6/7/2023 0 Comments Torment nexus![]() It has more words than the entire Harry Potter series put together. The game also floats on a million scripted words. You can be compassionate but is your compassion reserved for the citizens of Sagus Cliffs or the sentient creatures living beneath it? If you think it's an easy choice, just look at how social media responds to the death of a human, then look at how it responds to the death of an animal. As you should expect from a game with complex scenarios, your decisions will pretty much never come down to “adopt the puppy or kick the puppy.” All of the tides seem to have positive and negative implications. It's just a matter what stance you take within these invisible tides. Many pivotal actions you take-or rather conversational decisions you make-will shift the tides in different directions. Rarely are your actions as black and white as, say, Mass Effect’s paragon vs. Play how you want and the tides will follow. Yet, as the name suggests, these tides are a lot more fluid. To a certain degree, they serve like a character's alignment in Dungeons & Dragons (lawful good, chaotic evil, etc.). ![]() You can assume a certain posture in your tone and, in response, the Silver Tide might raise a tiny amount. ![]() The tides are invisible, though you feel them constantly shifting. Your first conversation already begins to affect the game's namesake tides. Tides of Numenera is a world both beautiful and ugly, as baffling as it is logical, that wants to show itself to you, slowly, piece by piece, one weird cultural quirk, rite, and exhibition at a time. I mean, think about it: You awaken, the Last Castoff of the Changing God, you’re prey for the Sorrow which hunts you to the ends of the earth and within your own mind, and you just want to rebuild your Hide-a-Bed and catch a little shuteye? Your quest is to be hunted by the Sorrow until you step back into a resonance chamber where, you're told, everything will be fine once again. You meet the Sorrow, your enemy, the enemy, that spreads more like an infection or a cancer than a demon or a swordsman. One species builds a bridge to another race, and that race spans centuries to reach other past, present, and future species. You see people dressing in new-old ways, food prepared in old-new ways. Magical tomes stacked beside tech manuals. Analog technologies colliding with digital religions. Ancient buildings built atop futuristic buildings. You see civilizations stacked on top of civilizations. Aside from (mostly) green grasses and (largely) blue oceans, very little is recognizable otherwise. It’s on Earth, but it’s one billion years in the future. You interact with people, places, and things, and by learning about the world around you, you learn more about yourself. You set off to learn about yourself as a Castoff, the Changing God, and your place in the world. If nothing else, it’s the most unique take on the good old “amnesiac protagonist” trope I’ve ever seen. You know nothing of your life when the Changing God was in control. When the Changing God leaves behind a body, a new and entirely separate consciousness springs from within the castoff. This is how he became the Changing God.īut the castoffs-the bodies he tosses aside-aren’t done. He lives a life in that body, and then, when that body has served its purpose, he builds another body to inhabit. He crafts a new body and then inhabits this new body. So this guy builds a path to immortality. More than anyone could learn in a lifetime. Only problem is, there’s too much to learn. There’s this guy, right? And he’s so thirsty for knowledge that he wants to learn everything. Let’s talk about this Changing God first. You are the Last Castoff of the Changing God. It’s hard to imagine a more schizophrenic world since, well, since Planescape: Torment itself. It lives and dies by its own mind-blowing concepts. Torment: Tides of Numenera, the thematic successor to 1999’s Planescape: Torment, is a dungeon-punk role-playing game with old school cRPG blood pumping through its veins. With only a few introductory lines, my pupils practically dilate.
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