Torment: Tides of Numenera

 PC
Metascore
81

Generally favorable reviews - based on 72 Critic Reviews

Critic score distribution:
  1. Positive: 57 out of 72
  2. Mixed: 14 out of 72
  3. Negative: 1 out of 72
  1. Riot Pixels
    Mar 17, 2017
    74
    It could have been a masterpiece if the writers knew when to stop.
  2. Hooked Gamers
    Apr 12, 2017
    70
    I never got the chance to play the original Planescape Torment, and so I wasn’t totally sure what to expect with Tides of Numenera. But the game brings with it a story that is wonderfully detailed. Each choice you make and each person you meet along your journey seems to alter the course of the game and those within Numenera. And this is to be commended. Unfortunately, though, many may feel that there is not enough action or combat, and I’d probably agree with them. The game did take me a long time to warm up to it and I’m still not totally sure if it was worth the time I’ve spent. But the story has drawn me in as I delve further into the story of the land and its characters. With some wonderful visuals and some beautiful locations, Torment: Tides of Numenera is well worth a look for RPG enthusiasts.
  3. PC PowerPlay
    Mar 31, 2017
    70
    An amazingly deep and unique roleplaying experience but marred by roadblock mechanics and repetitive game elements (Hollingworth). A deep and fascinating world with a compelling narrative and large degree of player agency (Wilks) [Issue#260, p.53]
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  5. GameOver.gr
    Mar 22, 2017
    70
    If you want your western RPG games full of text and lots of reading, Tides of Numenera will deliver. It has a very well written script, interesting quests and a rich world to explore, but lacks in the battle system and its technology.
  6. JeuxActu
    Mar 20, 2017
    70
    Torment : Tides of Numenera brings us back to the time of the first Fallout, Baldur's Gate and Planetscape Torment with a very rich background that will require players to read a lot in order to immerse into the story. A better UI and more complex fighting mechanics would allow more players to have fun with it.
  7. DarkStation
    Mar 3, 2017
    70
    In the end, if you have enjoyed the wave of Kickstarter PC RPGs so far, then you will enjoy Torment: Tides of Numenera too. It will likely be a game that you want to finish, but it likely won’t be one that calls you back for a second or third journey.
  8. Metro GameCentral
    Feb 28, 2017
    70
    That Torment: Tides Of Numenera is still a thoroughly engrossing experience despite its issues speaks volumes, and we’ve no hesitation in describing it as a worthy sequel to the original. But even so, this does not seem the best vehicle for its story or gameplay ideas. And it’s ironic that a game set so far in the future is relying on technology and concepts that are clearly decades out of date.
  9. Eurogamer Italy
    Feb 28, 2017
    70
    Torment: Tides of Numenera is a game that tries to deliver a supreme classical narrative experience and, in doing so, suffers from elitism and some sort of misuse of the medium. It’s an interesting experience, for a very few.
  10. PC Invasion
    Feb 28, 2017
    70
    Sometimes exceptional, always ambitious, but periodically falling short of its aims, Torment: Tides of Numenera is testament to the tribulations of following a universally established creative triumph. Well worth playing, nonetheless.
  11. Gameblog.fr
    Mar 16, 2017
    60
    Torment Tides of Numenera is an ambitious RPG with superb dialogs, but it has the bitter aftertaste of a incomplete game. It's an interesting experience, but not enough to be a must-have RPG.
  12. Game Over Online
    Mar 3, 2017
    60
    I failed to get into it. I skipped lightly along the plot, confronted by moral and ethical choices I for the most part either didn’t understand the implications of or didn’t care enough about. Interviews I have read with the designers indicated they wanted players to consider the question “What does one life matter.” This game didn’t make me consider that. It did make me consider what a dozen or so hours of my life are worth, and this wasn’t it.
  13. Gamer.no
    Feb 28, 2017
    60
    Quotation forthcoming.
  14. Ragequit.gr
    Feb 28, 2017
    60
    Tides of Numenera would have made sense as a quiet, indie, choose-your-own-adventure/RPG hybrid set in a strange and fascinating world. A small, indie game for a niche audience. Usurping Torment’s sacred mantle to present a barely competent CRPG with heavy interactive novel trappings that fails to elicit any sort of emotional connection with the player or give any meaningful context to his agency or interactions with the game’s world, will not be taken lightly, or forgotten any time soon, by its backers, this writer included.
  15. RPGamer
    May 29, 2017
    50
    What Tides of Numenera offers is a rich experience in learning lore and then making a final multiple guess at the ending, all the while never being fully satisfying in terms of presentation. There's more playability to this take on this game, but it might be better off being used for a title that has far less baggage.
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In Progress & Unscored

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  1. Ars Technica
    Mar 21, 2017
    Torment's uneven gameplay is pulled to the finish line by its engrossing world and story. Assuming you can get over the introductory hump (and all that text), it's absolutely a story worth reading, if not always playing. Buy it.
  2. Eurogamer
    Mar 7, 2017
    Where other RPGs are still content with a dragon or some apocalyptic end of the world boom, here the stakes are personal, as well as both asking and inviting far more interesting questions than how much fire you can fling from your fingertips. It's a far more welcoming game than the original Torment, though a slower burner as far as the main plot goes, and one that never quite has its predecessor's dark confidence. It is, however, as close as we've had in the last 15 or so years, and certainly doesn't invoke the name in vain. [Recommended]
  3. Kotaku
    Feb 28, 2017
    Despite clear flaws, Numenera is easily my favorite game of The Great PC RPG Revival (sorry, Pillars of Eternity, Tyranny, and Wasteland 2) so far. For nearly two decades, Planescape Torment was one of a kind, and after that kind of time passes, you figure that’s just the way it’ll stay. Against all odds, however, this 2017 video game has taken Planescape’s mottled old flesh and stitched together something strange and new. I wonder what sort of legacy it will leave.
  5. Rock, Paper, Shotgun
    Feb 28, 2017
    There is, throughout, a slight air of artificiality to Torment: Tides of Numenera. It has been made to please a specific crowd, and sometimes that shows; sometimes that comes at the expense of what matters most. This is outweighed entirely by the scale of this accomplishment. Torment is the weird, wordy, wise and wicked roleplaying game we’ve so desired during these long years of heightened spectacle. Not a total triumph, no, but close enough.

Awards & Rankings

55
#55 Best PC Game of 2016
44
#44 Most Discussed PC Game of 2016
17
#17 Most Shared PC Game of 2016

User Reviews

All reviews »
User Score
6.9

Mixed or average reviews- based on 441 Ratings

User score distribution:
  1. Positive: 250 out of 441
  2. Mixed: 88 out of 441
  3. Negative: 103 out of 441
  1. Althorion
    Mar 2, 2017
    6
    It’s not a bad game. But it *is* a scam.

    Numenera was kickstarted four years ago, in March 2013. It promised to become Planescape: Torment    It’s not a bad game. But it *is* a scam.

    Numenera was kickstarted four years ago, in March 2013. It promised to become Planescape: Torment spiritual successor, to be released in December 2014 and managed to achieve a number of stretch goals. It failed to deliver on each and every one of those.

    Let’s start from the end. Things that were promised include player stronghold, crafting system, an additional major city of M’ra Jolios Oasis, alternate exit from the Labyrinth to another part of the world… None of those are in the game.

    Then we have the release date, postponed over two years. One would assume that because of that game is a pinnacle of polish, runs smoothly and is bug-free. Nope. On a modern machine, having no problems running, for example, Rainbow Six: Siege at max details with optional hi-res textures from the DLC enabled in 80+ fps, Numenera’s framerate is somewhere between 30 and 50. There are multiple bugs, though thankfully nothing severe—some formatting codes in the text, sometimes you can’t turn off a pop-up and you’ll experience plenty of inventory problems, including multiplicating gear, selling things that cost you money (sic!), drag’n’drop not working… The game is fully playable, yes, but it makes you wonder what exactly programmers did with those extra two years, especially when they used preexisting game engine used in Pillars of Eternity, which didn’t have any of those problems…

    Finally, we should compare Numenera to the original Planescape. The predecessor was narrative-heavy game with seven fully-fledged followers with interesting stories; complicated, unique and weird world that was a joy to explore and interesting, philosophical overarching plot. Most of those things are still here—there’s a ton of beautifully written text, long dialogs full of interesting stories, the world has a rich lore that you can explore etc. However, one of the things that made Planescape so good and memorable were the followers. Here, you have six, but they are not nearly as interesting as Planescape’s ones. They have very little to say, which you can explore *with a single dialogue* plus occasional one-liner dropped here and there. Their quests are a joke—they can be as simple and short as one single dialogue, reveal next to no information about them and be a chore (Callistege’s and Rhin’s especially; I don’t want to go into the spoiler territory, but when one character returns to you with something that could be an epic tale, they just give you one sentence that amounts to “too much to tell, so I won’t tell anything”).

    The first one third of the game (part which you could see and explore in the beta) is great, full of life, interesting quests etc. For this part only, I’d give at least 8/10. Unfortunately, that’s the best that game has to offer and it’s all downhill from there. Locations are rushed, NPC have next to nothing to say, quest quickly devour into “fetch me this thing from two locations from here, that’s not even heavily guarded”. And then there is the ending, which boils down to “here is the list of all possible outcomes, choose the one you like the most, done”. Nothing you did before that matters but for a quick recap in the epilogue.

    The game at this point is not worth its price. It’s not that long (it took me 20 hours to beat with *all* sidequests, but I read quickly and that is the most limiting factor; conversely, original Planescape was almost twice as long), quite bugged and not that fun overall. If you like reading in your games, you’ll like it, it is really well written. It just doesn’t feel too much like a game and I feel really sold short on the promises the developer made.    … Full Review »
  2. moonlight_shado
    Mar 2, 2017
    4
    - This is not Torment by any stretch of the imagination. Just comparing itself to the 1999 masterpiece, is anathema.
    - Extremely poor    - This is not Torment by any stretch of the imagination. Just comparing itself to the 1999 masterpiece, is anathema.
    - Extremely poor audio-visual presentation, even by indie game standards. For a 4.5 million dollar Kickstarter, this is a disgrace.
    - In spite of its rich world and lore, it utterly fails to create an emotional connection with the player or make us care about anything going on in the Last Castoff's story.
    - RPG mechanisms, character development, inventory acquisition and management are at amateur levels.
    - Meres and their sad, sad implementation. It would have been preferable to save some face and not include them at all.
    - The bitter aftertaste in players' mouths, that this was merely a tech demo for selling the Numenera world to prospective publishers for future projects. There is no game here.
    - The silently cut stretch goals of the Kickstarter campaign. In light of the project's extremely poor quality, the argument of "We wanted to focus on polish" seems even weaker. High tier backers should be furious.

    http://ragequit.gr    … Full Review »
  3. TheThirdEye
    Feb 28, 2017
    10
    When I first saw that Planescape: Torment, a game that shaped my outlook and expectation of games to come, was getting a spiritual successor IWhen I first saw that Planescape: Torment, a game that shaped my outlook and expectation of games to come, was getting a spiritual successor I was worried. TToN has surpassed expectations and left me completely satisfied. This is a game that rewards and encourages the curious. This is a cool, sweet drink in a desert of games where story is only barely there because it is required. This is art.

    --Garth Holden    … Full Review »
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