All the others are kind of "meh." I found some different merecasters, but they all boil down to glimpses of Changing God/Castoff history, most of which are optional. Picking different NPC companions, Rhin is still the most interesting to me. My second run character ended up being more aggressive, but still inclined to talk or think through things rather than arbitrarily bashing everyone possible in the face. Mind you, I couldn't bring myself to play totally differently. While there are a few different little detours, there aren't really any totally different branches. Playing through a second time was educational, but not really beneficial.
TIDES OF NUMENERA CIRCLES IN RED FULL
It might be interesting enough to play a full second run through, which isn't all that common with me. Starting a second play through, I've already seen some different quests available, and I wonder what that's based on. Even "numenera" feels like an unnecessary mouthful.īut, for all the little gripes, it's still a fairly neat experience made more novel in this day and age of faster action. Sure, their powers are based on ambient, precursor-civilization nanotechnology, but "nanos" and their "esoteries" are just mages with spells for all practical purposes. It also feels like the Numenera terminology is just trying too hard to be different and techy. For all the abilities and items that let you select a type, I encountered approximately zero cases where it seemed to make a difference. But special damage is further broken down into energy/mental/chemical/transdimensional types that might mean something in the RPG, but are pretty meaningless in this game. Physical damage is reduced by armor, special damage is reduced by resistance. While the effort system works reasonably well in this context, other things don't. It all feels sort of inconsistent.Īnd while Planescape did feel somewhat hemmed in by being attached to the D&D rules of the time, Torment: ToN seems to have been designed closer to the Numenera game system. A few quests progress without you if you sleep, but most of the game does not.
Combat is functional, but I've seen better in similar game engines.
TIDES OF NUMENERA CIRCLES IN RED UPGRADE
There's an option to upgrade companion armor (which is otherwise fixed) in the second act that you can't really go back to if you change companions in the third (so far as I can tell). There's what seems to be a teleporter that looks like it should access multiple zones throughout the game, but I saw no way to go back to it in later acts when some of those areas are finally accessible. Some of the design suffers for being linear/disconnected/potentially-incomplete. I'm not against text-driven experiences, but I expect and desire more audio-visual information out of a video game. I think the isometric view would work better if there were at least portraits for NPCs being talked to, but there isn't even that much outside the protagonist and a few companions. Looooots of unvoiced dialog (there are a few lines here and there that are voiced). There are some interesting concepts to the companion characters, but only one of them approached being as deep and memorable as Planescape: Torment's cast - and even then, so much of her tale is off-screen.Īs a game. The world of Numenera has a weird sci-fi-fantasy mix of stuff going on, but (and this could just be me) it seems to lack some of the charm of Planescape. So yeah, it's good in that respect and mostly lives up to what it was trying to do. There's a reasonable examination of self and consciousness with internal demons of a sort made manifest and an essentially-immortal protagonist discovering and dealing with a history spanning multiple lifetimes. So as a "spiritual successor," it mostly works. But with its release, I did pick it up to play, as most reviews seemed positive. I didn't back it, though, out of wary skepticism. A spiritual successor to one of my favorite games of all time, Planescape: Torment? Yes please. I've been interested in the idea since it was announced.
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