There’s no resolution to their journey, and few quests have any noticeable effect on the world outside of the “Where are they now?” end credits scrawl. You can talk your way out of or around almost anything with patience and the right stats.) You’ll often let foes escape instead of killing them, and then those characters just…disappear forever. (Side note: I only got in three or four fights in the entire game. This is particularly noticeable if, like me, you play the game in a mostly pacifist role. There are also plot lines that seem unfinished or prematurely truncated-hints (or even overt nods) towards a forthcoming resolution that never actually comes. And of the cast, she has probably the most satisfying narrative arc-but still, it’s a fraction of the depth and long-term development you got from companions in Planescape or Baldur’s Gate II. She has no useful skills, serves no real practical purpose, but that sliver of story is interesting enough I kept her around. Rhin, for instance, is an 11-year-old girl with a stone in her pocket that she claims is a god. It’s a shame because on the surface many are just as interesting as Planescape’s cast. Rarely will you need to talk to them again though, and aside from a single, fairly simple quest for each there’s not much in the way of character development. Oh, they’ll chime in occasionally, tossing out some fact or other about your surroundings or a certain character. Your first interaction with each is overwhelming, flush with history and trivia and character quirks. All of them seem interesting, at least to start. No, the real problem is that Tides of Numenera has so many great ideas and so many are squandered, or used once and then thrown away.Ĭompanions, for instance. At 30-odd hours long, Tides of Numenera is briefer than most isometric CRPGs, but that’s not the issue. I don’t just mean in terms of some raw “Hours Played” metric. It’s a shame then that our time in Numenera is so brief. There were rules to it all, but rules so broad it felt like anything could happen, to anyone, at any time. There, you were but a man, surrounded by angels and demons and everything in between, a cog in a machine so large you could only comprehend a fraction of a fraction of its full expanse. Planescape, a series of “planes of existence,” each one corresponding to one of the traditional Dungeons & Dragons alignments (Chaotic Good, etc.) is larger than life. It’s perhaps the only kind of story you could tell in a world like Planescape or Numenera. “A person with no name and no memory.” “Escape death.” “Immortal being.” “Prodigious talent for regeneration.” Like Planescape, Tides of Numenera is a fiercely personal story less about saving the world and more about saving one person: yourself. If you played Planescape though, some aspects should sound familiar. Thanks to your prodigious talent for regeneration, you managed to live and now have to find a place in the world. The Changing God abandoned your body as it crashed towards the ground, leaving you to die-except you didn’t. An important side effect: When the Changing God abandons a body, a new mind arises in his place, taking over the body and living out life as a Castoff, an immortal being with skills second only to the Changing God himself. See, you were created by the Changing God, a man who learned to move his mind from body to body and escape death.
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