Torment: Tides Of Numenera is an upcoming RPG from InXile Entertainment and is perhaps one of the greatest RPG experiences I have ever had in terms of story and the general weight of the game.
That isn’t to say that Torment: Tides of Numenera is a perfect game, there are certain aspects of it that just felt…off while playing, but I will go into that all a little more in my review below!
I won’t lie to you guys, I spent the first 3 hours of Torment feeling really, really bored, this is no real fault of Torment but just RPG’s in general bore the hell out me in the first few hours, but with Torment something clicked around hour 3 in where I got so into the game I didn’t even realise it was time for dinner; 8 hours later.
Right then boys & girls…Enough posturing, time to get into the real meat of things:
Gameplay
First things first in this section, let’s get right into the battle system of Torment: The fights in Torment are turnbased, I fucking love turnbased battle systems they are just my favourite so I 100% had a fanboy moment when I got into my first fight and I found this lovely bit of news out. You can expend your turn carrying out a variety of actions in battle from the basic: HIT THINGS over to attempting to coerce and persuade your way out of battle – This mechanic provided a really fun addition that I would often attempt to take full advantage of. There were a couple of moments though where I was presented with the opportunity to resolve the fight without killing each other but this would sometimes glitch out and I wouldn’t be able to actually use this great mechanic.
One other criticism I had about the game was that whilst adventuring in the field of around the city the moment just feels odd and a bit juttery which is such a shame when everything else runs so smoothly ingame, this couple with a 15 second loading screen every time I would leave an area of the many cyberpunk environments would often stop me from being completely immersed in the story or world.
Story
In this section of my review I am going to be talking more about the characters & side quests rather than the actual storyline as I feel that the story of Torment needs to be left as a suprise to those of you wanting to get into it, one thing I will say though is that the overall story of Torment is just fantastic, for the first time in years with an RPG, I finished the game and wanted to dive right back in, in order to take different paths and make different choice which really affect the outcome of certain storylines overall. It really blew me away.
Now then:
There are a lot of characters in Torment, I mean A LOT of characters in the cities. There is a lot to take in as you adventure through the world of Torment in terms of characters & side quests but it really does pay off in big ways that often make the story feel like a really good HBO drama.
There are certain time sensitive side quests in the each of the areas – one that springs to mind early on is where you are tasked with hunting down a group of monsters who are digging under the city causing mini earth quakes and houses on the edges of cliffs to just fall away killing everyone inside. I left this side quest for a little while as I was focusing on other areas until I came back to find that one of the shops I frequented quite a bit had fallen off the side of the cliff face stopping me from being able to access this shop any longer. This was my favourite element to Torment as not only do the choices you make truly affect the game but the choices you don’t make or don’t make fast enough have the potential to wipe entire questlines out of existence.
As I made my way through Torment I found that I never really understood what I was doing – There was no hand holding or help to guide me through the game and it was playing this that I realised this is something really missing from RPG’s in recent years, I was lost in the world of Torment and it felt amazing to feel that way again.
One thing that caught me off guard with Torment: Tides of Numenera is simply the amount of reading that I had to do, I mean I expected a lot of reading in an RPG such as this but even so I still managed to underestimate just how much text there is in the game. With the way the story and the characters are built in the world a “skim reading” approach does not work – luckily for us though the script is so well written that it is totally worth reading through.
Appearance, Setting & Sound
Every time I got to a new area in Torment, I found myself just exploring, reading and learning for hours on end. The world had me so engrossed that I just wanted to try to experience everything it had to offer me which is just a feeling that I have, once again, long missed in so many modern RPG’s of the last decade.
The cyberpunk-ish world of Torment is taken directly from the tabletop RPG and this is so apparent by the level of detail and care that goes into creating the hub areas of the game, something that you cannot experience by reading a review – A feeling of being lost in a fantastic world for hours on end. Almost every NPC had a story to tell me or something to say which truly made the areas feel alive.
Verdict
Torment: Tides of Numenera is one of the most engrossing storylines I have ever experienced in gaming that is just a little let down by dodgy frame rates and a little TOO much going on at times but if you are looking for something to truly sink your teeth into then I 100% recommend picking this up.