After the initial confusion where you roam a dark and unfamiliar pit, you are introduced to character creation, which grants limited customisation of your Castoff. The Last Castoff is effectively a blank slate, abandoned and dropped into an alien setting, confused and disoriented, with only flashes of memories that are not yours to grant you knowledge necessary to survive. Every Castoff which preceded you inherited portions of the Changing GodвЂ™s powers, and as the final rejected vessel, your character is the most powerful of them all вЂ“ and how they shape the world and define their place within it is entirely up to you. His actions have awakened the Sorrow, an ancient entity which hunts both the Changing God and all of its Castoffs. The protagonist (you can choose to be male or female) was the latest vessel for the consciousness of the Changing God, who inevitably transfers into other bodies to preserve their immortality and cheat death. The game casts the player as the Last Castoff, a discarded body which once hosted a powerful being known as the Changing God.

From the ancient and architecturally bizarre Sagus Cliffs to the crumbling obelisks and shrines littering the Valley of Dead Heroes to the living, breathing alien city known as the Bloom which sometimes eats its own residents, the people, places and things you will see in your playthrough of Numenera are thoroughly engaging thanks to inXileвЂ™s willingness to diverge from the stereotypical medieval conventions and trappings of other settings in the CRPG genre. The ruins and devices they left behind are called numenera and worshipped as magical relics or divine monuments by the current medieval societies inhabiting the Ninth, who have formed entire belief systems and settlements around them. Set in the Ninth World a billion years into the future, eight civilizations have risen and fallen into oblivion, leaving behind incredible works of technology. Torment: Tides of Numenera has one of the richest and weirdest sci-fi settings I have ever indulged in. The spiritual successor to 1999вЂ™s Planescape: Torment, a classic computer role-playing game which failed commercially but lived on as a celebrated cult hit, Tides of Numenera doesnвЂ™t entirely recreate that same magic of its namesake, but it does a damn good job at putting forward another welcome addition to the re-vitalised CRPG genre.

As one of the most popular Kickstarter projects propelled to reality with $5 million worth of investments from 75,000 backers, Torment: Tides of Numenera seeks to satiate the ravenous hunger of its fans eager to see the good old days of classic computer role-playing games make a comeback in the modern era, with a return to deep RPG table-top rule-sets, isometric perspective, complex dialogue systems with tangible choice and consequence, and a rich text-heavy narrative.

Torment tides of numenera review