Here, however, they are interactive and allow you to decide how each scenario plays out. A series of memories, similar to the ones you “reached” for in Pillars of Eternity, guides you through the preface. Torment introduces you to its mechanics and the essence of its role-playing immediately, and it’s refreshing to find the character build is a streamlined experience. Your goal, then, is to find a way to stop The Sorrow, and confront your sire. Yet his unholy endeavour unleashed the wrath of The Sorrow, an abomination who seeks only to destroy not only him, but any of his previous castoff bodies. Each body he left behind – of which you are the most recent – developed its own soul, as well as a form of immortality. An immortal of sorts, you’re a vessel discarded by The Changing God, a being who discovered he could transfer his consciousness between bodies in order to live forever. With your memory almost entirely wiped after plunging to the planet in an incident you have no knowledge of, you awake in the Sagus Protectorate. The setting is The Ninth World, or rather Earth, one billion years in the future.

Fettles can affect you in both good and bad ways, and affect skill checks and combat.It takes a few hours to adjust to the new world and, much like The Last Castoff you control, you will need to learn, listen and assimilate.

The writing fires synapses all over your brain, prodding your curiosity, making you recall similar fleeting ideas you may have had but never realised, and imbuing you with a sense of need which drives you to discover the end of every side quest, open every book, and tinker with every artifact. The words themselves offer far more than the Pillars of Eternity engine it utilises, for while The Ninth World offers up colourful denizens to speak to and bizarre objects to interact with, it’s the stories and descriptions woven around these pixels which shine through. As a gaming experience, it’s almost certainly the most text that you’ll ever read on a screen, but it is absolutely justified. It’s the most concisely accurate descriptor of Torment: Tides of Numenera, and yet it isn’t meant pejoratively.

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