Torment: Tides of Numenera is pustulant, putrid, and mucousy—in a good way
18 years after Planescape, we journey into an otherworldly predatory organism.
Not everyone can make a city of meat.
To build something like this, the weirdness cannot just be an accoutrement, an accessory to a more familiar structure. The idiosyncrasies of biological life must be considered, the fact that we are, underneath our skin, a venous clockwork of offal twitching wetly in its varied cavities. More importantly, there needs to be an understanding of why this terrifies us, and how those fears intersect with our trepidations about urban life.
Luckily, inXile Entertainment are experts.
Let’s rewind a bit, though. I had the opportunity recently to get a hands-on with inXile Entertainment’s upcoming RPG
Torment: Tides of Numenera, the spiritual sequel to
the iconic Planescape: Torment. Like its predecessor,
Tides of Numenera diverges from the traditional monomyth. You are not a “chosen one” here, a trope that creative lead
Colin McComb has admitted fatigue with. If anything, really, you are the reverse.
As the Last Castoff, you are literally the detritus of an entity known as the Changing God, no more important than the hundreds of iterations that came before you. You do, however, have a quest to fulfil, and even that is atypical of RPGs.
Personal survival.
That is your driving motivation. Not the survival of your kingdom. Not the survival of your family. Nothing so noble as that. Instead, it is the animal instinct for self-preservation. Something called the Sorrow is hunting you and every castoff that came before. Only the Changing God has answers. You hope, at least.
While the full game will permit players to explore the Ninth World, our London demo had a more restricted scope. Instead of the universe, we had the Bloom, an immense predatory organism that also happens to be a transdimensional settlement.
Pustulant, putrid, and mucus-slick, the Bloom is a triumph in architectural grotesquerie. The streets are jagged with cartilage and small bones. They writhe around pits of exposed marrow, oozing abscesses, puckered orifices of suspicious purpose. The skyline is latticed with veins and ligament, and every building is a tumour, lumps of meat studded with mouths and boils.
To put it another way, the Bloom is to traditional city hubs what John Carpenter’s
The Thing was to
Star Trek’s uninspired alien design.
I loved all of it. Clearly. The two hours or so that I had with the game, I spent all of it wandering the Bloom’s fetid corridors, talking to anyone who had more than a throwaway line to spare. When a giant boil (yes, a man-sized blister) presented dialogue options, I poked at the thing, both literally and metaphorically, over and over until it burst. (Let’s not talk about the wet, glistening thing that rose from that mess of pus and broken membrane.)
There’s indubitably combat in the mix somewhere. Certainly, an encounter between some cultists and an alien scientist suggested the possibility. But I never got around to engaging in eldritch fisticuffs. There was too much conversation to be had.
Torment: Tides of Numenera is built on a spine of over a million words. It is difficult to say if every word was perfectly chosen, but I’m cautiously optimistic. For one thing, a number of
Planescape: Torment’s original team is working on the game. (If you’ve played the seminal title, you’ll likely be familiar with its depth. If you haven’t, you really,
really should.)
For another, the characters that I met were, well. To break it down briefly, we have experience-addicts lurking for the next hit of someone’s past; killing-machines desperate to be devoured by the Bloom; the digested spirit of the entity’s earlier sovereign; psychic avians that lobotomise slaves for use as translators; cultists who guzzle the Bloom’s juices and rewrite its scripture whenever whim decrees.
And what makes them work is not their individual peculiarities, but how they suture together, creating a vivid sense of place. Everyone you meet is affected by the Bloom. Everyone you encounter has, in some way, been influenced by the miasmic negativity that fills the vast abomination. Some rail against its influences. Some embrace its divinity. Others, like a guide you encounter early on, even become enamoured of the Bloom, treating it as some primal thing to be loved and indulged—even if it does cost them two legs, their sense of taste, and the capacity to feel fear.
Now, here’s the other thing:
Torment’s overarching question has always been, “What does one life matter?” And in the Bloom, the answer’s simple: not at all. All these small events cohere to create the impression that your character is infinitesimally small, meaningless save for its value as sustenance, and so very powerless. By the end of the demo, I remember feeling genuinely sorry for a group of castaways. Not curious as to how they’d contribute to the intricate narrative. But genuinely sorry for what will inevitably happen to them because I’ve seen the outcome for everyone else. I know what is going to happen.
Cosmic horror is a familiar canvas for many creatives. Even Gavin Jurgen-Fyhrie, a writer on the team (and coincidentally, the lead writer for
Wasteland 3), joked about defaulting to the genre. Not many get it right. But
Torment does.
They get a lot of things right, really. The universe is richly diverse, a fact that is never commented upon, and simply accepted. Gender is no restriction in the pursuit of power. Women can be as virtuous and villainous as their male counterparts. There are as many brown-skinned people as there are anyone else. Most importantly, none of the alien races feel like they’ve been codified as one real-world ethnicity or another, a constant issue in the entertainment industry.
Will this be a paragon of CRPGs, worthy of inheriting the accolades visited on its predecessor? Who knows. But
Torment is setting itself up to be a genuine classic, an amazingly topical game for this day and age. Even if unintended by the creators, it’s hard not to draw parallels between
Torment’s musings about the value of a single life in a ravenous universe, and our own place in this dystopian world. This, as intimated in earlier paragraphs, is especially true in the Bloom, where it is spectacularly easy to simply accept the status quo and press on.
But which player character does that? When trapped in the belly of the beast, the only sensible course of action is to rise up. (And possibly out through the membranous walls that separate you from the world outside.)
