Torment - Colin McComb on the Crisis System

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@PCGamesN they talk to Colin McComb about Torment: Tides of Numenera, its legacy, and ask him about the crisis system.

While the labyrinth can save you from death, there's still plenty of opportunity to wipe yourself out ("anger the wrong people or open the wrong jars" are just two examples). Should you want to stay among the living as much as possible, you'll want to make full use of Torment's 'crisis system'.

Crisis points happen at specific moments in the campaign and have multiple solutions. Sometimes the most obvious path forward will be to kill whatever stands in your way, while another option may be to sneak past. But between these two opposites lie a multitude of other possibilities.

"To take an example from the very first crisis in the game, you could tell the guy who's come to drag you back to the Order of Truth for study and dissection that you've just survived falling from the sky, and there's no chance that he and his petty thugs are going to be able to beat you," McComb details. "We wanted to make it so every crisis plays out differently based on your actions. I've played this first crisis twenty times now and keep discovering new things about it."

It's a new and exciting system that modernises the otherwise very classically styled RPG systems at place in Tides of Numenera. But McComb has been very careful to blend the new with the most important elements of yesteryear, such as multiple novels-worth of text. "We really like the extensive text, the idea that we could trust the player to be drawn in by the words and the story and the imagination," says McComb. "We were very happy to trust the player."​