The base level of society is supposed to be very early industrial period at best, but as the inhabitants of the Ninth World exist on top of the ruins of the previous eight worlds there’s a lot of impossibly advanced technology left over for them to turn to their advantage – if they can figure out how it works.

A world that is puportedly Earth is somehow still around and is the primary setting for the adventures of Numenera, however that’s basically lip-service because nobody calls it Earth it’s referred to as the Ninth World and might as well be Narnia for all the relation it bears to modern-day Earth, as one billion years of technological advances and the rise and tumultuous falls of successive civilizations have left it completely unrecognisable. Numenera is set one billion years in the future, largely because that means they can put ONE BILLION YEARS IN THE FUTURE… on the back of all the sourcebooks. What is interesting here is the manner of that failure, however, as it hasn’t fallen down quite the way I expected it to.įirst, let’s tackle the setting.

Doing something like this is all but setting yourself up for a fall, in other words, and so I’m not all that surprised that Torment ultimately fails to attain the lofty goal it has set for itself. The strategy equivalent would be trying to make a spiritual successor to Alpha Centauri or Master Of Orion, and I’ve completely lost track of how many contenders have shattered themselves trying to ascend those heights over the last couple of decades. Planescape: Torment is considered by many to be the Best RPG Ever I don’t go quite that far and merely consider it to be the best- written RPG ever, but nevertheless these are extremely large shoes to fill for Wasteland 2 1 developers InXile. By extension I also have something of a bone to pick with Torment: Tides Of Numenera – as is implicit in the name, this is a spiritual successor to the immortal Planescape: Torment that replaces the oddball worlds of Planescape for the even weirder reality-bending madness of Numenera.

I have something of a bone to pick with the Numenera setting.

Torment tides of numenera how to rest