Enlarge / Your companions form the emotional core of Torment and make the less sensible plot points easier to swallow.
Torment: Tides of Numenera opens with a literal bang. A moon explodes over the game’s setting (simply called “the Ninth World”), and your avatar comes hurtling out of it toward the ground. Of course, you don’t actually see any of this happen. Nearly all of the sometimes slimy, often depressing, and always cerebral story that follows this explosive introduction is conveyed in words, not in images and sounds.
Once Torment begins in earnest, the game assumes the look of any number of top-down RPGs from a bygone era. You could liken it to Baldur’s Gate or even Diablo, but the game’s name alone makes it clear that this is specifically a successor to Planescape: Torment, and it was even pitched as such in its 2013 Kickstarter campaign. That intention shows in the game, too, in ways both obvious and intentionally obscure.
One of the most obvious callbacks is your main character—”The Last Castoff” is the latest of many nigh-immortal bodies to be created and once inhabited by “the Changing God.” Your sire has flitted from body to body for hundreds of years, running from some multi-universal nightmare called the Sorrow. Each time he “casts off” such a shell (every decade or so), that vessel wakes up as a new Castoff with a mind of its own. As such, just like in Planescape: Torment, you begin the game as an amnesiac immortal.
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