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Have You Played... Torment: Tides Of Numenera?

Torment and tide wait for no man

Torment: Tides Of Numenera is apparently a 'thematic successor' to Planescape: Torment, which, as descriptors go, is even more woolly than 'spiritual successor'. Translated into jargon talk, this is a single-player RPG with an isometric perspective, set in a part-fantasy part-steampunk universe, and it's so story driven that it's basically like reading a book.

You play the most recent incarnation of a god. Every time they shuck off their previous body and slide into a new one, they leave the first just... alive. Like if the moulted skin of a tarantula got up and started running around under the belief it was a separate spider with amnesia. You form a ragtag group of adventurers, you get into high-concept-jinks.

My favourite part of Torment is the start, which sounds like damning with faint praise, but it encapsulates how the game works. You start falling from a very great height, and can have a number of internal responses to this. You can try to slow yourself down, or aim for a softer landing. Or you can try to remember what happened, who you are, what's going on... If you spend too much time thinking and not enough trying to do something, you'll go kersplat on the ground, and that's that. So in a sense, Torment is a very easy game to complete.

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