Torment: Tides of Numenera – Choices, Companions, and the Weight of Immortality
When Torment: Tides of Numenera was first announced, I was immediately drawn in. It was presented as a thematic successor to Planescape: Torment, promising philosophical storytelling, difficult choices and companions with lives and motives of their own.
I backed the record-breaking Kickstarter campaign, joining 74,405 people who pledged more than $4.1 million. The scale of that enthusiasm also became part of the game’s burden. Expectations expanded with every stretch goal, while the project itself took almost four years to reach its full release in February 2017.
The finished game did not contain everything imagined during that campaign. Some promised systems and companions were reduced or removed. Yet in the areas that matter most to me—story, dialogue, worldbuilding and moral consequence—it remains a remarkable role-playing game.
Its most interesting achievement is not simply that choices matter. It is that every choice is made from inside someone else’s attempt to escape consequence. The protagonist survives because an immortal man has repeatedly occupied bodies, abandoned them and left the resulting people to live with the damage.
A Successor Without Planescape
Tides of Numenera is not a direct continuation of Planescape: Torment. It shares neither the setting nor the Nameless One. Instead, it carries forward a particular conception of what a role-playing game can be: a story in which identity, mortality and responsibility matter more than accumulating equipment or killing increasingly large monsters.
The setting is Monte Cook’s Ninth World, an Earth so far in the future that the remains of vanished technological civilisations are treated as magic. Machines survive without explanations. Entire communities form around artefacts whose original purposes have been forgotten.
This gives the game extraordinary freedom. Almost anything can exist without requiring the conventional coherence of medieval fantasy or near-future science fiction. A location may be biological, mechanical, psychic and religious at the same time.
That freedom occasionally makes the world feel like a collection of brilliant ideas rather than one naturally evolved society. More often, it produces places and people unlike those in almost any other RPG.
The Moral Cost of Immortality
The protagonist is the Last Castoff, the most recent body discarded by the Changing God. For centuries, this man has escaped death by transferring his consciousness into new hosts. When he leaves, those bodies do not simply die. They awaken as new individuals—the Castoffs—carrying memories, abilities and enemies inherited from a life they did not choose.
The Last Castoff begins by falling from orbit, literally entering the story in a body from which someone else has fled. The immediate mystery is personal: who are you, what occupied this body before you and why is an ancient creature called the Sorrow hunting the Changing God’s abandoned vessels?
The larger question is moral. The Changing God has achieved a form of immortality, but only by externalising its cost. He survives; other minds awaken in his discarded bodies and inherit the danger.
That makes immortality less a power than a system of debt. The game repeatedly asks whether a life matters because of its origin, its duration, its memories or the effects it has on other lives. I later explored this broader problem in an essay about how immortality changes the scale of identity and responsibility.
Death itself is woven into the mechanics. The Last Castoff can often return through the Castoff’s Labyrinth, a mental space that expands as the story continues. Some encounters and puzzles use death as a route to information rather than treating it as an automatic reload.
That does not make the protagonist invulnerable in every circumstance. The important point is that death is no longer a clean boundary between success and failure. It becomes another state through which the story can move.
Crises as More Than Combat
One of the game’s most distinctive systems is the Crisis system. A Crisis is a hand-crafted, turn-based encounter, but it is not necessarily a battle in the conventional sense.
Characters move and act in an initiative order, yet the objective may involve escaping, manipulating machinery, persuading someone, protecting a particular person or changing the environment. Enemies can sometimes be defeated without being killed, and the most obvious combat solution is not always the most rewarding one.
This makes Crises feel closer to playable dramatic scenes than random combat encounters. Violence remains possible, but it is one tool among several.
The system does not always fulfil its potential. Some Crises still become prolonged fights, and the tactical mechanics are less refined than the dialogue and worldbuilding. At their best, however, they express the game’s larger philosophy: words, knowledge, movement and deliberate refusal can matter as much as damage.
Five Tides Instead of Good and Evil
The game replaces traditional alignment with five Tides: Blue, Red, Indigo, Gold and Silver.
They do not correspond neatly to good and evil. Blue is associated with reason, wisdom and understanding. Red reflects passion, emotion and decisive action. Indigo concerns justice, community and the greater good. Gold represents empathy, charity and sacrifice. Silver concerns influence, admiration and power.
The same action can express more than one Tide, and none is inherently virtuous. Sacrifice can be compassionate or self-destructive. Justice can become authoritarian. Passion can produce courage or cruelty. The desire for influence can support leadership as easily as vanity.
Your actions gradually establish a dominant Tide or combination of Tides, forming a Legacy. This can affect how people perceive the Last Castoff, which options become available and how certain items respond.
The system is more interesting than a morality bar because it asks what values the character repeatedly expresses rather than whether the game has awarded a good or evil point. Its weakness is opacity. The connections between an individual decision, the hidden Tide values and later consequences can be difficult to perceive without another playthrough.
That uncertainty is also part of the appeal. A moral decision is not reduced to choosing the dialogue option marked as virtuous.
Companions as Competing Interpretations
The companions are among the game’s strongest elements. They do not exist merely to fill combat roles. Each carries a different relationship to violence, identity, loyalty and the strange possibilities of the Ninth World.
Aligern is guarded, severe and marked by past compromises. Callistege appears to occupy several possible realities at once. Erritis’s heroic confidence may be less entirely his own than it first appears. Matkina has survived by becoming difficult to read. Rhin is vulnerable in a way that turns several player decisions into uncomfortable tests of protection, usefulness and responsibility.
Their reactions matter because they rarely agree on what the Last Castoff should become. One companion may admire a decision another finds foolish or morally repellent.
This gives conversations a function beyond exposition. The party becomes a set of competing interpretations of the protagonist. Your companions are not simply watching what you do. They are deciding what your actions mean.
The Bloom
The second major hub, the Bloom, is the game’s most memorable location. It is an enormous living predator that has become a city, an interdimensional passage and an ecosystem built around the things it swallows.
People live among its tissues, trade through its mouths and attempt to interpret its appetites. Streets feel temporary because the city itself is alive and may digest, open or rearrange the spaces around them.
The Bloom embodies the game’s central interests unusually well. Bodies contain other lives. Places consume memories. Survival depends on deciding what may be sacrificed, and every route through the world appears to pass through something else’s hunger.
It is grotesque, dreamlike and more coherent than its strangeness should permit. Even when the main narrative loses momentum, exploring the Bloom remains compelling because almost every corner suggests a history larger than the immediate quest.
Kickstarter Promises and the Finished Game
The Kickstarter’s extraordinary success created expectations that no finished game could entirely escape. Stretch goals expanded the proposed companion roster, locations, systems and localisation plans. During development, some of those commitments were changed or removed.
That disappointment was legitimate, particularly for people who had backed specific promised features. At the same time, a feature appearing on a crowdfunding page does not guarantee that it will improve the finished design. Crafting, for example, may have added another system without strengthening what the game actually does well.
The more revealing question is whether the final trade-offs produced sufficient depth in the material that remained. For me, they largely did. The game is uneven, and parts of its final movement feel more compressed than its early worldbuilding. Its companions, conversations and stranger quests nevertheless possess a density that many larger RPGs never achieve.
The game received no paid narrative expansion. In May 2017, the free Servant of the Tides update added Oom as a companion with a personal quest, introduced the Voluminous Codex, expanded character progression and improved companion-attitude and Legacy information.
That update restored some promised material, but it did not transform the game into the limitless project imagined during the campaign. What remains is a substantial, self-contained RPG rather than the beginning of a long-running content platform.
What One Life Matters
Torment: Tides of Numenera did not displace Planescape: Torment in the way some backers may have hoped. Its story is less tightly focused, its combat is uneven and its immense setting occasionally scatters attention rather than concentrating it.
Yet comparison with its predecessor can obscure what it achieves on its own. Few games are this interested in asking why a life should matter when bodies, memories and identities can all be replaced.
The answer is not supplied by immortality. Living forever may simply extend the amount of damage one person can leave behind.
The Last Castoff matters because they are not merely another body in an endless sequence. They can choose what to inherit, what to reject and whether the consequences passed down to them will be passed on again.
The game’s choices carry weight not because every decision produces a spectacularly different ending. They carry weight because the protagonist begins as someone else’s discarded consequence—and must decide whether to become more than that.
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