the philosophical ideas in that game. Also one particular trans-dimensional character makes a short cameo appearance.
TLDR: The Numenera setting is ass and if you skipped down here you probably don’t have the patience to finish this game anyway.
