You can find hundreds of other reviews through our Curator page

Though it’s not afraid to lore dump on people who seek such things, the adventure occupies a world that’s bigger than your unnamed protagonist and will just carry on around you with or without your understanding. Ignore some quests for too long and they will progress without your input, eventually resolving themselves at times and leaving you without reward and experience. Or perhaps you’ll undertake an action that seemed to be for the best and suffer the consequences when forced to view your solution from another angle. There’s talk of a mole-like monster hiding in the dumps that keeps burrowing under people’s houses, prompting them to fatally collapse on their occupants. Surely just killing off that pest would benefit everyone, so why not gather up the flaming torches and pitchforks?

Because there’s rarely just black and white in Torment; there are varied shades of grey. And there is always another solution available for people who look for them. Though the game has a reasonable combat engine, you can avoid the vast majority of conflicts by charming, lying, bluffing or threatening your way out of most situations. Even when a battle does break out, you often have more options than just putting everything to sword. A relic left by an advanced civilisation long dead has its basement filled with hostile AI drones you could probably bash to bits if you wanted. Or, you could try creeping around the sides and purging command consoles to restore them to default setting. Because even in the realms of high fantasy, the answer to almost any IT issue is to turn it off and on again.

I appreciate moments like these, because if Torment has one big failing, it’s the hopelessly drawn out and somewhat clumsy battles that always seem to take three times longer than they should. In the combat system's defence, there’s a lot to fit in; each character has a healthy range of battle options, and the equipping of ciphers which act like (often) one-shot special attacks. Effects range from the commonplace, like blasts and stuns, to the more remarkable, such as when a target is forced to walk around muttering randomly to itself for six turns while it drops a trail of money. Some characters can hide from sight to escape the enemy’s attention, or to set up devastating ambush attacks. Others have skill sets involving grappling hooks, short-range teleportation or especially harsh words.

But the world itself is Torment big star, shuffling in alien creatures from different dimensions or sentient beings of gleaming liquid metal as the norm because why shouldn’t they be? Why shouldn’t that fountain shoot gibbering eel-fish instead of water? Why shouldn’t there be a centuries-old would-be warlord, cursed with immortality and now forced to stand in a corner as punishment for a war waged so long ago, it’s faded from memory? Why shouldn’t some of the artifices you find be ridiculously useless knick-knacks from a race of people history insists never existed? Why shouldn’t someone’s half-remembered guilt of an age-old atrocity be manifested in your own mind to offer slight stat buffs?

Full Review // http://www.honestgamers.com/13344/pc/torment-tides-of-numenera/review.html