Torment:Tides of Numenera - BILLIONS OF YEARS!

I have not played Planescape Torment. I just need to get that out there and anyone that played or is planning on playing this game should probably stop comparing these two games. Its a spiritual successor, its not the same game, and its never going to live up to its predecessor. The biggest problem people have with this game is its not Planescape Torment. The game is based off the Numenera tabletop game universe, which takes place BILLIONS OF YEARS into the future. Instead of Planescape Torment's "What can change a nature of a man?" its instead "How much does one life matter?" This theme unfortunately makes zero sense and we'll get into that later. Its a narrative driven game where you can talk your way out of any battle if you are good enough at it. This also means combat is the biggest shit stain on this game and anytime you fail a skill check you want to restart because sitting through combat makes you want to jump in front of a truck. Yes its one of these type of games.

Lets look at the universe of Numenera for a second. This game takes place "a billion" years into the future. We need to stop and think about this for a second. A billion may sound like a small number when you say it out loud. But this is an astronomical number in life and evolution. The earth itself is only about 5 billions years old and life started only 3.5 billions years ago. Life evolved from single celled organisms to land life in 3 billions years. Within 200 million years they evolved from amphibians on land into dinosaurs. These lived for several hundred millions of years before going extinct. It took 66 million years from the time of dinosaurs to the time of humans. Humans only evolved 200 thousand years ago. Human civilization only begun 10 thousand years ago. You're telling me billions of years into the future, everyone is still human and look exactly like the people today? People still live in mud houses on the side of a cliff and everyone has the same moral standards as people today? That architecture and design still look the same as today? They tried to explain it all by saying its currently the ninth world as in 8 great civilizations before the one in the current game have come and gone and currently everyone is living in a medieval like civilization. What the fuck? This basically is a medival fantasy game that uses "technology" instead of magic. It uses Authur Clarke's famous third law, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." Instead of shooting fireballs you're shooting esoteric bolts. Instead of casting heal you use innervate which channels esotery into their bodies and cleans them of wounds.

Now we have the billions of years rant out of the system we can start looking at the world of Numenera. The world of built on the ruins of ancient civilizations. Every now and then you can click on an object and shit will happen. Sometimes nothing will happen and most often than not, it is completely useless. Why have all this cool stuff around when they do absolutely nothing. In fact the main storyline has almost nothing to do with any of the technology around. The main story is short and garbage but there are plenty of side quests that are somewhat interesting. There are some pretty interesting ideas in the game like the house of empty time where homeless children, though the keeper is able to be adopted by another family in another time frame. You could be adopted 600 years into the future or into the past. Or something like the Anchorage and the lore behind it. There is a lot of interesting stuff if you look for it, unfortunately none of that is in the generic main quest.

With technology and future shit out of the way we can focus on the main storyline. Some time ago someone discovered a way to to transfer his consciousness from one being to an artificial body and was called the changing god. Whenever the conscious is transferred out of the previous body, a new consciousness appears and takes its place. These people are known as the castoffs. You are the newest castoff of the changing god and you basically travel the world trying to figure out what to do. And by world I mean three maps. The first area you are at is the biggest, then it gets smaller as the game goes on. If you just follow the main quest you can probably finish the game in a couple hours. Doing every side quest took me about twenty hours to complete the game. Most of the time was wasted running around doing nothing trying to find quests. The other half is talking. This game has a lot of text. Do not play this game if you don't like reading. Its a whole lot of text with a whole lot of nothing. They can drag a description on for paragraphs yet you learn nothing about the character. If fact you rarely learn much of the people in the world. They are sort of just there and you sort of just walk away before stuff happens.

Not expanding on things really hurt the game. Like you meet a group of Nanos in a bar who fight the the Adversaries, a group of beings that traveled through the bloom, a multidimensional living creature that opens maws across dimensions, composed of pure thought and are in constant combat with the Nanos in an invisible psychic war. You show up you do a few quests and you leave, you never really learn that much about them and they never show up again. It was interesting but it was over much too fast. This also includes the Bloom, its a huge living creature that has maws extending to different dimensions and the living beings in the world of Numenera use it as a way of travel as well as a home. However the maws are not permanent and many groups of people get lost in different worlds. New maws are also always constantly being made which require different foods to open. Slaves are sold to feed the maws who will only eat certain things. For example, one maw will only eat guilt and after the feeding, the person will sometimes stay alive, but lose their ability to feel guilt. Upon eating something, the maw will open leading to a whole new world. Like this thing is fucking awesome why isn't the game expanding on this. Am I the only one who thinks this multi dimensional creature the size of cities just biding its time at our doorstep is a threat? Its such a powerful entity that the sorrow can't even reach you inside the bloom. Except when suddenly plot holes appear and it could reach you.

The main story is shitty. You are chased by the sorrow, a monster that chases the changing god and all its castoffs to kill them. Really? You're going to call it THE SORROW!? What kind of shitty name is that. The sad part was the original name was called The Angel of Entropy. Basically its a creature that ignores space time and is angry at you and your siblings. Why? Because of the tides. Its wiped out civilizations because of the tides and its after you because you, the changing god, and all your fellow castoff siblings are tied to the tides. What is the tides exactly? Well its the currents of urge and emotions that flow through humanity's collective psyche. Its never really expanded on other than its a power thats shared among you all. It has the ability to affect people around you based on the colours of your tide. Its basically a reputation system. The tides are as followed:

Blue Tide: Represents wisdom, enlightenment, and mysticism. It is the Tide of people whose goal is to expand the mind and the spirit.
Red Tide: Represents passion, emotion, action, and zeal. It is the Tide of people whose goal is to live in the moment, to experience life to its fullest, or to follow their heart wherever it leads them.
Indigo Tide: Represents justice, compromise, and the greater good. It is the Tide of people who view life's difficulties from a broad, global perspective rather than an individual one.
Gold Tide: Represents charity, sacrifice, and empathy. It is the Tide of people whose primary goal is to help others, especially at the cost to themselves.
Silver Tide: Represents admiration of power and seekers of fame. It is the Tide of people who seek to influence the lives of others or who actively seek to be remembered.

Almost every choice you make in the game will shift your tides, and it shifts very quickly. You can even have two dominant tides if there are two high ones instead of one very high tide. For example I started the game with the blue tide because I kept asking questions about the world, but as I started doing quests I gained gold and turned into blue/gold tide. Eventually I did a bunch of quests that jumped me so far ahead that I turned into full gold tide. By the end of the game I was back down to blue/gold and ended at that. However, from what I've read theres only like a couple of NPCS who will mention anything because of your tides. That and the ending which is similar to Mass Effect 3's notorious ending. It looked like they wanted to do something with the tides but never got around to it. This holds true to almost everything in the game.

Onto the worst part of the game, the combat. I have never seen combat in a game this terrible before in my life. It is turn based with the most horrible UI I've ever seen. Combat design in this game is to put as many enemies as humanly possible on the map and each one takes forever to move. The next is to add consistently respawning enemies or enemies that will keep joining in the fight. A single turn of combat can take minutes, a entire fight could take ten to twenty. Like what the fuck? The good news is you can skip most of it by cheat scumming. Usually I'm too lazy to bother with that but when the alternative is the equivalent of sitting through an Adam Sandler movie I would rather retry over and over until I got it right. No matter what you do, there are several fights where you cannot avoid. Most of them involve the Sorrow and the Sorrow are the worst fights. It takes forever to appear and walk, and then it will spawn Sorrow fragments every turn which is another enemy that takes up time during combat and the entire time is spent running away so enemies eventually fill up so much of the screen you can take a shit and come back before your turn is up. When your turn is up though, you usually can't tell where the fuck you are going. Sometimes the circle for how far you can move disappears entirely. So combat becomes a game of clicking as far away as possible then clicking closer and closer and closer until you can move then hoping the enemies don't spawn new ones and waste five minutes of shuffling around before its your turn to run away.

There is a lot of potential in the game and it was obviously unfinished. A lot of the things promised on kickstarter never made it into the game, although they have said they are working on a new patch to add in one of the removed companions. I wish they expanded on more of the lore and side quests instead of the dumb main story quest that is over way too quickly. More areas to explore would be nice too instead of the three maps we gotten. Combat would have to be completely remade because what it is now is a piece of shit. Is this game good? I would say its passable if you ignore the combat. Its not the greatest, but some of the side quests, characters, and lore are interesting but they just sort of end abruptly. The ending also ends abruptly and completely shits over the theme of "How much does one life matter?" by giving you the power to choose the fate of the world. All of them involve the death of many so there really isn't much of a choice.