![]() A merchant is slowly transforming into an insect due to the radiation of his wares. From characters to locations, nearly every moment is populated with some new conceptual anomaly. Riffing off the stellar Numenera tabletop RPG, Torment launches onto its own trajectory with the fiction, and achieves a peerless approach to world-building. I would have been happy to have more opportunities to use all the abilities and trinkets I had discovered. If anything, the depth of the systems ends up being underused due to the scarcity of crises and other rules-based situations. ![]() The approach to “magic” items is fascinating many tools are devastating one-use objects that can turn the tide of a conflict, and come with their own oddly captivating descriptions, as if each has its own forgotten story to tell (and many do). In support of both conversation tools and battle scenarios, a deep leveling system provides compelling decisions, from non-combat skills like deception or quick fingers, to powerful combat-oriented nanite-infused maelstroms or cleaving sword attacks. These infrequent conflicts are the punctuations on lengthy stretches of talking and reading, and act as an essential way to move the story forward. Even when it does enter a turn-based “crisis,” most encounters allow for solutions that don’t involve killing, like stealing the eggs of the monstrous creatures threatening the city in order to gain leverage, or distracting a guard during a tour of a spaceship so a different party member can sneak onto the main computer. Instead, it is far more interested in surprising characters, lengthy conversations, and choice trees that emphasize non-combat approaches to problems. But in keeping with its spiritual predecessor, Planescape: Torment, Tides of Numenera is light on tactics. Torment’s isometric view and party-based structure taps into older games like Baldur’s Gate and newer genre revivals like Pillars of Eternity. Accept the novelistic approach to storytelling, and Torment rewards you with the most surreal adventure ever to call itself an RPG. The preponderance of written dialogue and descriptions can be overwhelming, especially with only occasional traditional action scenes. Embracing the outer edge of speculative fiction tropes, it makes for a wild (and often inscrutable) adventure into uncharted territories of existential thought, grotesquerie, and wonder. ![]() Torment: Tides of Numenera opens with weirdness, and doesn’t wait for you to catch up. You are one of these husks, and you awake to life tumbling from orbit at terminal velocity, speeding to meet the ground below. He casts off bodies at his convenience, leaving behind new personalities in the discarded husks. One man has tapped into that wealth of lost knowledge and discerned the secret to immortality. A billion years in Earth’s future, many civilizations have risen and fallen, leaving behind a detritus of science that may as well be magic to the newest inheritors of the planet.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |