Torment: Tides of Numenera

The story here has the basis for a great game but far too many of the mechanics don't impact the actual game. There is minimal combat despite all the combat skills and most times it feels like you have to almost intentionally make bad decisions in order to fail social checks despite all the social skills. Its hard to recommend this as a 'game' when it really feels like an over-complicated choose your own adventure story. You spend almost an hour going through a series of social choices which builds your character based on your decisions then at the end of it you are still presented with a character creation menu to change everything to any build you want. Again, it feels that the choices themselves are irrelevant.

This was well made and polished, but I couldn't find the interest to continue after playing for quite a while. The problem with making a fantasy-style adventure game in an alternative setting of this kind is that it just doesn't feel like a good fit, at least not to me. The humour and setting just seemed like a bunch of weird stuff, and did not feel like an immersive game world at any time.

CRPG. Spiritual successor to Planescape. This game was...just okay. Needed to be more. More interesting, deeper. But it was fine to play, just not as much as hoped for.

I just can't get immersed. The game really tried hard but it's like reading a book that makes no sense.

Pretentious. Self-indulgent. Boring. Nothing like Planescape - Torment.

As a stand alone game it's ok. I can't recommend it as a torment 2 game. I played more than 15 minutes. I played about two and a half hours. I loved the original Torment. This game is nothing like it. Every thing that makes an rpg good is lacking. No combat, no crypts, dungeons, camps, buildings, cities, houses, forests, sewers, streets, fields, castles, mansions, ect,ect. Empty game. Their is simply nothing fun to do. Several hours in and the best thing so far is "find a slave girl". Their is nothing to buy, no money to buy it with, no combat, no adventuring, and the only exploring you do is to go from one npc to another and read a bunch of dialogue. The only place to sleep wants half of my money. You cant heal. This game really has nothing to offer me. I might as well read a book because i would get more action out of that. How did this game get good ratings. If by some chance it takes ten hours or so for the game to get good that's too long. Boring, boring, boring dialogue driven game. I cant even begin to express how disappointed i am with the supposed sequel to my beloved Torment.

Probably my favorite CRPG before Disco Elysium. I wasn't familiar with Numenéra, which is an absolutely formidable world to explore. Be ready to read a loooooooooooooot of text, but good text. At some point I thought to myself "damn I wish this was a third person high budget game and I could look at crazy good 3D models of what is being described in the dialogues", and I realized it would have made all the magic go away. Text is evocative without being a strain. That's how good the writing is. All in all, it's an excellent follow-up to Planescape, which was "the worst CRPG in the coolest world with the best story", but this time combat is actually interesting. I have played only one run and have not experimented on the malleability of the story, but it certainly looks quite fluid. (BG3 has released since then, yes, but I'm not a fan of DnD) There's a crazy good idea in this game: it's a micro-spoiler of a key feature that you will be explained 30 minutes into playing. Your character is immortal. Death is NOT a failstate, and does not load a save. Death in combat - or elsewhere - is your character taking a nap, and things happen without them being there. "Failure" yields extremely interesting results (or frustrating depending on where you're at mentally). I died in pretty much every important situation where I had to survive the fight, and that's both hilarious and super interesting. Also Chris Avellone is a piece of crap but games aren't made by a single person.

The concept of a "spiritual successor" sounded like BS to me, but I have to admit that after playing this game for the first 10 hours or so, I started to see it. This is material of similar complexity to Planescape: Torment. It's thematically comparable without at any point seeming like a rehash. The writing is at a similar level of quality, Gameplay is less fiddly, as one would expect in relatively modern times, but still fiddly. I still think isometric games suck, isometric being the second worst perspective after fixed-camera (which means randomly placed uncontrollable camera), but the story and worldbuilding made it worth suffering through that aspect. As a side benefit, this game made me more exhausted after each play session than any other game I can remember, maybe because of how precisely you have to do a lot of things in order (and all that reading on a computer screen). I mean, it turned out I had covid during a bunch of it, but still, I'm pretty sure it was the game that was making me tired.

It's not Planescape: Torment, but by any means, this is not a bad game. Those who love narrative driven RPGs should give it a chance.