![]() The Ninth World is a fascinating blend of dystopic science-fantasy, and I think the writing team deserves major props for their worldbuilding efforts and for forging ahead with a lot of interesting ideas. (There are some insightful post-mortem interviews with the development leads of Tides that really show how much the story's scope and form changed over time due to design and funding constraints, which largely explains why there was such a jarring divide between initial characterizations of the game and what we ultimately got.) So on some level, this feels like a failing of design and scope, which was then exacerbated by funding shortfalls, project mismanagement, and setting the expectation bar too high to begin with. Many of the game’s core systems feel poorly realized and bolted on, or too easily gamed so as to remove any measurable difficulty, all of which makes me think that this would have been better as an interactive story of some sort – perhaps some kind of isometric Telltale-type experience, or something similar that would have allowed inXile to focus on really fleshing out the story and characters while (hopefully) cutting down on the more problematic purple prose and its leaden effects on delivery. Too much of the story in Tides seems informed by these considerations, leading to a haphazard, confusing, and emotionally unsatisfying narrative experience that plods and jerks from one major plot point to another, leaving the player confused and indifferent in turns. I sympathize here, since even a record-setting Kickstarter like Tides had is nowhere near enough to create the kind of game that inXile advertised both initially and in the ensuing months as they started stacking up the stretch goals, but Tides feels like a rudderless, half-done homage to Planescape: Torment that misunderstands what it was people actually *liked* about that game and why. Unfortunately, despite exceedingly high expectations – both personally and within the story-driven CRPG community overall – it really struggled *as a story* and was broken and un-fun *as a game* in many respects. It almost hurts to give this one a down-vote, since this game was obviously a well-intended labor of love. I'd also like to take the remastered/rebuilt Planescape: Torment Enhanced Edition for a spin one of these days to make sure that nostalgia hasn't overly clouded my take on the original, but that's probably a longer-term aspiration for when I'm ready to spend a few weeks "playing the book" that is PST again. The following is more or less taken from my Steam review, but it bears inclusion here because of the wonderfully wonky roleplaying world of Numenera and how that relates to my ongoing efforts to better understand how engaging stories are constructed and told (or not) and translating those lessons into my own work. I backed it on Kickstarter back in 2014 because it seemed (at the time) to be a proper spiritual successor to the renowned CRPG Planescape: Torment and all the narrative depth and nuance that implies, but with a mind to ironing out a lot of Planescape's clunkiness and mechanical failings as a game. This stuff is only tangentially related to my writing efforts, but I do play a lot of games in my downtime and am – by definition, I think – influenced by them in various ways, not unlike particularly formative books I've read over the years, so I wanted to take a moment to offer my thoughts on Torment: Tides of Numenera.
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