Or you might just be amused by the cartoonish, Don Quixote-like "adventurer" who responds to voices in his head. You might adopt an ex-slave and dive deep into her religion's endless pantheon of gods. Your NPC party members provide an emotional core to cling to in this strange storm. You're not meant to understand everything, and once you care enough about the plight of the characters, nations, and factions therein, you don't have to understand it all. Once you have a foothold on the cast and setting, you can appreciate the all-pervading "weirdness" of the Ninth World. I understood that life is cheap in the Ninth World and characters can come and go in an instant. I accepted that my first party member, Callistege, existed as a gestalt of every version of herself from every possible timeline. After keeping at it for about an hour, though, I was eventually able to slip into the otherworldly politics, characters, flora, fauna, machines, and machinations of Torment. The game's post-moon-explosion introduction is a bit of a slog as you read reams of text and struggle to understand a good half of it. ![]() Remembering so many made-up words and phrases can make it difficult to connect with Torment's world, empathize with its characters, or even know what the hell is going on half the time.īut it kind of works. If you think that introduction involved a lot of complex proper nouns to keep track of, you’re not wrong. Numenera have a deep impact on every nook and cranny of life in the Ninth World, so you'll run into and recruit all kinds of characters that are just a little bit off, whether due to quasi-magical interference or plain ol' poor decision-making, just like in Planescape: Torment. This means that, at times, you'll be worshipped, feared, or both as you navigate the world and discover its "Numenera"-artifacts from previous civilizations that are so technologically advanced they might as well be magic. They have their own cults, armies, and well-known agendas that shape the universe. As such, just like in Planescape: Torment, you begin the game as an amnesiac immortal.Ĭastoffs and the Changing God have already had a massive impact on the Ninth World by the time you arrive as smoldering orbital discharge. Each time he "casts off" such a shell (every decade or so), that vessel wakes up as a new Castoff with a mind of its own. One of the most obvious callbacks is your main character-"The Last Castoff” is the latest of many nigh-immortal bodies to be created and once inhabited by "the Changing God." Your sire has flitted from body to body for hundreds of years, running from some multi-universal nightmare called the Sorrow. That intention shows in the game, too, in ways both obvious and intentionally obscure. You could liken it to Baldur's Gate or even Diablo, but the game's name alone makes it clear that this is specifically a successor to Planescape: Torment, and it was even pitched as such in its 2013 Kickstarter campaign. Once Torment begins in earnest, the game assumes the look of any number of top-down RPGs from a bygone era. Nearly all of the sometimes slimy, often depressing, and always cerebral story that follows this explosive introduction is conveyed in words, not in images and sounds. Of course, you don't actually see any of this happen. A moon explodes over the game's setting (simply called “the Ninth World”), and your avatar comes hurtling out of it toward the ground. Torment: Tides of Numenera opens with a literal bang. ![]() Platform: Windows (reviewed), Mac, Linux, Xbox One, PS4 She holds no grudge towards the Last Castoff, and can be added to the party later, provided Aligern is not in it.Game details Developer: inXile Entertainment If Callistege is not chosen, she leaves for the Order of Truth. The Last Castoff must choose between them. But their companionship is short lived, as Aligern and Callistege get into another argument before even leaving the area. Both insist on accompanying the Last Castoff, although they have very different ideas of where to go and what to do. Each reflection of herself moves with her, and seem aware of what is happening at every moment: they react to events in her life in different ways, and might give away her feelings when she herself betrays nothing.Īlong with Aligern, Callistege discovers the Last Castoff in the Reef of Fallen Worlds, after their crash. She and Aligern are mutually exclusive, as they both stubbornly refuse to travel together.Ĭallistege is a dimension-shifting nano who pierces realities, and is always surrounded by multitudes of other versions of herself from other dimensions that she calls "sisters". ![]() Torment: Tides of Numenera Callistege is a potential companion in Torment: Tides of Numenera.
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