Similarly, Numenera is, like many other fantasy worlds, a harsh one that doesn’t always welcome compassion. If you are like me and wish to avoid combat at all cost, it’s possible to do so (I was pulled into one or two battles but I was able to talk my way out of most hostile situations), but the pacifist route makes your character painfully irritating to some powerful NPCs who might otherwise wish to ally themselves with you and help you achieve grander ambitions if you were just willing to get your hands dirty. Some of the decisions are difficult to make. Importantly, the game never judges none of these Tides are “evil” or “good” – just different ways of looking at the world and responding to it. Depending on how you shift the Tides around over the longer term, other characters will change how they treat you, and windows of opportunity for your character will be both opened and closed. Resolve an issue through brute force and the balance of the Tides will be shifted differently compared to what would happen if you charmed your way through the situation using your character’s charisma. Instead, it features a “Tides” system whereby the game will track a large number of different “Tides” based on your behaviour. Numenera doesn’t judge and doesn’t prescribe behaviour for the player. The great thing about Numenera is that it really is up to you how you make your way through the game. But with limited memories of your life as the god’s host, let alone your new role in the world, it can be difficult to decide which forces to align yourself with, how to interact with other gods’ bodies, and how to make your way through the world. As the former body of a god, you are of great interest to organisations both benevolent and malign. Talk about abandonment issues and indeed many of these husks have got issues. This god flits from one body to the next, using them until they’ve served their purpose and are then discarded, becoming mortal, with the god moving on to the next one. You play as a cast-off husk of a god-given sentience. It might not be a visual novel, exactly, but you do need to be in a similar mindset to enjoy what’s going on in Tides. ![]() Character statistics are limited, combat scenarios are (mechanically) simple, and instead there is paragraph after paragraph after paragraph of text to read through. And I applaud the developers for being brave and keeping all the statistics and metagame stuff to a minimum in order to focus on the storytelling. Tides of Numenera is not the kind of game for people who like combat and min/maxing their characters. I was wrong, and I am very glad for that. there would be a greater emphasis on combat, player stats, loot, all that stuff. I thought, when I first saw this game in action, that the delightfully antique top-down isometric viewpoint was a ruse to hook players in, but then the game would kick in to offer more ‘modern’ gameplay – i.e. I didn’t think that in the modern gaming environment, where snappy dialogue and fast action are the hallmark of even the greatest of RPGs, Tides of Numenera would be quite so brave as to properly emulate Planescape: Torment. This is the kind of game that Torment: Tides of Numenera models itself on, and I’ve got to say, it exceeded my expectations by a great deal. There were still battles, but each one had real purpose for existing, and the combat system was relatively simple those battles were more about being part of the narrative than being a consequence of it. ![]() ![]() Related reading: Matt also interviewed the creative forces behind the game. At a time when most RPG narratives weren’t much more than excuses to funnel players from one battle to the next (you could say that not a lot has changed in the years since, frankly), Planescape Torment’s development team had the bravery to strip most of the combat out of its game and rely on the actual narrative and decisions players were making to carry the experience and keep players interested. One of the greatest narrative game experiences you could ever hope to play is Planescape: Torment.
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