Trivia / Torment: Tides of Numenera

• Author Appeal: You know you're in the Spiritual Successor to a Black Isle game when it features immortality, amnesia and recovering submerged memories, resurrection and past lives, spectral spirit guides, constructs, masks, haunted ruins, hunger as an almost elemental force (as well as a means of absorbing the memories of the dead); unspeakable ancient beings of godlike power, more than one of which is (or was) human; past wars, past sins, an unlikely party of lost souls thrust together seemingly by fate; mentor figures whose teachings were wrong, misguided, or evil; complex moral choices with no easy answers, and extensive dialogue trees which serve to turn the listener's entire worldview on its ear and make them question their very sense of self.
  • Finally, to top it all off, there's a showreel of all the places you went and the consequences of your actions.
• Dueling Games: Torment: Tides of Numenera and Pillars of Eternity were both Kickstarter funded spiritual successors to old-school CRPGs; in this case specifically Planescape: Torment. There's no actual rivalry between the developers, though: Planescape: Torment team members like Chris Avellone worked on both games, and both dev teams endorsed the other's Kickstarter. The fact that they ended up being released nearly two years apart from each other meant they didn't really compete in terms of sales, either.
  • In some respects, Disco Elysium has become the biggest "competitor" to Tides in hindsight, as some view Disco Elysium as a spiritual successor to Planescape: Torment as a weird and innovative philosophical RPG. This section of the community views Tides as keeping to Planescape's letter but not its spirit, by playing safe through essentially repeating the plot beats of Planescape in a new context.
• Official Fan-Submitted Content:
  • As with its sister game Pillars of Eternity, the tombstone names and epitaphs in the Necropolis are mostly Kickstarter backer submissions. (In a Leaning on the Fourth Wall moment, the Memorialists tell you that the names in the Valley of Dead Heroes are of everyone who has ever died, and they believe the current Ninth World is an illusory afterlife for people who died in the first world. Their quest is for every living person to find the name of the original, real person they're a "shadow" of — something that a Kickstarter backer playing the game can literally do.)
  • Unlike Pillars of Eternity, Torment also tries to take Kickstarter-backer-created NPCs and integrate them fully into the game world as part of the story; there are a total of 55 backer-created characters in the game, and the dev team brags that it's pretty hard to tell them apart from the ones they created themselves (helped by the fact that the Numenera setting is such a gonzo Fantasy Kitchen Sink universe). For example, all three of the hirelings you can bring with you to fight the Nychthemeron — Aidan Sitabo, Quijano del Toboso, and Varrenoth of the Barren Wastes — are backer-created.
  • In some cases the devs obtained permission from the Kickstarter backers to put their characters through Character Derailment to make them more interesting. For instance, Omahdon was originally a backer-created character with a generic motivation of "searching for his lost love", which was changed to him being a delusional Stalker with a Crush.
  • The top-tier backer-created content reward was to create a large monument in the Valley of Dead Heroes with a complex interaction around it. This reward was claimed by the RPG Codex forum collectively by pooling their money, and the resulting location in the game — the statue of "St. Proverbius" holding up the "Incline", giving you the quest reward of "The Face That Never Remembered" — is one long series of in-jokes from the Codex.
• What Could Have Been:
  • While at one point more were planned, there are only three foci in the finished game: Brandishes A Silver Tongue, Breathes Shadow, and Masters Defense. All three are unlocked and must be chosen at the same time, early in the game. Unlike in Planescape: Torment, the Last Castoff's class (a combination of type and focus) is set and cannot be altered once chosen.
  • The Oasis of M'ra Jolios, which at one point was going to be the game's second major hub, before the Bloom ascended to the role instead. An enormous globe of water in the exact center of the circular desert known as the Lost Sea, the Oasis is the home of the aquatic Ghibra who appear as background characters in Sagus Cliffs. Currently the city only appears during one of the game's meres and briefly as a memory in the Labyrinth, on the Last Castoff's way to confront the Specter for the final time.
  • The Order of Flagellants and Austerities, who were at one point scheduled to appear but go unmentioned in the released game. Once a hermetic and monkish offshoot of the Order of Truth, the so-called Scourges became a mendicant order and set out into the world with the appointment of a new leader a century ago. They are a missionary sect, devoted to cleansing the world of its many sins, among which are a reliance on the numenera and pollution of the flesh with extravagances and constructs. They feed on the rage of their kin, borrowing strength of will and thew, and run berserk if they are not stopped, laying bare the bones of those who oppose them. In the finished game, they seem to have been replaced with the suicidal death cult of the Endless Gate.

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