Torment: Tides of Numenera

There is a specific kind of ambition that only Kickstarter could have funded, and Torment: Tides of Numenera is a prime example of it. inXile Entertainment — Brian Fargo’s studio, staffed with veterans who worked on the original Planescape: Torment and Fallout — went to crowdfunding in 2013 with a pitch that no publisher in 2013 would have greenlit: a text-heavy, isometric, single-player RPG with no multiplayer hook, no microtransactions, no live service, and a design philosophy that treats combat as a failure state rather than a feature. Backers funded it in force. Four years later, on 27 February 2017, the thing actually arrived.

What arrived is a spiritual successor rather than a sequel. There is no legal or narrative line back to Sigil and the Nameless One; instead, inXile licensed Monte Cook’s Numenera tabletop setting — Earth a billion years out, eight dead civilizations deep, buried under technology so far past comprehension that the survivors treat it as magic. You play the Last Castoff, a body the near-immortal Changing God wore and discarded, waking up mid-fall with someone else’s memories rattling around inside you and a thing called the Sorrow already hunting. The question the game keeps asking, in a hundred variations, is the one Planescape asked in a different key: what does one life matter?

Commercially, it landed in an awkward middle. Critics gave it an 81 on Metacritic for PC. Steam user sentiment runs cooler, and the split is easy to read: the people who wanted a novel got one. The people who wanted Divinity: Original Sin with better prose did not, and they are the ones driving the negative side of that split. Both camps have a point. Understanding which one you’re in is the entire purchasing decision.

• Roughly a million words of reactive prose: Not a marketing number — a structural commitment. Dialogue trees branch on stats, on Tides, on companion presence, and on things you did many hours earlier. Descriptive vignettes carry as much weight as spoken lines, and the game trusts you to read them.
• Crises instead of combat encounters: Turn-based scenarios that fold conversation, stealth, environmental manipulation, and hacking into the same initiative order as swinging a sword. A meaningful share of them can be resolved without landing a single hit — talking a guard down mid-fight is a first-class solution, not an easter egg.
• The Effort economy: Might, Speed, and Intellect aren’t health bars, they’re currency. You spend from them to buy down the difficulty of any roll, in or out of combat. Every persuasion check is a resource decision.
• The Tides: Five moral colors — Blue, Red, Gold, Indigo, Silver — tracking not morality but motivation. They shape companion reactions, gate content, and drive multiple endings. Nobody tells you which one is correct, because none of them are.
• Meres: Playable memories, letting you inhabit the Changing God’s past lives and other castoffs’ final moments. Some of the best writing in the game lives here.

The Gameplay Loop, Such As It Is

Let’s be honest about the shape of this thing. The loop is: walk somewhere, read, choose, read the consequence, walk somewhere else. The overwhelming majority of your inputs are clicks on dialogue lines. If that sentence sounds like a criticism to you, this probably isn’t your game — no amount of praise below will change that.

For everyone else: the reactivity is remarkable, and it’s the rarest thing in the genre because it’s the most expensive. Most RPGs fake it. They give you three dialogue options that funnel to the same node, tag one of them “sarcastic,” and move on. Numenera actually forks. Your skill loadout changes not just whether you succeed but what you perceive — a high-Lore character reads a corpse’s implants and gets a paragraph a low-Lore character never sees existed. That’s not a stat check, that’s authored content most players will never see on one playthrough. Multiply by a million words and you begin to understand both the achievement and the budget problem.

The Effort system is a smart mechanical import from tabletop, and one the genre has underused. Your three stat pools are simultaneously your health, your mana, and your bribe money for the dice. Want to talk the Aligned past a checkpoint? Dump four Intellect into Effort and the difficulty drops. But those points don’t come back until you rest, and you’ll want them when the Sorrow shows up. It turns every conversation into a genuine tactical decision, and it means failure is affordable rather than fatal — the game is built to absorb botched rolls and route around them, which is why it can afford to let you fail interestingly.

Where the Wheels Come Off

The Crisis system is the game’s most interesting idea and its weakest execution. Conceptually it’s the right answer to “how do we make combat narrative”: turn every fight into a scenario with objectives, escape routes, talkable NPCs, and an interactable environment. In practice, the moment-to-moment combat underneath is limp. The attacks are designed without weight, the animations are stiff, and the enemy behavior amounts to little more than walking at you. Encounter balance is tuned unevenly, swinging between trivial and grinding. inXile clearly knew this — the entire design nudges you toward non-violent resolution — but building an escape hatch from a bad system doesn’t make the system good. It makes it vestigial. When combat is unavoidable, and occasionally it is, the studio’s attention was clearly elsewhere.

The second structural problem is pacing collapse after Act One. Sagus Cliffs, the opening city, is one of the densest, strangest, most confidently-written hub areas in the genre — a place where every alley has a story and half of them are better than most games’ main quests. Then you reach the Bloom, a living dimension-hopping city-creature that should be the highlight, and the content thins. Threads get resolved in a paragraph that Sagus would have given a chapter. The endgame arrives faster than the setup earned. This is what a Kickstarter budget meeting the wall looks like from the inside, and backers noticed: promised content and at least one promised companion didn’t make the ship date.

Onboarding Friction

Steep, and largely unrepentant. The Numenera ruleset uses vocabulary nobody outside the tabletop knows — Cyphers, Fettles, Edge, oddities — and the game explains it in tooltips you have to hunt for. The opening hours ask you to absorb an alien setting, an alien vocabulary, and an unfamiliar stat economy simultaneously, while the prose refuses to slow down for you. Plenty of players bounce off at exactly that point, and the Steam review split reflects that as much as it reflects the combat.

The art direction is the standout here. inXile had a real problem — how do you make “a billion years of dead civilizations” look like anything other than generic fantasy with more cables? — and they solved it with a palette nobody else uses. Sagus Cliffs is all bruised violets, bio-luminescent teals, and impossible architecture built from salvage nobody understands. The Bloom is genuinely upsetting to look at, which is exactly right for a city that is also a digestive tract. Hand-painted backgrounds carry the load, and they carry it well.

Character models are the weak link, as they are in every Unity-based isometric RPG of this era. Faces are unconvincing, animation is stiff, and the 3D characters never quite belong to the 2D environments they stand in.

Technically, this is a light ask. A 2017 Unity isometric title of this scope is easy on modern hardware, and a 2D-heavy presentation of this kind simply doesn’t stress a system. Voice acting is partial, which is the correct call for a million-word script; full VO would have meant a drastically reduced script.

The UI is where the real complaint belongs. It’s dense, small, and hostile to first-time readers. Given that reading is the entire game, the typography and text-box design deserved more care than they got.

On Steam, this is the definitive version and it isn’t close. Mouse and keyboard is the native input for a game that is fundamentally a hypertext document with combat episodes — clicking dialogue lines, hovering for tooltips, scanning long text blocks. The PC’s stronger critical reception compared to the console ports is not a coincidence; the console versions had to redesign navigation for a stick, and menu-heavy CRPGs never survive that intact.

Practical Steam notes: it ships Windows, macOS, and Linux builds, which matters if you’re not on Windows and are tired of being an afterthought. It launched at full price and has spent most of the years since in deep-discount territory — at its current sale price of $8.74, the value equation stops being a debate. There is no Switch version and no mobile version, which is a genuine shame; this is exactly the kind of game that wants to be read in bed.

Torment: Tides of Numenera is a solid, flawed work, and the flaws are not small. The combat is mediocre. The back half is undercooked. It asks more patience in its opening hours than many players will extend to any game.

And it is still one of the more interesting things anyone has done with an RPG script in years. It bet its entire budget on prose, worldbuilding, and consequence — the three things the industry systematically underfunds — and it delivered on all three at a level that makes most big-budget “narrative” games look like they’re reading from cue cards. The Tides are a better morality system than the alignment sliders everyone else still ships. The Effort economy deserves to be stolen by every studio in the genre. The Ninth World is the rare fictional setting that actually feels like it was imagined rather than assembled.

inXile aimed at something almost nobody attempts and landed a large but incomplete share of it. That partial landing is worth more than a dozen safe, complete, forgettable games. At $8.74 on Steam, it’s an easy recommendation for the right audience — read it like the novel it is.