RPGs are supposed to be about more than just managing a character sheet; in the best pen-and-paper campaigns, the bulk of your time is spent talking. You’re prodding the DM to see how much information they’re willing to give up, and making persuasion or perception rolls in an attempt to uncover some hidden clue or alternative path to success. This is a part of the RPG heritage that modern games have largely forgotten (or at very least simplified into practical irrelevance), but Torment: Tides of

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This is due in large part to the frequency with which choices and skill checks are made. There are reams of of well-written dialogue in Torment, and whether you are trying to get an alien prisoner to dish on how they got locked up or negotiating to save (or condemn) a slave’s life, it felt as though barely a minute or two would pass without choices that hinged on my character’s strength, speed, and intelligence. To some, this might sound either dull or impenetrably complex, but Torment’s unique “Effort” system kept it from being either for me.Each of the many skill checks is associated with one of three base stats: strength, speed, and intellect. Within a given day, each member of your four-person party has a set number of Effort points to spend to increase their chances of success in related tasks.So for instance, I may be shoulder-deep in a writhing, biological relic of some sort, trying to fish out a valuable item, and as it’s about to slip through my fingers, I’m asked to make a speed check. There’s a base chance to succeed, which gets calculated from all manner of passive traits and other extrapolated stats, but if I really want what’s floating around in that amorphous, slimy mass, I can spend points from my speed effort pool to rig the odds heavily in my favor. Great success - I pull out an immensely rare and powerful healing item.It’s easy, at first, to spend as many Effort points as allowed in an attempt to sway every individual to your side every time, but if you don’t start assessing what rolls you want to win as opposed to the ones you really NEED to win, you could find yourself up a creek when a Crisis event begins. These are like turn-based battles with words. One that I got into involved a group of mutants and some enforcers for a local crimelord who were looking to shake them down for their monthly protection money. Both sides looked primed to fight when I stepped into their neighborhood. You can see one possible way it can play out below.As you can see, almost every turn requires each of your characters to make crucial skill checks in order to de-escalate the situation. Even when things to come to blows, though, the Effort system still holds sway. A lumbering haymaker of an axe swing can be made more damaging with additional strength effort, just as you can spend intellect effort to pump up a big gravitational crowd control spell. In combat or out, managing your daily allotment of effort points is a huge part of the experience.What can’t really be conveyed either through these gameplay videos, or really through any words of my own, is just how well-written Tides of Numenara is. Dialogue is interspersed with sumptuous descriptive passages that make playing almost feel like reading a good book. It’s not a typical choice, but it worked out really well in the demo I played, because it brought the fantastical setting and its inhabitants to life in a way that goes beyond visuals. The Bloom is an endlessly strange place, it being an extra-dimensional biological entity that spans the gap between different points in time and space. Though Torment is graphically competent, the unique horrors and cosmic oddity of the place would be lost without these extra bits of observational writing. Besides, all the best DMs write good fluff text; this is just the equivalent.All told, The Bloom is just one corner of a much larger, equally weird world of the distant future, where countless human and alien civilizations have risen and fallen, each atop the ruins of the last. It congeals into an oddly alluring sort of techno-fantasy where just about anything seems possible or permissible. There's of course no way to know if all of that possibility will be diligently mined, but my two hours with Torment: Tides of Numenara certainly has me hopeful thus far.

Vincent Ingenito is IGN's foremost fighting game nerd. Follow him on Twitter and help him sort out his Street Fighter 5 character crisis.