![]() The thing that makes Torment work in these areas is the sheer amount of work that has to go into making sure that there are a wide variety of player choices for overcoming obstacles. ![]() Some of this disappointment is inevitable. Torment is at its best when you just arrive in a new major hub and can start finding and working on all these different quests, but there are only two major hubs. This is good for the systems, but it ends up hurting the story and those good feelings of going with the flow. But Torment: Tides of Numenera, at 20 hours, is surprisingly short. In a longer game, the flaws in these systems might be more apparent. Pillars of Eternity Review: Obsidian's Best RPG to Date Torment's relative easiness helps here, as it can make you feel super smart for getting a functional character build. It's a very clever system, and as your characters progress, it's a system that also lends itself to creative character builds, like a Last Castoff with intellect buffs that lets them coast through most conversations, and a bunch of might skills for smashing skulls when circumstances require. If you need to convince someone in a conversation, you can gamble a couple intellect points and raise your chances from 45% to 85%-meaning that instead of being just a random number, they're investments that you make, which encourages players to take ownership of the results. But instead of serving as the core of your character's being, they serve as pools for gambling. You have three attributes: might, speed, and intellect. Second, you can gamble your attribute points to improve chances on skill checks. First, it creates interesting failure states most of the time, using its writing to push your goals down a different paths, instead of just closing the door. Normally I dislike percentage-based skill checks in games, as they encourage save scumming, but Torment gets around this cleverly in two ways. Torment uses a similar system for both combat and problem-solving outside of combat, where, based on your skills (like Quick Fingers or Lore: Machinery) you have a certain percentage chance of accomplishing your goals. Happily, it makes those options legitimate decisions instead of simplistic "pacifism good, violence bad." I tried to play as a relatively moral character, which put me into combat more often than expected, largely because refusing it would have meant supporting cruel and amoral characters. This sounds complicated, and perhaps it is but fortunately, combat is both easy and relatively rare, so it's more like a flavor to the game than something to worry about mastering.Ĭombat-called a "crisis" here because they can be resolved through dialogue as well as violence-is rare because, like its role-playing inspirations, Torment wants to provide you with options for dealing with inevitable conflict. For example, instead of conventional damage effects like fire or ice, you can add transdimensional or chemical damage to spells and weapons. Taking the game as it comes is also helpful mechanically, as Tides of Numenera is freed of the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons systems that limited its predecessor Placescape. Most of the story involves figuring out what's going on, from "who am I?" and "what is this place?" early on to higher-order mysteries like "why do I exist?" and "what the hell is this giant organic monster that houses entire cities?" It's great advice for your player character, the "Last Castoff"-the leftover body of a Changing God who switches hosts every decade or so-who starts the game off on an alien world, in an amnesiac haze. ![]() "Go with the flow" is especially good advice for Torment in a variety of different ways. What makes a great RPG is being able to or say whatever you might want to, and the game accepts and even encourages that. It's the dream of freedom of choice, as promised by Torment's predecessor Planescape: Torment as well as games like the Fallout and Deus Ex series. It's the sort of game where you're given a set of choices, every single choice seems viable, and the game responds and validates the choice you made. At times, Torment: Tides of Numenera feels like the perfect role-playing game.
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