inExile Entertainment has done a commendable job of bringing the Monte Cook’s tabletop setting to life through a dizzying amount of in-game writing. There’s a notable amount of care put into bringing each location, character, and one-off line of dialogue to life. The locations that the Last Castoff and companions travel to are evocative, ranging from a hidden sanctuary that houses many of the world’s remaining Castoffs to a fleshy underworld, called The Bloom, that shifts and groans as it expands and devours anyone who runs afoul of its mysterious wishes. It’s a vision of Earth one billion years in the future a dreamy mix of fantastic architecture and geographic formations layered upon crumbled kingdoms and toppled cities.
The Ninth World stands upon the remnants of forgotten civilizations.
So, while I can’t recommend Tides of Numenera to anyone looking for satisfying combat, I can praise its world-building and narrative turns. Violence is rarely the only - or the best - solution too. Much like Planescape: Torment, its a narrative-heavy game, where your interactions with other people and the decisions you take matter a lot more than cleaving your foes apart. For those who prefer their brain over brawn, Torment excels at making multiple playstyles feel both viable and worthwhile. Torment: Tides of Numenera follows in the footsteps of its venerable predecessor. Even battles against the game’s ethereal Big Bad, a tendrilled creature called The Sorrow who hunts down the Changing God and his Castoffs with relentless fury, had multiple paths to completing the encounter. If you pay close attention to your environment, there’s a good chance that an alternate solution to the situation is hiding nearby. Each Crisis is more of a turn-based puzzle than an outright melee. Throughout my twenty-some hour journey through Numenera, I never hit a point where I had slice through my foes just to make progress. Time after time, I was surprised by the different choices and moments of opportunity that presented themselves during my quest.Įven if you wind up in a combat encounter (or a Crisis as they’re called in-game), fighting is rarely (if ever) your only option. Even though the current inhabitants live at about a Medieval level of technology, the leftover remnants of these advanced societies lie all around them. Civilizations have risen and fallen on Earth. You can smash a door open or intimidate an imposing enemy with enough Might as easily as you can tap into the latent memories of a long-dead hero with the right amount of Willpower. The Numenera tabletop role-playing game and the Torment: Tides of Numenera video game are set a billion years in the future. Regardless of what kind of character your Last Castoff winds up becoming, it’s inevitable that you’re going to have to pull from your skill pools – either Might, Speed, or Willpower – to overcome challenges. Skill checks are a big part of Torment: Tides of Numenera.
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