Torment: Tides of Numenera - An Unusual Game

Eurogamer is trying to analyze Torment: Tides of Numenera, and think it is an unusual game.

Torment doesn't struggle for imagination but to make it really work you will need to invest yours, too, for this is a game about reading, about letting your mind wander as if you were reading a book - or as if you were playing a tabletop role-playing campaign. If you don't meet it half-way you will be left with a plain experience. Fully half of the screen can be text at times, with little going on elsewhere, although sparse but well-timed sound and visual ornaments - shouts of a crowd, flashes of light - do enough to bring to life what you read. It isn't ugly, I'm not saying that; the environments are like lovely little paintings that your rather more mundane characters trample on. But it is a game that requires your input.

It does a good job of getting you in the right frame of mind, though, pushing you down into your chair and preparing you for what comes ahead. I wrote about the the opening two minutes of the game in a separate article because they stunned me, slapped me up sharp, and this was followed by an inventive character creation sequence with not a statistic in sight. It was all story and interactive dialogue and ethical and philosophical choices about who I was. It was very effective.