btw is everyone in the inxile writing team a walking stereotype? Just saw callistege's writer on cmcc twitter and
check her twitter for extra lulz
I love how the former completely explains the latter. Total ignorance is bliss.
If you are a Nano, you should absolutely take Scan Thoughts. There's literally over 1500 extra lines of text just by having that one ability.
what the fuck, and people thought the checks in PoE were lopsided
Torment: Tides of Numenera review
Planescapism.
Smart and commendably weird, InXile's homage to Planescape Torment doesn't exceed its inspiration but certainly does it proud.
By Richard Cobbett Published 28/02/2017 Version tested PC
Kickstarter-fuelled nostalgia or not, it takes more than a little self-confidence to name your game after one of the smartest, most beloved, most respected RPGs ever made. That's not a percussion heavy soundtrack you're hearing in Not Planescape Torment: Numenera, just the clanking of its giant brass balls. And yet somehow, against the odds, inXile does it proud. To be clear, Planescape remains by far the superior Torment, but Numenera is as close as anyone's gotten to not just recreating what it did, but the experience of discovering it.
Both games have their roots in pen-and-paper universes, though as with Planescape, it actually helps not to know much about the world so that you can learn along with the main character. You're not an immortal amnesiac this time, but rather the 'Last Castoff' - in brief, there's an entity called the Changing God who likes building himself new bodies every decade or so, then just dumping the old one. That's you this time, though like your brothers and sisters, you retain your consciousness, and are a relatively common sight in the world.
Enough options for you? There's no Journal to remember what everyone's said, unfortunately, though key characters will repeat themselves as often as you like.
It's a fantastic world, too. Numenera is SF rather than fantasy, set on top of eight civilisations' worth of toys and wreckage that range from familiar robots to full-on demonstrations of Clarke's Third Law that any sufficiently advanced technology can be combined with a silly hat to make its user look like a wizard. It's a multicolour world of strange floating doohickies and spinning triangles and particle fountains and ancient clocks the size of buildings, and honestly a real breath of fresh air after the far more traditional settings of recent RPGs like Pillars of Eternity and Tyranny and even The Witcher 3.
It's not just enjoyable for letting the artists play with the full colour palette, though - it's a great setting for quests and stories. One of my favourites from early on involves the 'Levies'. Like all the best RPG quests, this one is both an assignment and a way of learning about the world in a more active way than just being told the lore. The basic concept is that the first area, Sagus Cliffs, is protected by golem style creatures called Levies, powered by a year of life donated by new citizens. One however has gone horribly wrong and is perpetually in tears. It turns out that its donor was a petty criminal who was planning a big heist that would have ended in tragedy. Instead, after becoming a citizen, he shaped up. However, his Levy remains a product of that year that never happened, complete with all the terrible memories and guilt. Your task is to persuade his creator to gift him a better one.
This approach as much as anything is what Numenera takes from Planescape Torment. There's more overt things, like shout-outs to a past castoff called 'Adahn', villains called the Sorrow that look exactly like the Shadows, and the unnamed main character not usually being able to die, albeit mostly for plot convenience rather than anything really justified in story. However, the interesting parts are invariably the moments it finds more philosophical takes on quests, to wrap the familiar in strange and twisted new imagery, and build a bigger picture of the world through smaller, seemingly isolated nuggets of plot and character.
You do notice the lack of combat after a while. Sections of Sagus Cliffs are supposed to be dangerous, but it's hard to feel that when walking with impunity.
Where it stumbles, it's typically because very few of these details feel as personal as The Nameless One's slow realisation that he's basically behind every scrap of pain he encounters. The Last Castoff isn't completely disconnected from past actions, obviously, but is a big step away from being personally responsible for anything, in a story that often feels afraid to get truly dark, and whose philosophy leans more towards long speeches and debates than the perfect simplicity of Planescape's central question "What can change the nature of a man?" or Mebbeth's exquisite deconstruction of classic RPG fetch quests.
Again though, we're talking about a stone-cold RPG classic here. Working on the same levels is already more than most even attempt, and falling a bit short is nothing to be ashamed of - even if it's impossible to overlook that 'Tides of Numenera' is the real title here, and 'Torment' less a summary of the plot than a general statement of design intent.
It's also worth noting that a lot of the above is mostly an issue in the first couple of thirds of the game, with the third - a genuinely alien place called the Bloom - finally showing real teeth. I'm glad the whole game's not set there, as I did enjoy the sunlight and lighter touch of the Cliffs, but I would have liked more of its lingering menace and threat to kick in a bit earlier, when the Last Castoff doesn't face a whole lot except socially awkward "Hey, haven't we met?" conversations and hunting for the plot in a maze of side-quests.
Mostly, questing is standard issue fare, with a bit more focus on picking text-based options to get things done, and occasional breaks into full-on interactive fiction when exploring the past. The most dramatic break from the norm is what Numenera calls its 'Crisis' system, and it really is a refreshing way of handling more active encounters and retaining player choice.
The Bloom is easily the best location. It's as dark as Sigil, operates on brutally alien morality, and feels oppressive to explore even when there's little going on.
The idea is simple. There's almost no combat in the game, and none of it is the usual ambient goons just standing around, or NPCs going from "Hail, friend!" to "WE MUST FIGHT TO THE DEATH!" at the slightest nudge or insult. Action encounters are sparse but complex, initiated only at key story moments and often possible to cut off before even that by using your party's pool of Might, Intellect and Speed points to intimidate or persuade or slink away in silence. When it does, the world shifts to a turn-based system. Instead of just fighting, however, you can still talk, use items, manipulate the battlefield, and more.
The system often works great, as the first battle showcases. Normally it would be a straight-up fight. Instead, you can play with light bridges, intimidate the enemies into fighting poorly or straight up giving up, weaponise the arena with the right skills, or simply surrender, be knocked out, and wake up wherever it was they planned to take you in the first place. The second big one takes the system in more of a stealth direction, using musical devices to distract not-immediately hostile enemies and with failure causing a diplomatic incident between two species, rather than simply dropping you back in for a second attempt.
The further into the game you get though, the less inspired these sequences become. By the end there are far too many characters taking forever to take their damn turns and the initial sequences' complicated, interwoven mechanics have been boiled down to stuff like 'kill everyone or hit that crystal three times. Yes, that one just sitting there in the open.' The final really big fight - surviving until a certain event - was so boring, I put on a movie. While there are options to avoid combat at times, having a non-combat build didn't help me avoid taking shots and knocks on the way to these non-violent solutions.
The later sequences aren't helped by the fact that while, technically, you're supposed to be balancing a limited number of Intellect, Might and Speed points to spend on physical challenges and conversations, with the more you spend increasing your odds of success, Numenera never really puts the screws on. You only spend a few of them per choice, most challenges can be given to any member of the party rather than just the Last Castoff (big exceptions being calling back on previous memories) and it rarely takes many to get an almost guaranteed success. The result is that it's almost never worth gambling instead of just straight-up buying a victory. In addition, not only does a full team have points pouring out of every orifice, there are boosters, and while staying at an inn to recharge them is expensive, it's not so expensive that it's ever actually a problem to do that as needed.
Not knowing Numenera as a setting, it's hard to tell how many seeming Planescape shout-outs are part of the setting - the Castoffs having their own Blood War for instance, or the Bloom's voraciously biological take on Sigil's Portals.
I don't want to be too down on either system though, as both are good ideas and preferable to the bland combat and tedious skill-checks they replace. When the Crisis system works, it feels like a GM is controlling the fight, just as the points system has a few clever subtleties, like combining with individual skills such as Persuasion to distinguish between, say, talking a character down versus shouting them down. That guiding touch isn't always there, though, and the longer the game clicks on, the more it feels like the passing of time itself should probably have been listed as co-designer - its razor hands slicing away the early subtlety in favour of brute-force solutions.
In particular, there's a certain awkwardness to much of the world. It's hard to put a severed finger on exactly what it is, because it's not that Numenera lacks for quests, locations or content. At the same time though, you can't go into many buildings on the map, areas are small and fairly sparsely populated, and much of the content on offer is oddly shared out. Take for instance Sagus Cliffs. For all of its quests, in practice you only need to complete a couple to get to the second hub. That's a full third of the game that you could easily spend ten hours investigating, or almost complete by sheer accident- not least because the lack of combat/difficult skill checks removes any sense of how powerful you currently are or need to be at any given time. Your current level really tells you nothing.
Luckily for Numenera, the audience most likely to enjoy it is also the audience most likely to be tolerant of such mechanical things. The obvious comparison is with Pillars of Eternity, a game rooted in the RPG mechanics of Baldur's Gate et al, and the feel of the old Infinity Engine. Torment however, then and now, is a game built on story and narrative; of seeing promises of over 1.2 million words and going "Hurrah!" instead of emitting the kind of groan that normally involves a regrettable curry washed down with a whole cheesecake. If you're the kind to just click through the text, avoid. That's where most of the fun is.
The people of Numenera have no shortage of technology. But usually no manuals for it, no way of replacing it, and often no idea what anything was originally meant to do.
And in that regard, it's successful. Like its predecessor, Numenera may not have invented its world, but it makes it one you'll want to spend time in. Where other RPGs are still content with a dragon or some apocalyptic end of the world boom, here the stakes are personal, as well as both asking and inviting far more interesting questions than how much fire you can fling from your fingertips. It's a far more welcoming game than the original Torment, though a slower burner as far as the main plot goes, and one that never quite has its predecessor's dark confidence. It is, however, as close as we've had in the last 15 or so years, and certainly doesn't invoke the name in vain.
Torment: Tides of Numenera PC review
By
Jeremy Peel
After a long day of intense conversation, my party lay their heads to rest in a tidy hostel on the high cliffs of Sagus - a port for airships where homes slip regularly into the sea.
Though the inn is open to the air and its rooms rest on long stilts that disappear into cloud below, Tranquility’s Rest is the first true calm we’ve found in the bustle and intrigue of the city. Perhaps that’s thanks to Tranquility herself, a honey-voiced proprietor and mutant, stretched tall as if from too many lie-ins. Perhaps it’s the pheromonal perfume she wears.
When we wake, it’s as if our own world has collapsed into the ocean. While we slept, a serial killer has struck again in Sagus’ Underbelly, stripping a casual acquaintance of their life and their skin. Meanwhile, in another questline, adventurers who needed our help were forced to fight a great psychic battle alone. Not all of them made it.
The passage of time, normally the sole preserve of the player to push forward, is just one of the quiet ways in which Torment: Tides of Numenera breaks and remakes the rules of the RPG.
Who knew this bewildering and brilliant game was going to work out? Well: nearly 75,000 backers did. Kickstarter projects have a way of taking the tension out of an outside success story. But it’s true Tides of Numenera didn’t necessarily have much going for it, as a spiritual sequel. Not the wild and impossible Planescape setting, which remains locked away in a tower at Wizards of the Coast. Not Chris Avellone, the man who contributed countless words to the original Torment. In lieu of those things, developers InXile have chosen to inherit vibe, themes, ambition, and a certain frustration with RPG convention.
That’s inherent in the premise, which finds you not chosen for greatness but disposed of. Shed like a snake skin by a body-hopping immortal named the Changing God, your body is a castoff - and your character the consciousness that rushes to fill the God’s space in its head.
Ahead of you, somewhere, are the Changing God and answers. And behind, always following, is the Sorrow - a sort of psychic octopus who relentlessly pursues the Changing God and his castoffs, like some horrific policeman of mortality. The upside is that for you, death is impermanent: a fleeting moment of pain from which you quickly recover and often learn something.
You’re far from the only abandoned thing in the Ninth World. Built on the ruins and technologies of past civilizations, here is a far-future Dark Ages in which the internet is an ancient and little understood form of magic. A city like Sagus Cliffs has its seat of government in a space shuttle encased by rock, while the engines act as forges for the Underbelly below. Even the sand burbles with the grains of degraded machine intelligences.
If that sounds a bit odd, times that by weird, tack on some strange and you’re getting somewhere close to how out there the new Torment is. The Numenera setting - a universe dreamed up by tabletop designer Monte Cook, himself a Torment veteran - proves a wonderful stand-in for Planescape, and InXile have carved out their own corner to have fun in. It’s a place where no side-quest or NPC need be disallowed on the grounds of canon.
In exploring Torment, I’ve met a man whose tattoos map the known world. City guards built from sludge by a machine, itself powered by a single year of each citizen’s lives. A visitant from another world who gave his arms to create his children, as per his race’s reproductive process. The personification of the letter ‘O’. I’ll never see Sesame Street in quite the same light.
It’s important to point out: the experience of playing Torment is at least 75% prose (with the occasional diversion into verse, which isn’t nearly as dreadful as it sounds). If you’ve played Pillars of Eternity or any of the recent Shadowrun games you’ll have some idea of what to expect - but Torment takes it further than either. InXile use the dialogue box as a platform for full descriptive passages: drawing characters in more detail, fleshing out scenarios with threatening postures and revealing tics. Occasionally, they gently enhance the effect using sound, though voice acting is sparse and reserved for key characters. The environments onscreen, vibrant and intricate though they are, serve only as a visual guide to the imagination.
It’s an unusually high burden to place on the player, and that prose won’t be for everyone - I hope you’re up for learning some new or archaic words, like lambent, stentorian or ovoid - but it’s unusually rewarding too, in its novelistic way.
The people and particularly the objects of the Ninth World (the Numenera of the title) are described with wonderful specificity - so that you know what they’re made of, how they make you feel, perhaps even have an inkling of what they might be used for, even if you have no idea how they actually work. This is how Torment stays grounded. Just because something is strikingly weird, doesn’t mean it can’t be tangible - real enough to care about or be afraid of.
It’s an approach not always flawless in its execution. Occasionally the backgrounds will let down the writing with asset reuse. Once in a while, somebody will stay standing up when they should be lying down dead - a source of less confusion in a different setting, you might imagine.
And sometimes, environments can feel too dense, at least for my overloaded mind - exhausting in their array of near-bottomless nodes to plumb for vivid text. Thankfully, InXile tend not to fill their maps with too many unavoidable scripted encounters, leaving you to start up conversation with NPCs whenever you’re ready, tackling the meal at your own pace. It helps that the text attached to those NPCs is always unique and alluring.
The central story, too, is a chain of compelling mysteries that pulls you onwards. Without spoiling anything, it’s a story that provides you with so many different opportunities to be caught on the line, emotionally speaking.
The murder in the Underbelly? That propelled me through later, related events in the main plot and coloured the decisions I made there - providing motivation which wouldn’t have shown up had I not slept in during that particular side-quest. Maybe for you that motivation will come in another series of events I never saw, or the plight of a companion I didn’t pick up. More often than you’d imagine, those smaller stories feed back into the main one, infusing it with personal investment. It’s a super neat trick, and one only The Witcher 3 has managed similarly in recent memory.
If you’ve ever played an RPG and thought of an offbeat solution to a quest - perhaps one that involves something unrelated you know about the world - well, there’s a chance Torment supports that. That kind of thinking is its stock in trade. This is the game for those frustrated by the RPG forever-promise of consequence, the illusion of choice that doesn’t always hold up once you’re seasoned enough in the genre to see the seams.
It would be unparalleled if not for the release of Obsidian’s Tyranny not six months ago - and Tyranny achieved its reactivity by sacrificing overall playtime. That Torment matches it over a much lengthier period goes some way to explaining why it’s been this long in development.
I’ve been umming and erring over whether or not Torment has a pacing problem. If it does, it’s only because it’s advanced outside of its genre’s comfort zone. In a more traditional RPG, combat is part of a loop that breaks up the more dense chunks of storytelling. Torment removes the onus on combat, to its credit - but doesn’t fully replace it with anything.
It’s not for lack of ideas. Torment’s combat is highly accomplished. When it comes around, InXile call it a Crisis - since there’s often a way to resolve a situation via stealth, conversation, or even simply by embracing death and coming back once your enemy’s have moved on. Crises are a turn-based affair resembling Divinity Original Sin, in which each combatant can make one move and one action per turn. Everyone hits hard, and getting the win is often about taking advantage of your quicker companions, who get to go earlier in the queue.
It’s also about making use of your Cyphers: technological oddities which, whether through intent or by accident, have some powerful combat function - healing and buffing allies or reducing your enemies to chemical goo. Carrying too many Cyphers creates unpredictable interference that bestows increasingly negative effects (I met one merchant who had sprouted little claws all over her body, so be warned). It’s a brilliant way of discouraging hoarding. Instead of keeping them for a rainy day that never comes, you throw out Cyphers without hesitation during Crises to turn the tide. As it were.
These are clever, satisfying solutions implemented by seasoned RPG designers who know exactly what annoys them about RPG convention. But a side-effect of that same philosophy means that the Crisis system can wind up underused. Depending on how diplomatically you play, combat can come around very infrequently indeed, and the weapons strapped to your back will see barely any use. In that scenario, Torment can feel like one long improvement on Baldur’s Gate II’s crammed hub city, Athkatla. That might be your dream game. Or, uninterrupted by any text-free combat sequences to cleanse the palette, it might feel like too much of a good thing.
That’s a matter of taste. What I can tell you is that it turns out there’s a power in picking your battles. When I did fight, I did so at the very edge of my abilities, using every trick I’d learned and every gadget in my robes. When I did fight, it was because I’d made a very deliberate choice to do so. Resorting to violence out of revenge, out of desperation, out of malice? That’s a powerful set of feelings, and one RPGs generally rob us of by making combat the default.
Outside Crises, InXile have worked hard to incorporate your party’s skills into conversation. You’ll quickly get used to rolling the dice to see whether or not you’ve succeeded in breaking down a barrier, or persuading a city official to give you the time of day, or dodging a lethal blast from malfunctioning numenera. You’ll select the right companion for the job and spend their skill points as ‘Effort’ to influence the outcome. Just as in Crises, failure can lead to its own intriguing outcomes too. More than anything, Torment rewards curiosity - certainly over good sense or planning. After all, what do the undying have to fear but transdimensional squid beasts with tentacles thicker than your head?
When you do rest, it’s usually not because you need to tend physical wounds, but that you’ve had a hard day’s discovery or diplomacy. There’s more than a touch of the Fighting Fantasy books about the whole thing, and in some senses Torment feels at its purest during the lovingly drawn choose-your-own-adventure sequences that bridge its key story moments.
In a non-linear experience of time that befits the setting, we already know that Torment succeeds. At least 75,000 people are behind it, willing it into being. What’s so delightful is that it succeeds not primarily as a nostalgia exercise but as as a genre-pushing RPG, and a beautifully told story about things left behind.
Add to this the fact that you can pretty much spend the other stats with impunity, easily passing on most checks anywhere, there'll probably be very little point, yeah. When it comes to stats in Tides of Numenera, there's really nothing stopping a Nano from passing Might or Speed checks. But since Nanos get Scan Thoughts and benefit from high Intellect, and with the Intellect tests so massively outclassing the other checks, a nano with high Intellect is definitely the way to go. Worst case, you can let the other party members handle the Might/Speed checks - the game treats it as if you were the one doing it, anyway.
btw is everyone in the inxile writing team a walking stereotype? Just saw callistege's writer on cmcc twitter and
check her twitter for extra lulz
well PC gaming is the domain of non-games like Dear Esther so.
