“Magic” is called “Esotery”, and that’s the easiest change. GameplayĪs the start of playing Torment it’s a little overwhelming since so little of what you’d expect from an RPG appears. Barring fellow castoff Matkina none of them really have any reason to be hanging around the main character for so long as the plot doesn’t concern any of them, and only Erritis the over-heroic idiot is any fun to have around – and yet his meager plotline is a quest to make him no fun at all.

But I never really felt protective, attached or connected with any of them, not like Morte or Minsc or Mordin or any of the better companion characters from other RPGs. I even had the option to sell one to slavery or feed another to a giant Sarlacc-like worm, which is awesome. It’s hard to talk badly about the companions because they’re so well written, unique story events only occur when certain characters are with you, and if you so choose you can even complete their stories and give them a happy ending away from you. There certainly could’ve been a lot more here as Torment only scratches the surface of the Numenera universe. Sometimes the game gave us more, sometimes it’s left to our imagination, and I’m not sure which is more satisfying. The more we found out about the Ninth World, the more we wanted to know about it. The game keeps on introducing fascinating things, like the Endless Battle, the galaxy-spanning emotion-eating city-creature called the Bloom, an entire land devoted to ancient tombs, and other twisted discoveries that makes every moment of Torment interesting. There’s a lot of text but honestly we didn’t mind. Your character is the most recent, The Last Castoff, and you will have a part to play in the fight against the terrifying entity called The Sorrow that is hunting down castoffs and the Changing God. A powerful being called The Changing God keeps himself immortal by continually changing and shedding bodies, leaving these “castoffs” to make their own way in the world. It is millennia in the future, with our world so far in the past that nothing remains of it.

Torment tides of numenera how to rest