Torment: Tides of Numenera opens with you falling from orbit, a brand-new mind waking inside a body the Changing God has just discarded. He has cheated death for millennia by building vessels like yours and moving on, and every one he leaves behind wakes up as a castoff. You are the latest, and something ancient called the Sorrow is already hunting you. inXile Entertainment, with the creative team behind Planescape: Torment and Wasteland 2, built this isometric, story-driven RPG around a single question that follows you through every conversation: what does one life matter?
A Body the Changing God Left Behind
You are the Last Castoff, and you carry no memories of the being who wore your body before you. What you do carry is a link to every other castoff he ever abandoned, and to the Sorrow, a relentless entity that tears through anyone who shares that link. Survival means understanding what the Changing God was running from, and the search takes you from the tiered city of Sagus Cliffs to the living, digesting mass of the Bloom and beyond.
Torment is a game where dialogue is the main event. Most of the memorable moments happen in text: the memories you relive in Meres, the confessions you coax out of strangers, the choices where every option costs someone something. The writing team, led by Colin McComb, wrote a story that is epic in scope but personal at its core, and it earns the comparison to its 1999 predecessor by asking harder questions rather than repeating old ones.
The Ninth World of Monte Cook's Numenera
The setting is Monte Cook's Numenera, a far-future Earth where eight great civilizations have risen and vanished, leaving their technology scattered like fossils. The people of the Ninth World scavenge those remnants, the numenera, and treat them as magic because nothing else explains them. It gives the game a texture no traditional fantasy world can match.
- Cyphers are one-use devices with wild, unpredictable effects, and you can only carry so many before they start interfering with each other. Deciding when to burn one in a Crisis is a small drama every time.
- Artifacts and oddities are the stranger finds: permanent tools with quirks of their own, and curios whose only purpose is to make you wonder who built them and why.
- Locations range from cities built inside prior-world machinery to organic labyrinths that respond to your presence, all rendered on the same technology that powered Obsidian's Pillars of Eternity, with a Mark Morgan score underneath.
Companions with Their Own Reasons
Your party is small and deliberately odd, and each member has motives that may line up with yours or quietly cut against them. Their loyalty is never guaranteed, and how you treat them shows up in how they act when it counts.
- Callistege
- A nano who exists in several dimensions at once, her many selves flickering around her as she speaks. She is brilliant, ambitious, and not shy about what she expects to gain from traveling with a castoff.
- Aligern
- A gruff nano whose living tattoos crawl across his skin and hold secrets he would rather not discuss. He and Callistege despise each other, and keeping both in your party is a diplomatic exercise in itself.
- Matkina
- A fellow castoff known as the Silent Death, an assassin who has lost pieces of her own past and has every reason to distrust anything connected to the Changing God, including you.
- Rhin
- A lost child who hears a god no one else can, and who has no business anywhere near the dangers you attract. Whether you protect her or use her is one of the game's quieter tests of who you are.
The Tides Decide What You Leave Behind
Morality in the Ninth World is not a simple matter of right and wrong. Instead, five Tides track the kind of legacy your actions build: Blue for reason and knowledge, Red for passion and action, Indigo for justice and the greater good, Gold for empathy and sacrifice, Silver for admiration and power. You never pick one from a menu. You reveal it through what you say and do, and the world reads you accordingly.
- Characters and factions react to your reputation and your dominant Tides, opening some paths and closing others, so the same quest can play out very differently on a second run.
- Your three stat pools, Might, Speed, and Intellect, double as a resource you spend on Effort. Pouring Effort into a persuasion attempt or a desperate lunge improves your odds, but the pools drain, and the game asks you to live with the gamble.
- Glaive, nano, or jack, your character type and descriptor shape which approaches feel natural, but talking, sneaking, and improvising are always options, and the ending you reach is a product of all of them.
The Crisis System
When a situation boils over into a Crisis, the game shifts to turn-based tactics, but a Crisis is not simply a fight. Each one is a hand-built set-piece that blends combat with environmental puzzles, social maneuvering, and stealth. You might reroute a prior-world machine to end a standoff, talk a panicking guard into standing down mid-encounter, or slip your party out while the enemy is distracted. Weapons and cyphers matter, but so does the option to never draw them. Many players finish the game having fought only a handful of battles, and the game treats that as a legitimate way to play rather than a trick.
If you have ever wanted an RPG that trusts you to read, think, and answer for your choices, the Ninth World is waiting. Wake up in a body you did not ask for, outrun the Sorrow, and find your own answer to what one life matters.
