Being a fan of this dev team and Planescape, I kickstarted Torment: Tides of Numenera with excitement but tapered expectations. When Torment initially released into Early Access, my excitement grew. The writing was good, the characters were intriguing, and skill checks felt like they'd deliver a legitimate roleplaying experience. After finishing the game, I can't say it was bad game per say. But I'm definitely disappointed, and I definitely would suggest a slew of other RPGs ahead of this one. So what went wrong between Early Access and release?

For one, combat never evolved into a strategically challenging system. Several abilities are completely useless, the encounters were generally all uninspired, and before long you'll want to avoid combat purely because of how mundane it all is. It feels like the team started with a good system and then ran out of time to finish it (a pattern you will see repeated in this review).

Combat might be forgiveable if the skill check system were properly balanced, but mid way through the game I was easily passing every check. Torment bills itself as a game where players can embrace their own mistakes. I wouldn't really know because I was flying by without any fear of what might happen on a failed check. Without the fear of failure from combat or roleplaying, all sense of overcoming adversity went out the window.

The characters are generally well written but aren't fully fleshed out. I enjoyed talking with Callistege, Erritis, and Matkina as well as their occasional interactions with one another. Both the dialogue and descriptions were novel-esque, but the game lacked a strong sense of direction. The story starts with a very promising antagonistic introduction but fails to maintain interest during the 20 hour experience. Music/sound was OK but nothing to write home about.

The combat, skill checks, roleplaying, characters, story, and progression options all show tons of promise. Unfortunately, nto a single one of those aspects feel fully realized. For that, I just can't recommend picking this up.

PS:T remains one of my top 5 all time favorite games. I reviewied it many years ago on GamesDomain. So of course I backed this game. I've been playing RPGs since the original Wizardry. I watched a couple of videos but avoided playing the demo because I wanted the entire experience at once. I was truly excited to play this one.

And...meh.

If there was a "meh" button on Steam, this game would be the poster child for it. The first problem the game encounters are the expectations. When you name your game the same as one of the most beloved RPG of all time you're setting the bar quite high. There's no way for an experienced PS:T player to play this and not think of the original. It doesn't deserve the name Torment so I'll refer to it as Tides.

Normally I'd talk about the graphics, the sounds, the quests, the bugs, the pros and cons of the game. That's my normal MO. But I can't do it in this case. So let me tell you why it finally got a thumbs down from me.

Sure it's linear - but so was Torment.
Sure there are bugs (like the combat freeze bug - inexcusable) but those will get patched out.
Sure the graphics can get muddled. But those are acceptable.
Sure there are exceptionally annoying sequences (not really combat) in the game that if you don't have the correct build you will struggle to get through.

Nope, those aren't the problem.

The game commits the cardinal sin of being unmemorable. How? Let me provide a few examples.

The NPCs are all fairly dull. People still remember Morte, Annah, Fall-From-Grace, Dak'kon and Ingus. I haven't played that game in 10 years and can rattle off the characters. I finished Tides a week ago and can't remember one character name. I guess you could chalk that up as a Senior Moment but the characters aren't even worth the time to talk to. Plus there are some very weak NPCs that you simply should avoid. There was no attachment to any of them by the end of the game and that's a darn shame. I HAD to pull Morte out of that pile of skulls 15 years ago. There was no such urgency or attachment in Tides.

Remember the Morgue? Farods? The Upper Ward? Curst? Torment had some great set areas each with a different feel. In fact, if you go look at the screenshots of the upcoming remastered version the areas look awesome. Tides? There's one - the Bloom - and that's about it. The main town just seems like a collection of different ideas with no coherency at all. Other areas aren't memorable at all. Like the NPCs, the world isn't very interesting. Go to the Tides website - or better yet, just Google - the Tides wallpapers. Those captured the imagination. The actual set designs were so flat and dull as compared to those it's mind boggling how poorly executed the art design is.

But the worst, most cardinal sin is the writing. It's writing for writing's sake. It's like a student trying to pad their essay to get to the magical 1,000 word count. Much like this review, it just goes on and on and says nothing new. You started off in Torment with some fairly extensive dialog but it wasn't overwhelming. Only later - as you got more engrossed into the world - did it explain more and more to you. Torment built up the world, word by word, until you were fully engrossed. Tides just spews dialog at the player without ever really taking the time to set everything up. Thus it has little meaning and no emotional impact.

Now next week a remastered version of Torment will be released. You can get the existing game for half the price of this one and it's a far, far superior product. Tyranny, another RPG recently released, is a superior product. Now maybe they'll create an enhanced edition with new NPCs, areas and dialog that makes Tides into something more. But until that happens, I'd say you have better options for your money.

EDIT: Revised significantly.

I backed the Kickstarter campaign early on, and have been looking forward to Torment: Tides of Numenara for years. And, having played it for several hours, I have to say I'm quite disappointed.

Generally speaking, the game designers seem to have neglected game mechanics to concentrate on narrative. That would have been a credible tradeoff -- but frankly, the storytelling isn't very good.

After nine hours of play, I realized that I don't care about the protagonist or his predicament, I don't care about the antagonist, and I don't care about the protagonist's companions. Each has a narrative; none has a personality.

If you've played table-top role-playing games much, or online role-playing, you're likely to have met an enthusiastic but inexperienced player who has written out an elaborate back story, and then reads it out at the first opportunity. But no matter how well-written that backstory is in itself, it's a static element, and not an interaction that builds a relation between characters in a dynamic story. The NPCs in the game are like this: all static backstory, with little interactivity.

The game opens with a classic setup: the protagonist has no memory, and is in a crisis. This is a classic precisely because it forges a bond between player and character, based on their common interest in getting answers to the obvious questions. But, that crisis is quickly resolved, and immediately after, you get the basic answers to your questions, and several strong hints that completing the main quest really isn't in your best interests at all. All the virtues of this classic storytelling opening are quickly abandoned, and you're left with only an arbitrary main quest that the protagonist has no real motivation to pursue.

It doesn't seem to get any better after that. Everything confirms that initial impression; nothing hints at an alternate interpretation. The companions are flat and dull, and offer no additional motivation.

In general, the writing feels like a compilation of creative writing class exercises with no organic connection between them.

It concerns me that whether TTON is remembered as a success or a failure, it will be regarded as such for the wrong reason. Many reviewers, professional or amateur, seem to accept the idea that TTON is about elevating writing over gameplay, so that if it's a failure, it's because players want only hack-and-slash power fantasies, and if it's a success, it's because this is the kind of writing we like. But in my opinion, it's a failure, precisely because it fails in its primary emphasis, as an interactive story.

The real tragedy is that many of us supported this project because we saw an opportunity to send the game industry a message that we want intelligent, mature interactive stories, and we were willing to provide all the resources needed to make them. That opportunity was squandered.

Bottom line: deserves its mixed rating. Full disclosure: I was a backer. I was hopeful but development took far too long for what was delivered. Do not bother with the DLC, but that almost goes without saying given what you get for your money.

There's a lot to like about this game. It's rather unique in its setting, gameplay, lore, etc. There are interesting side-quests and the companions are diverse in their personalities and backstory. You might even end up caring for one or two. Arguably, it takes you to one of the most horrifying places I've ever seen in a video game: the Bloom. One place I'll never forget. Stuff of nightmares. But that's not enough to save it.

It's actually a small game in terms of environment size, even if these are imaginative. There's a lot of writing but the sheer quantity of it weighs down any possibility of outstanding quality. You get the impression most of the (long) development time was spent ensuring it actually worked, rather than creating something incredible. And it's not incredible. The idea that you should spend double your money for digital extras is simply laughable. So its main drawcard: reactive, narrative storytelling, falls flat. Novelty alone doesn't make a good game. By the end, moreover, I was completely overpowered. I absolutely butchered what should have been some of the toughest opponents in the universe. Without spoiling much, there are decisions that actually make things harder if you choose accordingly. I did as much and still showboated. I didn't even use all that many disposable items either, some of which are quite powerful. You get the picture. Gameplay is unchallenging, for the most part, and the writing is merely competent, not memorable. To top it all off, vast amounts of promised content were cut. In that sense it's partially unfinished.

I finished the game but I feel no need to replay it. That's rather astounding considering the work that's gone into the writing. It's also telling. I can't recommend it.

I was enjoying the game, until I encountered a game braking bug the prevented me from continuing the quest and the game.

I found that this had been reported on the official forums and steam forums in January 2017, it is now December 2017 with no fix. Developer recommendations are... reload saves from before the bug and keep trying that area in the hope it works or restart the game. They have now moved on to other things and will not be fixing this. Errors at release are one thing, leaving a game this broken for over a year is terrible.

Game could be fun but has bugs that make it literally unplayable unless you are prepared to repeat the game multiple times in the hope, this time, it could maybe work.

Torment: Tides of Numenera is an awesome piece of fiction, but it's not a good game.

Some context -- Planescape: Torment is probably my favoite CRPG of all time, and I gladly backed Numenera on Kickstarter a few years ago. I'm happy to say that the writing in Numenera easily rivals that of Planescape, and I have enjoyed every line of prose.

The main problem, for me, is that there is very little "game" here. Unlike Planescape -- which, while it was not generally lauded for its combat, at least had "dungeons" in the classic roleplaying sense -- Numenera has very little in the way of combat, at least if you play an intelligent, dialogue-focused character.

While this could make for an interesting roleplaying game if it had other gameplay mechanics -- perhaps simulation or management aspects -- in Numenera, it means that the game amounts to little more than branching dialog trees with some interesting choices to make. This was relatively enjoyable for the first ten hours or so of the game, but after twenty hours I have had a grand total of two fights. I would say I wished for more, but the actual gameplay for these turn based combats is simply terrible. Player combat abilities are boring, there is nothing of tactical interest, and in general they are a total slog.

In some ways, Numenera is the opposite of Pillars of Eternity, which I found to have at least passable encounters, but vapid writing that left me totally uninterested in continuing to play.

If you're looking for a great RPG that brings back some of the magic of 90's RPGs, I'd recommend Divinity: Original Sin and its sequel which are quite likely the best RPGs of their generation. Sadly, Torment: Tides of Numenera is not.

My hours represent finished gameplay as a high intelligence character with a focus on dialogue. I recommended it before but now I finally understand the negative reviews. Here are the pros & cons IMO:
if you don't wanna read it all ...tl;dr - developers half-a$$ed the game: a lot of missing content and abrupt ending with no cutscenes.

PROS:
- Brilliant writing, intriguing character dialogue and world lore.
- It's something separate to the original Planescape, a homage instead of a carbon copy.
- Appealing to newcomers of the CRPG genre (easier than most classic CRPG)
- No meta builds or specific interactions you need to play to progress (or you're doomed)
- Beautiful sci-fi environmental design, areas are unique and grotesque
- Good looking character models.
- Building characters for combat is SO EASY compared to other CRPG.
- Interesting cypher system that aids combat and boosts stats

NEUTRAL:
- Combat is turn-based, not hard or broken at all. Very simple and you can make your character & companions invincible without the need for guides.
- You cannot beat the game solely on dialogue, some fights are mandatory. However final boss confrontation can be beat with dialogue.

CONS:
- $4.2 million dollar budget, and many missing kickstarter promises such as LONGER STORY, another MAIN CITY HUB - Oasis of Mra Jolios, Crafting... which could have ultimately made the game a masterpiece.
- Only ONE CUTSCENE IN THE BEGINNING!
- The Tides (character good/bad alignment system) does nothing for the game. Very shallow.
- All character animations are....missing? All they do is stand still with a short looping animation and run around. As a modern CRPG with a high budget I expect AT LEAST some hand/arm movement while speaking to them.
- This is a science fiction game and I only saw 1 alien animal species that I can kind of interact with. And 1-2 intelligent alien species. Seriously what.
- TOO MANY EVENTS happen OFF-SCREEN and ON TEXT!!! Lazy!
- 2nd main city hub is underwhelming, small and you spend a short amount of time there.
- Playing a GOOD character ultimately gimps you. Being mean has no consequences but rewards you with more money and items.
- NO FACTION REPUTATION! Seriously do the cultists hate me or like me? I treat them like shet, scare them off and they still welcome me? Even top-down ARPGs have faction reputation!
- I got the good ending which brought the story nicely together HOWEVER IT WAS FAR TOO FAST. I was expecting at least a beautiful CUTSCENE BUT THERE IS NOTHING! ABSOLUTELY NOTHING.

Relatively good game but the missing features make it far from of a masterpiece. I would have given this a recommended if it weren't for the disgustingly abrupt ending. Proceed with caution.

Let me preface this by saying that I'm really hoping that in the future I can change this review to recommended. It does a lot of stuff well: cool world, cool atmosphere, well-voiced and flesh out companions, interested skill and character development, and a focus on non-violent gameplay.

That said, there are a lot of bugs, including some quest-breaking ones that will really kill your immersion and block off gameplay options. For a game that spent 4 years in development, went through an extensive public beta, and is 2 months out from launch, this is pretty egregious to me. I can't recommend that anyone plays this game until those bugs are fixed, because they're really infuriating.

Torment really should have been released as a collection of short stories instead of a game. Some minor narrative/mechanics spoilers for the first couple of hours of the game in here I guess?

The biggest problem with Torment is that you just don't do anything in it. This isn't a game about making decisions, it's a theme park ride where you walk around in circles and are told about the plot and the cast. This would be fine and I have no problem with linear games, but the game presents itself constantly as a game about making decisions. However every quest has you playing messenger or Fedex, and... that's pretty much the whole game? You really don't make decisions with meaningful consequences or have any challenges presented to you. A few resolutions cause minor NPCs to disappear/leave, but it's always at the point where those NPCs will never say anything new ever again, so it just doesn't matter. Every quest, conversation or situation has a very clear 'right' option and some very clear wrong options. The wrong options either just require you to try again and pick the correct option, or it leads to a fight instead. Fighting is effectively always presented as a punishment in this manner for making the wrong choice, and too often a hostile situation is disarmed with a surprisingly easy and simple one sentence conversation check.

It feels like when making this game they didn't really know what they wanted. After the intro sequence you're presented with character creation. The game overloads you with stats, classes, abilities, levels, specialisations, numbers, numbers, numbers. None of these have any context for what they mean, and they're so abstract from genre convention that this is a big problem. This is the setup of what feels like it was meant to be a meaty combat-focused actiony RPG. One of the 3 classes specialises in weapons as an example, and almost all abilities for all classes are only usable in combat. Then you almost never have combat, and when you do it feels like a random encounter instead of a meaningful resolution. In the 3 whole fights I had during 9 hours of play I didn't face a single named character - they were all mooks. 2 of these fights I resolved without attacking once, and 1 I resolved without even moving or taking actions. The one fight I actually had to engage the enemy was just a damage/healing race until I won, so it really wasn't satisfying either.

The writing in Torment: Numenara is generally pretty interesting, but there's so much telling and almost no showing. In Planescape: Torment you start the game waking up on your own deathbed, with no idea how or why. You're not given context for it, and the only character around you acts as if this is the most natural thing in the world ever. This gave me an immediately intriguing mystery that was directly related to my character, and made me want to find out more. Conversely in Numenara you are fully witness to what appears to be your own death, then you wake up in a completely abstract and alien pocket dimension, get presented a series of moral and/or philosophical questions by floating magical lights, then get given a character creation screen. This was a bizarre setup that didn't invest me in my character or situation, felt entirely disconnected from reality (and, it turns out, was), and was frankly boring. It's a very dry wordy experience full of choices where nothing you say or do matters and you have no agency. Eventually you wake up and have the same not dying mystery as Planescape and.. oh. You're immediately told about your regeneration ability, who you are, how you died, what you need to do, and why you're where you are. You're not even given a chance to speculate for yourself before everything is just told to you directly.

All conversations follow this "let me tell you everything" convention too. These almost always consist of a whole bunch of exhaustive but not exclusive questions, and the occasional (easy) skill check for more information. For every single one of these - without exception - my only input was to exhaust each dialogue option and sometimes pick the least-♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ response. After you select an option it's replaced with "let me ask you x again", which makes everyone feel like a robot. Every character is more than happy to repeat the same conversations, questions, and answer over and over. This would have been alright if I was reading a book, but this isn't a book. These are meant to be characters, but they're effectively just walking encyclopaedias. One of the characters in Planescape: Torment is literally an encyclopaedia too, and they're still more nuanced, interesting, and way more enjoyable than everyone here.

There's a massive deus ex machina mechanism in this game where you solve all problems by just remembering the solution. You don't have to work it out, or investigate an area, or solve a puzzle, or hunt for clues, or win a fight, or really do anything interactive. You just click the 'recall memory' option, click the skill check, pass the skill check or reload if you don't, get a memory of the past, and voila you have the answer. Great. That's an incredibly interesting plot device in principle, but it's boring when it's as crazily overused as it is in Torment. Your past memories seem to know EVERYTHING. This mechanic really should have been saved for some huge narrative events with potentially world-changing consequences, but in Torment you use it to find where you left your house keys, or where a book is hidden, or how to activate an incredibly ancient and seemingly alien machine from a previous era. It's bafflingly overused. You use it all the time, every few minutes. It trivialises every encounter and mystery.

Also you can read everyone's minds and immediately find out what secrets they are hiding, removing all tension or intrigue from any encounter without a memory to recall. However this always feels like I'm reading the game design documents, rather than finding out in character. As a minor spoilery example: there's a place early on where someone happily tells you - a complete stranger - that they have a spy in their organisation. The spy is literally standing 10 feet away, and your basic start of game mind reading ability will automatically tell you this 30 seconds later. What can you do with this information? Nothing. Your character doesn't even register they know this at all - you can even ask to receive this information as part of an unrelated quest reward later, despite you already knowing it. The only time you can ever act on mind-read information is when you cannot read someone's mind. And the only resolution to that is to immediately and directly ask someone, to their face, why you can't read their mind! Nobody ever minds this question and it never has a negative consequence! It's crazy.

I'm a big fan of letting players discover things on their own, letting them intuit people's motivations, resolving conflicts without necessarily knowing everyone's opinions or who was right/wrong, not telling you if you made the right choice as part of a decision etc. Torment does none of this. It's incredibly frustrating, because almost every plot setup is interesting too, and with better writers and/or a different media format could have been vastly improved. If this was a collection of short stories I would have loved reading through it.

I've heard after 15 or so hours all the early game stuff becomes crazy revelatory and meaningful, but I'm confident I already know everything about my character within the first hour. No late-game curtain pulling will change that the first 10-15 hours (at least) is just boring, nothing is going to make combat fun. Also a year after release and there's still a bunch of bugs that cause companions and quests to not progress properly.

My advice is to just read a plot synopsis of the main story and the companions. You'll get the full experience without having to sit through 15-20 hours of padding.

What does one promise matter? Deception.

A tragic tale of modern CRPG where all the dreams about a true successor of the greatest CRPG of all time shattered like broken glass. Torment: Tides of Numenera has everything going for it to be the definitive modern CRPG to remind people that this genre doesn't lack behemoths. And what a disappointment it is, 4 years in development, having collaboration from Mask of the Betrayer's original designers, PS:T's Colin McComb and Chris Avellone, over 4 million dollars funded on Kickstarter, comes a video game proved that inXile Entertainment forgot what made PS:T a true masterpiece.

For a game that boasted itself as "having more words than Bible", T:ToN surprisingly has very few memorable moments and characters, its writing relies on unnecessarily long and flowery descriptions that seems to try too hard to shout "look at me, appreciate all these Pulitzer-inspired writing prompts" to readers. There's no fault in bringing a lot of text in CRPG, because it's one of the definitive features of the genre, but the problem is T:ToN has very few interesting things to say, and one thing won't get more interesting no matter how you keep describing it. It's a wordy game for the sake of being wordy, it sometimes feels like a very long pretentious short book that was made for people who don't have a huge vocabulary. As someone whose native language isn't English, I can read the translated version of Witcher saga from Andrej Sapkowski which has arguably equal amount of vocab but way more comprehensive than T:ToN.

You have a lot of questions, NPCs have a lot of answers and descriptions, but only a few of them is worth listening to. The story itself doesn't have any real climax or tension, one plot twist revealed near the end of act 2 is way too predictable, none of the companions is memorable or relatable in any mean except Shin, and the story only gets somewhat interesting when you reach The Bloom. It's 2017 and we're comparing role-playing games through words count? Why is the successor of Planescape: Torment is more boring, forgettable and lack any suspense when compared to Tyranny - a side project from Obsidian? Morte blew all of the companions in this game out of the water which is incredibly stupid because important character arcs is the trend of writing in modern video game yet T:ToN failed short in it. It's too proud of its pretentous messages and forgot that there are confusing readers being left behind in its mess of a narrative, a dumbfounded hollow of writing in CRPG that missed all the marks, lacked any emotion and didn't give us anything worth remembering.

Everything else about Torment: Tides of Numenera screams lack of professional game design. The UI is stupidly designed, NPCs don't have portraits (yet several important ones have it in battles?), available portraits span from terrible to horrible, crisis has a decent concept yet in reality, is tedious because inXile has no idea how to make compelling combat sections, so they throw roaming/respawning/a huge number of enemies into your way as obstacle. Effort mechanic leans to Intellect skill checks too much, there's no reason not to play Nano unless you tend to fight your way (which is not a great idea since all battles in this game are crap) or you want to cripple yourself. The Tides' impact is incredibly hard to notice. The Cyphers span from being completely useless to overpowered. Mark Morgan's 50-track OST doesn't have any remotely memorable tune. The Meres get old quick with more and more overexposition.

Torment: Tides of Numenera was supposed to be the "dream game" for CRPG followers, instead, it's a game where hipsters try to pluck through the narrative then come back and ♥♥♥♥♥ slap people "because you don't like reading in video games". T:ToN is a badly made video game and a mediocre book with millions of unheard words that better stayed silent.