5/5 ★ – crimson2877's review of Torment: Tides of Numenera.

Beaten: May 03 2022 Time: Idk probably 25 Hours Platform: Xbox Series X 
Honestly I think Torment: Tides of Numenera is a more interesting game to talk about than its predecessor, even if it’s not (by my measure) a better game. It’s conflicted and sprawling in pretty much every way that a work can be, and the ways it frays are almost all tied in to the idea that this is a followup to Planescape: Torment. Somehow though, much like KOTOR 2 (and if we’re being honest, Planescape: Torment itself), the rough edges and scraped skin where the work’s intentions crumble into oblivion just end up feeling endearing to me. 
What’s remarkable about Numenera is that this knotty dissonance is tied into the setting at a foundational level. Numenera is a ttrpg set something like 1 billion years in the future on earth, after many (8 in particular) grand civilizations have risen and fallen, leaving every inch of the land coated in history and relics of ages long past. It’s a setting about discovering old, odd, or broken things, and it’s tied to a system that drops all pretense of simulation from the style D&D usually goes for in favor of simple mechanics to drive a more exciting story. Put simply, it’s a world of 70s and 80s pulp-hard sci-fi stories layered on top of and inside each other, like taking pages out of every Isaac Asimov book and rearranging them in a random order. I Love It. 
What this means for the game is that it’s probably ok if your story has ends laying on the ground that don’t really relate to anything, because it fits into the larger whole. The first Torment is a tidy game, a game where just about every scrap of dialogue felt like it was thematically driven by the same forces (with the rough edges of the game being the amount of combat, which wasn’t driving that same thematic point, and was much more common than I remembered and also much more than this game lol). That’s a lot of why that game is so beloved, I think. You rarely get a game that focused and thought out, and yet so expansive as well. 
Numenera hasn’t been as well remembered, and in fact seems like it’s fallen out of public discussions over the 5 years since its release, and I think that untidyness (or the non-standard mechanics that mix typical cRPG design with Numenera’s Cypher System in a way that *I* like but definitely feels a bit weird) has a lot to do with it. In fact, besides those two reasons, I can’t imagine why it would be forgotten. The quest and hub design is just like, intensely good, with a lot of the quests being some of my favorites out of any RPG I’ve ever played. Quests often lead into each other, tying up in unexpected ways, or branching out in a way that truly enhances the scale of the world. 
Putting itself next to Planescape was always going to be a losing battle, but I thing the minutiae of Numenera should earn it a place next to its brothers (Tyranny and Disco included) as one of those games that mixes Adventure games, RPGs, unhinged creativity, and emotional devastation together unbelievably potently. It’s a great game on its own merit, and deserves a reevaluation. I hope it gets that second look sometime