My thoughts on Torment: Tides of Numenera

This stuff is only tangentially related to my writing efforts, but I do play a lot of games in my downtime and am – by definition, I think – influenced by them in various ways, not unlike particularly formative books I've read over the years, so I wanted to take a moment to offer my thoughts on Torment: Tides of Numenera. I backed it on Kickstarter back in 2014 because it seemed (at the time) to be a proper spiritual successor to the renowned CRPG Planescape: Torment and all the narrative depth and nuance that implies, but with a mind to ironing out a lot of Planescape's clunkiness and mechanical failings as a game.

The following is more or less taken from my Steam review, but it bears inclusion here because of the wonderfully wonky roleplaying world of Numenera and how that relates to my ongoing efforts to better understand how engaging stories are constructed and told (or not) and translating those lessons into my own work.

I'd also like to take the remastered/rebuilt Planescape: Torment Enhanced Edition for a spin one of these days to make sure that nostalgia hasn't overly clouded my take on the original, but that's probably a longer-term aspiration for when I'm ready to spend a few weeks "playing the book" that is PST again.

Anyway, without further ado:

It almost hurts to give this one a down-vote, since this game was obviously a well-intended labor of love. Unfortunately, despite exceedingly high expectations – both personally and within the story-driven CRPG community overall – it really struggled *as a story* and was broken and un-fun *as a game* in many respects.

I sympathize here, since even a record-setting Kickstarter like Tides had is nowhere near enough to create the kind of game that inXile advertised both initially and in the ensuing months as they started stacking up the stretch goals, but Tides feels like a rudderless, half-done homage to Planescape: Torment that misunderstands what it was people actually *liked* about that game and why. Too much of the story in Tides seems informed by these considerations, leading to a haphazard, confusing, and emotionally unsatisfying narrative experience that plods and jerks from one major plot point to another, leaving the player confused and indifferent in turns.

Many of the game’s core systems feel poorly realized and bolted on, or too easily gamed so as to remove any measurable difficulty, all of which makes me think that this would have been better as an interactive story of some sort – perhaps some kind of isometric Telltale-type experience, or something similar that would have allowed inXile to focus on really fleshing out the story and characters while (hopefully) cutting down on the more problematic purple prose and its leaden effects on delivery. So on some level, this feels like a failing of design and scope, which was then exacerbated by funding shortfalls, project mismanagement, and setting the expectation bar too high to begin with. (There are some insightful post-mortem interviews with the development leads of Tides that really show how much the story's scope and form changed over time due to design and funding constraints, which largely explains why there was such a jarring divide between initial characterizations of the game and what we ultimately got.)

The Ninth World is a fascinating blend of dystopic science-fantasy, and I think the writing team deserves major props for their worldbuilding efforts and for forging ahead with a lot of interesting ideas. The problem is that most/all of those ideas never really seemed fully developed or thematically connected in any sufficiently coherent way, leaving us with some interesting one-off stories or mini-quests that provide a lot of flavor but not much else. Our traveling companions suffered a similar fate: they were interesting starting points as characters, but then largely devoid of any real development or substance that might make us feel strongly about them one way or the other as the game progressed. It’s like the difference between reading the Silmarillion and the Lord of the Rings, or between reading a history book and having lived through that particular time in human history: even the most eloquent and succinct descriptions can only do so much if you don’t have some kind of emotional anchor or investment in the story and its characters, and Tides seems to have forgotten this. It’s too preoccupied with creating a vivid backdrop and stuffing it full of oddities and novel distractions, which – while fine and even desirable in their own right – become a major problem when they come at the expense of crafting a core narrative experience that the player/reader will necessarily become invested in.

Although I enjoyed exploring the alien environments of the Ninth World and appreciated the change-up from more conventional SFF settings, the execution left me both disappointed and oddly indifferent. There was nothing wrong with using the original Planescape: Torment as a creative starting point for Tides, but I feel like inXile was too focused on aping the experience of the original in a new setting while checking off as many superficial nostalgia boxes as they could, all at the expense of telling a sufficiently fresh and engaging story that would resonate with your typical CRPG player.

And don’t get me wrong here, because there were absolutely things that I enjoyed during my playthrough. For example: the Fifth Eye Tavern and its band of psychic soldiers/mercenaries, the Adversary, various takes on AI and nanotechnology, the endless battle/conflict, and the *idea* of the Changing God and its violation of certain cosmic/metaphysical laws that attracted the destructively “corrective” attention of The Sorrow were all super interesting concepts. Ditto the Tides themselves. But it felt like that’s *all* they were: interesting in their own right, but ultimately disconnected from any larger, more unified story or thematic exploration.