Torment: Tides of Numenera Review

This was never going to be an easy ride for the team at inXile. But they brought it upon themselves. One cannot claim to stand beside a beloved niche RPG and expect to come away scratch-free.

I don’t know if Planescape: Torment was, objectively, all that great. It doesn’t matter. It’s been over ten years since I last played it. As with all good games, the warm glow of nostalgia erased flaws and polished successes.

InXile did their game a disservice by presenting it as Planescape’s spiritual successor. You can compare favorably to a game as it existed in the past, but rarely to people’s memories of it.

And Tides (let’s stick with this moniker) tries hard. In fact, it often veers away from homage and into the territory of imitation.

“Remember that cool thing about Planescape? Look! Look! I have it too — but slightly different. Just a little bit. *wink wink nod nod*” is what the game would say every so often, if it could speak. At times, it feels insecure of being able to live up to its heritage.

Which is a pity, as it actually does a good job of exploring similar themes in its narrative. It could drop all the “me too!” filler and be a less pandering experience for it.

A Personal Narrative

Like its predecessor, Tides is a story about a person looking for answers about his (or her) existence. It’s a compelling narrative. It soon pulls you into unravelling the mystery behind an ages-old conflict. One between a living God and the supernatural force that hunts him and his progeny.

I’m not going to pull up comparisons with the original Torment often. I’ve covered that in the previous section. But this is one of the few I need to make.

Torment’s Nameless One was one of the most interesting characters in the game. He was a hulking, battle-scarred, dreadlocked and tattooed freak of a man, with a menacing look to him. He was very atypical for a video game protagonist.

Tides’ Last Castoff, in comparison, is a bland, androgynous character. There is a decent narrative justification for this. But it doesn’t make up for the lack of interest it instills in the player.

Yet, the central mystery he chases as the game progresses is compelling all the way through. It was the main reason that pulled me to see the game to its finale. If you’re used to fantasy narratives, you’ll probably have figured out a good chunk of it by the end. But it holds the potential to surprise.

I can’t say the same about all the parallel narratives that revolve around it. Their purpose is to build the world and setting in your mind. You’ll meet characters that will tell you tales about fantastic experiences in the world . There’s a problem here. These will usually be a lot more interesting than your own adventures and the places they take you to.

And the mixed writing doesn’t help. It reeks of “too many cooks in the kitchen”. Some pieces are beautifuly delivered. Others are a hodgepodge mix of badly-constructed metaphor and overuse of synesthesia. Clear indicators of too many inflated writer egos on the team.

I know what I’m talking about — I’m one of those, too. That’s why editors exist — to keep us in check. Tides seems to have had too many writers and too few editors. It could stand to be a bit less Lovecraft and a lot more Hemmingway.

Not Better With Friends

The companion characters also fall a bit flat — with one notable exception. The writing is good enough. The problem has more to do with delivery.

They rarely speak, but when they do, they unload half a novel’s worth of exposition onto you. “Hi, pleased to meet you. Let me tell you about my goals and fears, all at once, and then I’ll spend the next five hours in abject silence.”

Their personal quests also vary from the interesting to the bland. Let’s take lovable rogue Tybir as an example. He has some spectacularly charismatic interjections during some side-quests. But his own tale, a fearful search for a lost lover, ends up falling flat. It had the potential to be emotionally engaging, but the buildup wasn’t there.

Most importantly, you never feel particularly invested into helping your companions. The stuff they need always happens to come across your path. The full extent of your effort and commitment to their cause? To take the time to go through some dialogue.

Rhyn is the companion that bucks this trend. Helping her out places considerable mechanical stress on you, with no obvious payoff. I’m not going to spoil what is the best part of this game. Let’s say that Rhyn is the closest Tides ever comes to exploring the themes of its forebear, and leave it at that.

Choose Your Own Adventure

The non-combat RPG mechanics in Tides are, for the most part, irrelevant. You use three main stats — Might, Speed, Intellect — to pass skill checks in relevant disciplines. These will enable you to carry out actions or influence people during conversations.

So far, so good. The trouble is that it’s effortless to develop your party in way that make you succeed every time. I managed it without even trying. Once, when I purposely wanted to fail at a task, it was actually hard to do so!

This from a game that tells you that failing often brings interesting consequences. I wouldn’t know. I couldn’t fail if I tried.

This turns what should be a RPG challenge into something more akin to RPG storytelling. It’s more about choosing how you WANT to solve a situation, rather than choosing how you CAN solve a situation.

This mechanical sterility plus the wordiness of the game make Tides more like a visual novel. Not a bad thing, provided you didn’t come looking for a stats-driven RPG challenge.

To its credit, Tides does provide you with a good latitude of options on how to solve most quests. A lot even feels like an adventure game. You’re often trying to track down a specific item to use to help a certain character. These are fetch-quests, but minimal signposting makes them feel like puzzles. On the rare occasion where you can’t work out something in the way you've imagined, you feel let down. This, to me, is a good sign that the game handles it well most of the times.

Not a Street Fighting Man

I’ll own to not being the best person to talk about the combat. I’ve tried to avoid it as much as possible, and to Tides’ credit, succeeded.

During my 31-hour play-through, I’m almost certain I’ve had to fight on less than 10 occasions. Of these, I cleared less than a handful by killing all opponents.

The game does put you into combat scenarios often enough. But you can skip most of them by interacting with thingies / talking to the right person. Hardly mind blowing stuff, but it’s nice to have the option.

The combat I did partake on was rather dull. It’s standard, up-to-four-party-members-vs-several-enemies turn-based fare. There aren’t a lot of combat skills available. And of the ones that are, you’ll pick one or two favorites that’ll take you through most of the game.

Then there are the one-off usable items, the “cyphers”, part of the titular Numenera. These are rather powerful unique items. If you’re anything like me, you’ll save them in your backpack so you can unleash them on the final stretch of the game.

And when there are a lot of enemies taking their turn, combat turns into a slog. The AI takes just enough time not to be unbearable, but certainly annoying. The spell and ability visuals are also rather bland.

In fact, the visuals as a whole are very generic, from character models to scenery. The late game areas are more lavish in their presentation. But everything leading up to them feels unimaginative.

This is where I need to bring up the original Torment again. The graphics might not have aged well, but the artistry is still a far cry from the blandness of its successor.

A Tale Well Told

So far, it might look like I’m being very negative. I don’t want you to leave with that impression. Let’s try running a quick thought experiment.

Lets imagine for a moment that this was a game launched in a parallel dimension. A game crafted by an indie team named Xelin and their leader Faran Byrgo. It’s called Tides of Numenera, and privately funded with no public promises to keep.

While it wouldn’t set my world on fire, it would be a solid thumbs up and put the developer on my short “to watch” list.

For all the failings I’ve described above, I’ve enjoyed the tale it spun. I’ve enjoyed the visual-novel-meets-RPG structure. The world is strange and vibrant, even if the game keeps most of it in the periphery of the adventure.

But this is not that parallel universe. I still enjoyed it, and still recommend the game. Yet, Torment: Tides of Numenera languishes in the shadow of its predecessor. Much like the Last Castoff spends most of the game under his God-Creator’s shadow.

Which makes the game a rather self-referential, self-aware piece of commentary by inXile.