Torment: Tides of Numenera exemplifies that most modern of creative success stories: the Kickstarter smash hit. Developed by inXile Entertainment (the team behind Wasteland 2) it was launched on the crowdfunding platform in 2013 and reached its full $900,000 target after only six hours. By the end of the campaign it had raised almost $5m.

Why such fervid interest? Torment: Tides of Numenera is the spiritual successor to the renowned 1999 role-playing game Planescape: Torment, which, alongside other classics like Baldur’s Gate, helped redefine the genre. Set in the complex Planescape D&D campaign, its narrative took in a multiverse of coexisting dimensions, it featured a rich cast of well-drawn characters and an emphasis on dialogue rather than battle.

As you’d expect from that game’s spiritual successor, Torment: Tides of Numenera is a bizarre mishmash of worlds and themes. The player is the Last Castoff, an outsider with a past they had no control over, on an uncertain path of self discovery. The titular numenera are the remnants of past civilisations which dot the Ninth World, a battered and bruised Earth set a billion years in the future. The Ninth World has seen the rise and fall of countless civilisations and races in that time, but all of them remain unknown to the current denizens, who have been left only with their equally mysterious and often extremely dangerous numenera.

Torment is unapologetic in how much it tells the player; there’s no encyclopedia or tool tips to guide you in dialogue. You’re expected to read and learn as you play. The sheer mass and detail of the lore is overwhelming and hard to digest at first, though this seems deliberate based on who you are in this setting. As the Last Castoff you play the latest reject of a powerful entity who switches bodies to remain immortal; when the entity switches to a new body the previous body becomes conscious. You begin the game as one of these husks. You are abandoned, confused and uncertain, and the scraps of knowledge you pick up become as important as the scraps of technology you scavenge to survive.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Combat features a turn-based system reminiscent of Divinity: Original Sin. Photograph: Techland

The player is given the option of recruiting companions who can assist in dialogue skill checks and in combat. Companions are fleshed-out characters with their own motivations and reasons for helping you. Much like Baldur’s Gate, if you take a course of action that your companions disagree with there’s a chance they may leave your party for good or even attack you. In terms of dialogue, the writing is superb, evocative and ranges from lighthearted sci-fi jokes to a terrifying dissection of existence itself. And it’s a good job, too. There’s a lot to read and Torment expects the player to visualise all the intricately written and structured descriptions it uses. This isn’t a game where you rush through text to get to a fight.

In fact, the game has some advice in the early stages: “Don’t worry if you fail this task. In Torment failure often results in interesting outcomes.” This is true, though Torment is also one of few titles where you can die and see the game over screen while still creating your character. The Last Castoff’s body has been modified with upgraded regeneration so most deaths aren’t game overs and when you ‘die’ the world moves on without you as you recover, often in interesting and unpredictable ways. Torment encourages you not to save and reload if things don’t pan, because what is more important is “your story”. There’s a definite sense of experimentation and discovering your own motivations as a player, especially with the numenera you encounter. From your first few moments in the game you might die simply by engaging with your surroundings, and if you do, it doesn’t matter. It’s very similar in this regard to Planescape: Torment. The Nameless One in that title was immortal and death was basically just a temporary inconvenience.

That’s not where the similarities to Planescape: Torment end. While the player gets to choose the skills and abilities of the Last Castoff, you don’t get to decide how they look physically, their background or what they sound like. That’s been decided for you and a large part of the game is discovering why. You do get to decide the sex of your character, but beyond that, this game is about the identity you forge for a character you didn’t make in a world you had an impact on but no memory of.

Torment uses a skill-check system in almost every section of the game. Each character has a number of might, speed and intellect points which you can use to ensure you succeed in persuading someone in conversation or to increase your chances to hit in combat. Companions can help with skill checks, which gives Torment a similar feeling to tabletop D&D games.

While it’s an interesting system, it’s tempting to hoard skill points and avoid situations where you might want to spend them in case you run out later. During my playthrough, I ignored many early conversations because I’d run out of intellect (make your own jokes) and if there were any skill checks during the chat I knew I’d fail them. I could revisit most of these conversations later, but it felt counter-intuitive to ignore a gigantic mutant banging against a cage or a howling mob in front of a public execution because I had no points left and didn’t want to risk failing a check. It’s fairly easy to get skill points back outside of combat, you just need to find an inn and sleep, but that means ignoring a fun situation or backing out of a conversation, running to an inn, sleeping and then coming back. During combat, you have to rely on consumables to replenish skill points and if you run out of those, there’s not a lot you can do besides die and see what happens.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest It’s tempting to bypass interesting events until you have the skill points to handle them. Photograph: Techland

Combat is less important than in other RPGs like Pillars of Eternity or even Baldur’s Gate. It occurs during crisis points and features a turn-based system similar to Divinity: Original Sin. During these sequences, you can use the environment around you or even attempt to talk your way out of the fight entirely, by using persuasion. There are no random encounters, in many ways you have to go out of your way to trigger physical fights, but those options are open if that’s how you want to play the game.

Unlike Pillars of Eternity from which it borrows some technology, Torment is a sci-fi RPG, though the line appears to blur at times. There are machines and robots, and the user interface itself evokes a sci-fi feel with smooth metallic designs and glowing blue borders, but then you find yourself speaking to ghosts or following gods and other mythical items. But then here, ghosts aren’t fantasy and nothing is magic; it’s all part of the pan-dimensional science that is commonplace in this distant future.

In terms of equipment, a lot of what you find is scavenged, disposable and bizarre. Technology potentially a billion years old from a different reality may wind up being used as a crude mace instead of what it was originally designed for. In addition to equipment, the game gives players ciphers, which provide bonuses to certain skills and abilities and sometimes grant new ones, but if you equip too many they will generate negative rather than positive effects . Ciphers are limited-use items and, again, it’s easy to either hoard them or use them all and run out when you need them most. Artefacts are more permanent bonuses which won’t run out as quickly but still aren’t always reliable, and you can only equip two of them. Much of the skill of combat comes through resource management and knowing when to use items and when to hold back.

Actions you take in Torment affect an abstract power linked to morality called Tides. The Tides form a morality system where your actions shape how others see you. Each Tide is symbolised by a different colour depending on the sets of standards it symbolises. Indigo for example symbolises justice, the greater good and compromise. If you take an action that upholds the law, the Indigo Tide will become more dominant, but at the same time if you break a promise to tell someone a truth that may save their life, the Indigo tide will also become more dominant. Tides rise and fall as you play through the game, and as well as changing how other characters approach you, they affect your character’s legacy, which will alter the ending you get as well as grant you different abilities based on your most dominant Tide. Tides aren’t meant to be barriers and just because you usually play smart and talk your way out of trouble the game won’t penalise you if you decide to start smashing things up.

During character creation, the player can choose between a nano (mage), glaive (warrior/rogue) or jack (balanced), giving a rough outline of a player class, within those subsections are various abilities and traits you can select. One of the more notable of these was “scan thoughts” which outlines an NPC’s true thoughts in a few sentences at the end of their dialogue. While a lot of the skills and abilities are basic stat boosts or traits, abilities like “scan thoughts” seem to change how you play the game at a fundamental level, to the point it’s hard to imagine playing without it. It allows you to see whether companions are truly loyal or not, whether strangers are trying to attack or trick you.

Torment is designed to be replayed, you can’t fit a billion years into one play-through and expect to see everything. The sheer mass of stories and lore is impressive, and with less focus on combat, you can build characters that are designed for exploration and dialogue instead. The game is less a hunt for fights and gear and more a philosophical journey into what identity truly means. This is an intriguing, altogether different approach to storytelling. Torment: Tides of Numenera is more than a nostalgic homage to Planescape: Torment – its own innovations will mark the genre as much as its spiritual predecessor did.

Techland; PlayStation 4/Xbox One/PC (version tested); £45/£34.99 (PC)

