"Reading," the Nigerian poet Ben Okri said once, "is an act of civilization." Torment: Tides of Numenera

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As a spiritual successor to 1999's Planescape: Torment, one of the finest (and strangest) RPGs ever made, Torment: Tides of Numenera embraces its predecessor's isometric design with its use of the capable Pillars of Eternity engine. More importantly, it preserves Planescape: Torment's weird philosophical tone and aesthetic, filling the screen with everything from quasi-medieval markets to entire cities crafted out of meat.

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Sometimes, admittedly, it clings too much to fantasy trappings despite its setting of a billion years in the future, and its mages and ax-wielding warriors leave it feeling like a take on Baldur's Gate with aliens in the place of elves. Fortunately, it's an attractive vision. It takes place in an era when the strange trash of thousands of dead civilizations – the titular numenera – rots scattered about the Earth, its purpose often long forgotten. It's a world where headless men arouse about as much curiosity as a 3D printer today, where neon-green monoliths zap the unprepared, and where pods packed with demigods sometimes plummet from the sky. For all that, it's also a world where random goons with swords attempt to rough you up if they don't like your looks. I guess some things never change.

“ I admire that you're not actually a hero, but effectively garbage – literally.

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Fortunately, you're not such a nobody that no one wants to hang out with you. Torment: Tides of Numenera features several companions who can tag along with The Last Castoff three at a time, and I sometimes found their stories as fascinating as my character’s. Take the wise Callistege, who walks around surrounded by flickering clones of herself glimpsed from alternate realities. Or consider Erritis, a warrior whose unstable personality channels Beauty and the Beast's Gaston. Strangely, a disproportionately large amount of his lines are voiced, while the bulk of the rest of Torment's dialogue remains disappointingly relegated to text.

“ When you play Torment: Tides of Numenera, you might as well be reading a book.

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It still delivers a fantastic story, though, the power of which largely rests on the wealth and variety of its dialogue choices. Virtually every conversation and interaction triggers a cascade of dialogue options with skill checks, usually with text that sometimes sprawls into a dozen richly styled sentences. Tides allows for three combat classes – the warrior-like Glaive, the versatile Jack, and the mage-like Nano – and the latter opens even more dialogue options through the ability to read minds. In fact, conversations offer such a dizzying array of options that it's sometimes difficult to figure out how to end them (especially because the UI doesn’t gray out options you’ve already read through).

“ The red tide doesn't necessarily mean you're evil.

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“ I usually found the combat comparatively dull.

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The battles disappoint overall, but that doesn't mean there's not some sense of strategy outside the squabbles peppered among the reams of dialogue boxes. One of Tides' better features in this regard is the "effort" system, which lets each character in the party draw from a pool of stat points every in-game day to add a little boost to the effectiveness of an action. Need to figure out how some eon-old gadget works? Pump a few effort points into the task and you'll have a greater chance to override it even if your class would fail the skill check in another RPG. It also works in combat, allowing you to land strikes that might have missed. Their limited design, much like the rest of Tides of Numenera, has the nice side effect of encouraging thoughtful play. Early on, it's hard to shake off the temptation of use effort points to their full effect at every opportunity, but I found greater reward in learning how to wait until I truly needed them.