YMMV / Torment: Tides of Numenera

• Ass Pull: The Sorrow's motivation and the basis for the entire plot can come across like this. She asserts, at the end of the game, that just by you being a Castoff with power over the Tides, you've made the people's lives around you worse. This is true even if you've never used a Tidal Surge or done anything harmful to anyone. This revelation is discussed in Miel Avest, but virtually nowhere else, and there is almost no evidence given to back it up. So while it doesn't come completely out of nowhere, the theme explodes from a minor plot thread to the lynchpin of the story in the game's climax.
• Complete Monster:
  • The Changing God is a powerful immortal who brought untold torment to the Ninth World by abusing the titular Tides to fuel his eternal life. He was once a normal man who sought a way to live forever to cure his ill daughter and found a way by crafting new bodies and transferring his mind into them using the Tides. This drew the wrath of the Sorrow, the Tide's immune system, and the Changing God would throw away everything that made him human, and even abandoned his daughter to the Sorrow, to preserve his immortality. The castoff bodies he created gained minds of their own and the Changing God used them as nothing more than tools, often leaving them in mortal harm to save his own life. This negligence caused the Endless Battle between him and the castoffs, which he fought with earnest by brainwashing thousands to join his armies and by using the numenera as Weapon of Mass Destruction. His ultimate solution to escape death was to create a device called the Resonance Chamber to infuse the thousands of castoffs he created into his body in a process that left them in constant agony in his mind until their very psyche was shredded into oblivion. In truth their greatest enemy, the Changing God proved to be a worse threat to the castoffs and the Ninth World than the Sorrow itself ever could.
  • The Bloom is an impossibly ancient predator that transcends dimensions to feast on the negative emotions and suffering that it itself propagates. Initially presented as a mindless organism that devours others at random, the Bloom is ultimately revealed to be a devious monster that will manipulate everyone that lives inside of it to engorge itself on its favorite prey: other predators. The Bloom gifts a powerful individual called the Memovira with control over the maws and tendrils within it to create an environment of desperation and survival in its populace and feeding off the despair, guilt, and anguish that result. The Bloom will eventually tire of the Memovira and devour them before starting the cycle anew. Wishing to be worshiped as a god, the Bloom secretes its juices to mind control a cult into following its every command, and forces them to exterminate anyone who tries to discover its secrets. A truly terrible fate awaits those fully devoured by the Bloom as it drags them to its heart where their shades fight in constant turmoil for the Bloom's amusement while feeding off their hatred and despair until they lose all semblance of who they were and merge with the Bloom itself. The Bloom has been to a hundred thousand worlds and devoured billions to satisfy its never-ending hunger.
• Enjoy the Story, Skip the Game: Planescape: Torment was noted for the extremely great story, writing, art and atmosphere, but the gameplay was the weakest link. Most fans agree it's the same with Tides of Numenera: the story and writing is great but the combat is bland and boring.
• Jerkass Woobie: The First Castoff is responsible for eons' worth of problems by beginning the Endless Battle and was motivated largely by personal spite, but said spite was against the Changing God-and you've just passed his entry under Complete Monster. She was the first victim of his cowardice and selfishness as an unwanted byproduct of his cloning process, told to her face she was little more than an unneeded set of clothes and for her trouble was made a pawn of the Bloom, also above. Ultimately, the First was made who she was by villains worse than she ever was, and never, ever was able to escape the whole painful cycle.
• Porting Disaster: The console versions. Both the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One versions have major stuttering problems and fail to run at a consistent 30 frames per second. Clipping issues are also plentiful, with it being possible to get stuck in a wall next to an intractable object in the tutorial area. By 2020, however, the game seems to have been patched sufficiently.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: The combat system being changed to Turn-Based Combat instead of Real-Time with Pause of the original turned out to be rather divisive among fans.
• Tough Act to Follow: Naturally, prior to release, one of the main worries about the game was that it had big shoes to fill due to being a Spiritual Successor to Planescape: Torment. The reception on release has generally been positive, but there have been a few direct comparisons to its predecessor, with multiple people saying it doesn't live up to the original.