Everything Review: a joyfully expansive dream of a game

A daisy creeps across a rocky landscape. It becomes a blade of grass, which, in turn, becomes a caterpillar, which then turns itself into a very miniature zebra. Nearby, a patch of clover says to the zebra, “Repetition is the only form of permanence I am capable of.”

This is a kind of everything.

This is David OReilly’s Everything, a game nestled somewhere between art piece and walking simulator, and perhaps best described by its title. It allows its player to be everything. This is also, however, a kind of cop out. Surely in trying to be everything, something is bound to be missed. It’s a loaded notion (indeed, when the game is ready to play, it declares, “EVERYTHING IS LOADED”), but it certainly tries. And it is better for it.

Take your pick from 3,000 playable characters in a collection of bespoke and procedurally generated landscapes, between which you are permitted to ascend and descend as you see fit. Perhaps you might like to be a flower. Perhaps you might like to be the moon. Perhaps you might like to be a cluster of stars. Perhaps you might, instead, like to know what a stone tower is thinking with the press of a button. Everything will tell you, and then it will collect the thoughts of things you encounter into a larger database of thoughts, which it will eventually use to generate thoughts of your own.

The more you engage with, the more you know and you can gather ladybirds and boxwood trees Katamari Damacy-style across a meadow, soundtracked by lectures on the universe from philosopher Alan Watts while you do it. A boulder might remark to you that it hopes it remains springtime forever. It is certainly an experience.

In this way, Everything feels like a massively upscaled version of OReilly’s 2014 release, Mountain, which gave its players a procedurally generated mountain, contingent on little else.

Mountains might reflect on starlight, or show up with a dining room set poking out from its crags and hollows. Tech writer Leigh Alexander commented on Mountainback in 2014, saying, “It’s annoyingly simple … One of those things where you assume someone either ‘thinks they are so deep’ or is making fun of you. But listen: I love my mountain. I want to keep it.”

Everything takes this strange comfort of the procedurally generated personal to a universal scale, and it is good. It’s really good. Everything is a game that knows what its core strengths are, and it does not shy away from them: everything persists, and everything is connected.

Curiously, one of Everything’s best features is that the game will autoplay when left idle for more than a few seconds. One might let Everything play in the background while doing other things, letting it be an ambient aquarium of universes.

Left to its own devices, Everything will do absurd things. It will plop tubas into lakes, it will bring pieces of pizza the size of suns into space. The game becomes larger and larger, leaving flowers and moons behind to fold into earths, into ringed planets, into irregular galaxies, into planck lengths of the one-dimensional category, and then back into atoms. Or perhaps it will simply parade a group of multicoloured tents around a fire pit, and let that be that.

To some, this pleasure of letting a game play itself may come across as counterintuitive. But there is its own sort of pleasure in watching a thing create itself again and again, to know that the landscape either you or the game has created will never happen again.

This is your planck length of the one-dimensional category. It is no one else’s.

This persistence in spite of everything is Everything’s strength, but it is also to its detriment. It can begin to feel fairly lonely to exist in a universe which isn’t affected by your existence, or your changes.

You are an elephant in a collection of flat blocks, but to what end? You are a pile of volcanic rock the size of the Pyramids, and still the world carries on as if you were not. There are no people, no dialogue, no consequences for being a sea of caterpillars in an alien river. You are things and their thoughts, pieced together from their own exposure to the universe you exist in, ever recycling and generating into a potentially solipsistic infinity. Perhaps there is some comfort to find in this relentless existence, or perhaps it is merely depressing. But to be affected in this way – to contemplate one’s own relationship to the cyclical nature of things – isn’t necessarily a negative.

As you explore hills and alien climates as buttercups and trumpets, as aloe vera and as an Irregular 3D Structure, Alan Watts’s voice rumbles low and emphatic: “Billions of years ago, you were a big bang, but now you’re a complicated human being.” Perhaps this is enough.

PS4/Steam; £11.99; Pegi Rating 3+

Arms Review: Nintendo's springy limbed fighting game is ridiculous fun

The premise of Arms requires a substantial suspension of disbelief. The characters in Nintendo’s new fighting game mostly seem to have ended up immersing themselves in this sport because their arms (or, in one case, hair), instead of regular arms, are capital-A Arms – springy and extendable and ending in interchangeable weaponry. This raises some questions: How do they eat? How do they pick their noses? How do they wipe?

Of course, a game like this doesn’t need to make sense, and the marketing makes it clear that Nintendo is perfectly content with the ridiculousness of it all. But given the popularity of the Switch and the focus on multiplayer, Arms could become a hit with a huge online fanbase, and it’s a shame that the lore and characters are lacking the kind of treatment received by games like Overwatch. There will still be fan fiction and fan art, obviously, it just won’t be as compelling.

Style seems an easier fix than substance, however, and what Arms lacks – if only a little – in character it makes up for in form. As you’d expect from a new IP from Nintendo, designed for its unpredictably popular new hybrid console, Arms is unique, colourful, and accessible, with enough complexity to tempt a competitive scene but not so much to make anyone feel alienated.

At every stage, Arms is welcoming. The box art is all big eyes and bold colours, an aesthetic that permeates throughout the game. Motion controls are encouraged, and enjoyable enough to discourage the tendency a more experienced player might have to immediately discard them in favour of the comfort of a pro controller.

Playing with a Joy-Con in each hand in what Arms insts is called the “thumbs-up grip” – Joy-Con vertical, buttons facing inwards, thumbs on triggers – is comfortable and intuitive; you can get through the tutorial in less than a minute. You tilt both Joy-Con in the same direction to move, tilt them towards each other to block, press buttons with your thumbs to dash or jump or unleash a charged attack, and – obviously – punch to punch, throwing a long springy arm out to meet its target.

Punch both hands forwards together and your character will grab their opponent and throw them to the ground, which feels so satisfying that you may find yourself performing a throwing motion yourself despite it being completely unnecessary. You can also use tilt (or analogue stick, or D-pad) to steer punches after you’ve fired them, though it requires a little extra mental energy to remember to do that if, for instance, you’ve been moving your character right and you need their punch to go left.

There are no complicated combos here. Arms operates on a rock-paper-scissors basis: block a punch, grab an opponent who’s blocking, punch to break a grab. In these 3D arenas there’s alsoan emphasis on movement. It feels better to jump and dash to avoid punches and counter before the opponent’s long Arms have sprung back into place.

Players will soon find a character and play style that suits them, like a lighter character who can easily jump (or, in the case of Ribbon Girl, double jump) out of harm’s way but can be knocked off their feet with a single blow. Further options come in the form of the Arms themselves; each character starts with three to choose from before each match (and while players who like symmetry might want to choose the same for each Arm it’s generally better to make them different), but you can use the currency earned in game to unlock more.

Again, different players will find their different preferences. Some Arms are heavy enough to break through incoming punches, some shoot several projectiles spread horizontally or vertically, and others can approach in an arc to attack a defensive opponent from the side. Holding down the dash or jump button will charge a character’s Arms so that when they’re released the attack has an elemental effect, perhaps temporarily freezing their opponent so their movement is restricted.

The single-player content encourages experimentation with the different characters and Arms. While there’s no real story, which feels like a missed potential in a game with such a varied cast, there is a 10-stage Grand Prix. Choose a character, choose a difficulty level between one and seven, and if you beat all 10 stages that character wins a crown on that level (lower levels are automatically filled in). Completionists who want to beat level 7 with each of the 10 characters will have quite a task ahead of them.

Most stages will be regular fights, though the occasional round of “V-ball” (volleyball with an explosive ball) or “Hoops” (basketball where you grab and dunk your opponent) are always welcome. You can also play through an entire Grand Prix with a friend, teaming up against two opponents. Teammates are joined with a spring, so if one is thrown it adversely affects the other, but it does help to have someone else to block attacks coming your way, though this may happen far more often by accident than on purpose.

You can also team up with a friend on the same console when playing online, whether against other friends in a lobby of your making in the sensibly named “Friends” or against strangers in Party Match, where you’re thrown into a lobby in which different groups of players are matched for different modes simultaneously. Complete the Grand Prix at level 4 and you’ll also unlock Ranked Match, where you can fight strangers to boost your rank. Here, Arms manages to show a little more charm, as the ranks are named for things that can – like springs – be spiral shaped: snail, lollipop, whirligig, pinwheel.

Elsewhere, however, Arms feels like it’s missing the extra flavour that would make it practically perfect. The music is annoying, the arenas feel largely uninventive and the characters are hit and miss. Spring Man and Ribbon Girl are generic; Byte & Barq and Helix are a little more interesting. Min Min, with her dragon-themed weapons and Arms made out of noodles, feels like an uncomfortable stereotype. And the fact that the only black character has weaponised hair is definitely a problem.

But Arms appears to be a game where the core idea came before the aesthetic trappings, and that core does work. Anyone can pick up the Joy-Con and punch, and there are few enough other controls that it doesn’t take long to learn the rest. It’s always easy to tell what’s happening on screen, whether that’s a grab coming towards you or an elemental effect taking hold, so players can quickly progress to learning how and when to react to an opponent’s moves. And there are enough combinations of characters and Arms to give those of a more competitive spirit room to grow. Arms is a good starter fighting game, both for players and for Nintendo. Hopefully future updates will give the inevitable franchise a bit more bounce.

Nintendo; Nintendo Switch;£49.99; Pegi rating: 12+

Gravity Rush 2 Review: Boundless Fun If You Ignore The Storyline

Part of the joy of video games is that they can offer a level of control that’s so often lacking from real life. They allow you to take your fate in your own two hands – a cool head and nimble fingers will decide whether you dodge a blow in Dark Souls, pull off an outrageous feint in FIFA, or make Mario leap the extra hair’s breadth that separates life from death.

Gravity Rush takes the opposite tack, sacrificing precision and finesse for the thrill of the unpredictable. Your character, Kat, can manipulate gravity, able to decide which way is “down”, allowing her to tumble gracelessly through the sky in any direction, the world tilting and lurching around her. This isn’t flying, it’s falling sideways through crowded cities, crashing through crates and knocking off chimney pots.

The first Gravity Rush was released for the PlayStation Vita in 2012, and has become a cult favourite almost despite itself. It was lauded for its beautiful, anime art-style, open world gameplay and free-flowing mechanics (despite its insistence on showing off the Vita’s unwieldy motion controls), but its storytelling was obtuse to the point of senselessness.

It asked interesting questions about the nature of time that it was either unable or unwilling to answer; it didn’t so much as leave things on a cliffhanger as leave every major plot thread dangling.

Five years later, Gravity Rush 2 is both a realisation ofthe first game’s potential and a doubling down on its flaws.

On the Vita, Kat was always straining to escape from the prison of her tiny screen, and the panoramic quality of the PS4 sequel looks glorious. The floating islands that make up Kat’s world bring to mind a Studio Ghibli animation. Every frame is filled with rare and unexpected beauty, from burnt orange sunsets fading behind dizzying skyscrapers to circular rainbows ringing the horizon.

Kat is a wonderful heroine and her joyful tumbling is the perfect way to traverse this world. Every street is thronged with passers-by who flee in terror whenever Kat comes crashing into their lives, cracking paving slabs as she thuds to the ground. This apparently bustling world does, however, flatter to deceive. Unlike the densely textured world of, say, Arkane’s Dishonored games, Gravity Rush 2 is all surface: nothing but inaccessible, empty polygons lie behind the brightly lit windows and grand facades.

Combat has been tightened, with two new gravity “styles” – very heavy and very light – adding variety without overly complicating things. Kat’s ability to whisk piles of debris into the air and launch them at her enemies feels more intuitive than before, although her main attack, shifting gravity to fall feet first towards her foes, is still prone to sending her hurtling away from the action.

Things go a little awry, once again, when it comes to storytelling. Some designers would have used the sequel to clean up the mess left in the wake of the first game; not Keiichiro Toyama (the wunderkind behind the game, who also created the first Silent Hill when he was just 21). Not only do you need to have played the original Gravity Rush to have any hope of understanding the plot, you also need to have watched the two-part anime movie released at the end of last year. And even then, good luck following it.

Toyama pays little heed to the prevailing wisdom of game design. His sequel is packed with anachronistic mini games and collectibles. Much of Kat’s time is spent completing repetitive tasks that feel like chores during the first attempt and drive you to distraction by the 20th. Most of the dialogue, presented as neat interactive comic strips, exists only for exposition. And there are far too many inexplicable, tedious stealth missions that have no place in a game where the protagonist cannot slow her pace beyond a brisk jog.

The main story is divided into three chapters, the first of which sees Kat fighting against social inequality in a land where the working classes live in shanty towns literally beneath the rich folk in their gleaming sky-mansions. The second chapter continues the story from the first game, while the final section delves into Kat’s mysterious past, where the game’s most unforgivably dull and protracted sequences take place.

All three are really just excuses to pack in lots of increasingly overblown and oversized bosses, many of whom come with giant glowing weak spots, as if it were still 1995. The second half of the game is made up of one climactic fight after another, with the narrative importance of each lost amid the ceaseless torrent of action. In one mid-way mission, for instance, an entire city comes to life, is destroyed, and is never spoken of again. Some of these fights are fun, while others are a maddening and seemingly endless battle against the game’s unpredictable mechanics.

But to get bogged down in these frustrations is to miss the point. The joy is in the little things: taking a young boy on a flying tour of the city to recreate his grandfather’s photographs; chasing after a seagull that’s stolen your lunch; handing out flyers for a local food wagon.

Kat is never more fun than when she’s hurtling horizontally across the sky for no reason other than to feel the wind against her face. At its best, Gravity Rush 2 recreates the sense of reckless abandon that came when riding a bike as a child, the feeling of limitless potential combined with the intoxicating thrill of knowing that the tarmac could come up to meet you at any moment.

Sony; PS4; £45; Pegi rating: 12+

Hitman Review – A Beautiful Puzzle Box Of A Game

When this new instalment in the Hitman series was first announced back in June 2015, the overwhelming reaction was one of confusion.

Following 2012’s poorly received Hitman: Absolution, the franchise was to re-emerge as something unprecedented in the action adventure genre: a six-part digital episodic release, spread across a whole year, each part constituting one level of the final game. Nobody was quite sure what this experiment would look like, or what the point was.

And then, in March 2016, the first episode was released. Like a magic trick, the pieces came together. To say that IO Interactive’s Hitman is an episodic stealth game containing six levels is at once wholly descriptive and wildly inaccurate. The complete game, released on disc this week, takes Agent 47, the series’ bald, barcoded assassin, through six individual locations. No more, no less. That much is true. What becomes clear almost immediately, however, is that the nature of the game transforms those six levels into something expansive and remarkable, with a degree of replayability rarely seen before. This is not an easy game to explain, so let’s start here: Hitman is very, very good.

On the face of it, this is a game about the interaction between two things: 47’s mechanical toolset, and the environment he finds himself in. The former appears to be very simple. 47 can crouch, take cover, vault over low objects. He can see a short distance through walls to identify the movements of his targets. He can throw small and large objects. He barely moves above a jog. It is a beautiful juxtaposition to his gliding menace, then, that the game’s most distinctive mechanic is a fundamentally silly one. Across the series, 47 has always been a master of disguise, capable of switching outfits on the fly to access off-limits areas. In Hitman, though, this is taken to a spectacular extreme as the bald assassin daisy-chains disguise after disguise as he moves through each of the vast environments.

If the mechanical toolset is simple and restrained, the six environments are the exact opposite. Each is a cross between an open-world and a Rube Goldberg machine, containing thousands of NPCs and nearly unlimited potential for inventive assassination.

The first mission, a fashion show in a repurposed Parisian museum, is a perfect demonstration of the game’s core design thesis: everything you would expect to be in such a location invariably is, and it’s all happening at once. On the ground floor, hundreds of guests in tuxedos and cocktail dresses mingle around the bar and the catwalk. Behind the scenes, stylists work industriously, stage crews guide models through darkened corridors. Downstairs, the kitchen hums as chefs and waiters work to keep the upstairs functioning. A security team have set up an outpost in the wine cellar.

Through this all, 47 moves like a shape-shifting ghost. At a slow walk, he acquires a waiter’s outfit from a side room, and slips down some side stairs into the kitchen. Nobody bats an eye. He corners a chef in a blind-spot and takes his outfit, doubling back into the kitchen and, safe in the plausibility of his disguise, poisons some soup. The disguise mechanic is brilliantly complicated by the presence of some NPCs that can see through them, presumably recognising that you’re not Karl the Stylist, and you’ll occasionally have to duck into cover or wait for one of these brighter specimens to pass ahead of you so as not to be spotted.

Paris is followed by Sapienza,the game’s standout level, which takes in an entire Italian town. Then come the bustling streets and souks of turbulent Marrakesh, then an immaculate Thai hotel. The game’s final two levels, a terrorist compound and a high-tech Japanese hospital, push the players to perform increasingly demanding assassinations. The action of these missions move constantly around 47, and he shifts slightly to use their momentum for his purposes. 

The reason for the scale of each of these environments becomes clear as the wider metagame emerges. Each level has main story targets, sure, but is also filled with an infinite number of player-made contracts, which ask 47 to assassinate a particular NPC, often while wearing a specific disguise or with a certain weapon. The crown jewels, though, are the developer’s own “Escalation” missions, in which the player is required to perform a hit five consecutive times, with new complications being added with each repetition. Kill the chef. Kill the chef and the waiter. Kill the chef and the waiter with a cavalry sabre. Kill the chef and the waiter with a cavalry sabre, but watch out for the deadly landmines placed around the museum. Now do it in 45 seconds. As IO added more escalations monthly, they became increasingly confident and absurd; they are beautiful practical jokes on the player, tense and funny and rewarding.

As 47 completes contracts and explores each level, he unlocks new tools and weapons to be used in any environment. Complete a hit effectively and you’ll be able to start with a disguise, or smuggle a large weapon into a box in the level. These spaces transform, both in actuality as you unlock things, and mentally as you build an increasingly coherent map of the spaces.

The game still changes and shifts monthly. New escalations are added, new contracts are featured. On four occasions, IO released “bonus missions” that radically transformed existing environments, filling the square in Sapienza with a film shoot or turning Marrakesh into a night-market. The game’s “Elusive Targets” showed up, too – unique contracts tied to an ever-descending real world clock that can only ever be attempted once, in situations that become almost unbearably tense. Fail them, and the opportunity is lost, never to return. While around 20 Elusive Targets have been and gone, IO plan to continue introducing them into the future.

Throughout the course of this collected works, you will disguise yourself as a cyclist, a clown, as a po-faced doctor and a catwalk model. You will kill targets with a fire extinguisher, with a letter opener, with an exploding golf ball. At times you will flee from what feels like the entire level only to end up on the roof of an observatory looking over an Italian town. Sometimes, you will exit levels silently and beautifully and never be seen.

The beauty of the game is, you can play for many hours, but then see a friend try a mission and they’ll do something totally different. It might be a route you had never considered, or an interaction with a guard you didn’t know was possible. In this way the game unfolds like a puzzle box and, just when you think it has finished unfolding, it reveals something new.

Hitman is unquestionably the finest game in the series. It might be one of the best stealth games ever made.

Square Enix; PC/PS4 (versiontested)/Xbox One; £45; Pegi rating: 18+

Torment: Tides of Numenera Review – much more than a nostalgic homage

Torment: Tides of Numenera exemplifies that most modern of creative success stories: the Kickstarter smash hit. Developed by inXile Entertainment (the team behind Wasteland 2) it was launched on the crowdfunding platform in 2013 and reached its full $900,000 target after only six hours. By the end of the campaign it had raised almost $5m.

Why such fervid interest? Torment: Tides of Numenera is the spiritual successor to the renowned 1999 role-playing game Planescape: Torment, which, alongside other classics like Baldur’s Gate, helped redefine the genre. Set in the complex Planescape D&D campaign, its narrative took in a multiverse of coexisting dimensions, it featured a rich cast of well-drawn characters and an emphasis on dialogue rather than battle.

As you’d expect from that game’s spiritual successor, Torment: Tides of Numenera is a bizarre mishmash of worlds and themes. The player is the Last Castoff, an outsider with a past they had no control over, on an uncertain path of self discovery. The titular numenera are the remnants of past civilisations which dot the Ninth World, a battered and bruised Earth set a billion years in the future. The Ninth World has seen the rise and fall of countless civilisations and races in that time, but all of them remain unknown to the current denizens, who have been left only with their equally mysterious and often extremely dangerous numenera.

Torment is unapologetic in how much it tells the player; there’s no encyclopedia or tool tips to guide you in dialogue. You’re expected to read and learn as you play. The sheer mass and detail of the lore is overwhelming and hard to digest at first, though this seems deliberate based on who you are in this setting. As the Last Castoff you play the latest reject of a powerful entity who switches bodies to remain immortal; when the entity switches to a new body the previous body becomes conscious. You begin the game as one of these husks. You are abandoned, confused and uncertain, and the scraps of knowledge you pick up become as important as the scraps of technology you scavenge to survive.

The player is given the option of recruiting companions who can assist in dialogue skill checks and in combat. Companions are fleshed-out characters with their own motivations and reasons for helping you. Much like Baldur’s Gate, if you take a course of action that your companions disagree with there’s a chance they may leave your party for good or even attack you. In terms of dialogue, the writing is superb, evocative and ranges from lighthearted sci-fi jokes to a terrifying dissection of existence itself. And it’s a good job, too. There’s a lot to read and Torment expects the player to visualise all the intricately written and structured descriptions it uses. This isn’t a game where you rush through text to get to a fight.

In fact, the game has some advice in the early stages: “Don’t worry if you fail this task. In Torment failure often results in interesting outcomes.” This is true, though Torment is also one of few titles where you can die and see the game over screen while still creating your character. The Last Castoff’s body has been modified with upgraded regeneration so most deaths aren’t game overs and when you ‘die’ the world moves on without you as you recover, often in interesting and unpredictable ways. Torment encourages you not to save and reload if things don’t pan, because what is more important is “your story”. There’s a definite sense of experimentation and discovering your own motivations as a player, especially with the numenera you encounter. From your first few moments in the game you might die simply by engaging with your surroundings, and if you do, it doesn’t matter. It’s very similar in this regard to Planescape: Torment. The Nameless One in that title was immortal and death was basically just a temporary inconvenience.

That’s not where the similarities to Planescape: Torment end. While the player gets to choose the skills and abilities of the Last Castoff, you don’t get to decide how they look physically, their background or what they sound like. That’s been decided for you and a large part of the game is discovering why. You do get to decide the sex of your character, but beyond that, this game is about the identity you forge for a character you didn’t make in a world you had an impact on but no memory of.

Torment uses a skill-check system in almost every section of the game. Each character has a number of might, speed and intellect points which you can use to ensure you succeed in persuading someone in conversation or to increase your chances to hit in combat. Companions can help with skill checks, which gives Torment a similar feeling to tabletop D&D games.

While it’s an interesting system, it’s tempting to hoard skill points and avoid situations where you might want to spend them in case you run out later. During my playthrough, I ignored many early conversations because I’d run out of intellect (make your own jokes) and if there were any skill checks during the chat I knew I’d fail them. I could revisit most of these conversations later, but it felt counter-intuitive to ignore a gigantic mutant banging against a cage or a howling mob in front of a public execution because I had no points left and didn’t want to risk failing a check. It’s fairly easy to get skill points back outside of combat, you just need to find an inn and sleep, but that means ignoring a fun situation or backing out of a conversation, running to an inn, sleeping and then coming back. During combat, you have to rely on consumables to replenish skill points and if you run out of those, there’s not a lot you can do besides die and see what happens.

Combat is less important than in other RPGs like Pillars of Eternity or even Baldur’s Gate. It occurs during crisis points and features a turn-based system similar to Divinity: Original Sin. During these sequences, you can use the environment around you or even attempt to talk your way out of the fight entirely, by using persuasion. There are no random encounters, in many ways you have to go out of your way to trigger physical fights, but those options are open if that’s how you want to play the game.

Unlike Pillars of Eternity from which it borrows some technology, Torment is a sci-fi RPG, though the line appears to blur at times. There are machines and robots, and the user interface itself evokes a sci-fi feel with smooth metallic designs and glowing blue borders, but then you find yourself speaking to ghosts or following gods and other mythical items. But then here, ghosts aren’t fantasy and nothing is magic; it’s all part of the pan-dimensional science that is commonplace in this distant future.

In terms of equipment, a lot of what you find is scavenged, disposable and bizarre. Technology potentially a billion years old from a different reality may wind up being used as a crude mace instead of what it was originally designed for. In addition to equipment, the game gives players ciphers, which provide bonuses to certain skills and abilities and sometimes grant new ones, but if you equip too many they will generate negative rather than positive effects . Ciphers are limited-use items and, again, it’s easy to either hoard them or use them all and run out when you need them most. Artefacts are more permanent bonuses which won’t run out as quickly but still aren’t always reliable, and you can only equip two of them. Much of the skill of combat comes through resource management and knowing when to use items and when to hold back.

Actions you take in Torment affect an abstract power linked to morality called Tides. The Tides form a morality system where your actions shape how others see you. Each Tide is symbolised by a different colour depending on the sets of standards it symbolises. Indigo for example symbolises justice, the greater good and compromise. If you take an action that upholds the law, the Indigo Tide will become more dominant, but at the same time if you break a promise to tell someone a truth that may save their life, the Indigo tide will also become more dominant. Tides rise and fall as you play through the game, and as well as changing how other characters approach you, they affect your character’s legacy, which will alter the ending you get as well as grant you different abilities based on your most dominant Tide. Tides aren’t meant to be barriers and just because you usually play smart and talk your way out of trouble the game won’t penalise you if you decide to start smashing things up.

During character creation, the player can choose between a nano (mage), glaive (warrior/rogue) or jack (balanced), giving a rough outline of a player class, within those subsections are various abilities and traits you can select. One of the more notable of these was “scan thoughts” which outlines an NPC’s true thoughts in a few sentences at the end of their dialogue. While a lot of the skills and abilities are basic stat boosts or traits, abilities like “scan thoughts” seem to change how you play the game at a fundamental level, to the point it’s hard to imagine playing without it. It allows you to see whether companions are truly loyal or not, whether strangers are trying to attack or trick you.

Torment is designed to be replayed, you can’t fit a billion years into one play-through and expect to see everything. The sheer mass of stories and lore is impressive, and with less focus on combat, you can build characters that are designed for exploration and dialogue instead. The game is less a hunt for fights and gear and more a philosophical journey into what identity truly means. This is an intriguing, altogether different approach to storytelling. Torment: Tides of Numenera is more than a nostalgic homage to Planescape: Torment – its own innovations will mark the genre as much as its spiritual predecessor did.

Techland; Play Station 4/Xbox One/PC (version tested); £45/£34.99 (PC)

The Top Video Games Of 2017

There are tons of great-looking video games coming out in 2017. Many of these are western releases, but a huge number of fantastic titles are coming out of Japan also. In fact, many of my most hotly-anticipated games are Japanese this year.

In any case, here's a list of all the best (or at least most important) video games currently announced for a 2017 release. I'm putting them in alphabetical order and including trailers whenever possible. I'll keep this list updated with other important releases as well.

Take a look and let me know which of these video games you're excited about.

Arms - One of the Nintendo Switch's first releases, Arms is a boxing game that uses both button and motion controls. Fighters have boxing gloves and long, spring arms and duke it out in a ring. It looks novel, as far as fighting games go, and exactly the sort of quirky little game that Nintendo would come up with.

Berserk and the Band of the Hawk - The game based off the popular, and uber-violent, manga is a spin-off of the also popular Dynasty Warriors franchise. I admit, I kind of wish it were a rip-off of Dark Souls rather than the hack-and-slash chaos of Dynasty Warriors, but that's probably just a personal bias. Maybe I'm just not that much of a Dynasty Warriors fan.

Call of Cthulhu - A Gothic, Lovecraftian mystery and psychological horror game from Cyanide Studios. Could be great, could be "meh." But I like the trailer.

Dark Souls III: The Ringed City - The final DLC for the Dark Souls franchise takes the player to the Ringed City, at the end of the Age of Fire, at the edge of the world.

Divinity: Original Sin 2 - The follow-up to the original Divinity: Original Sin which was one of the most charming, clever role-playing games to come out in years. Divinity: Original Sin 2 looks to expand on everything that made the original so great with better graphics, a bigger world, and more choices. If you can't control your hype for this one, nobody will blame you.

Dragon Quest Heroes II - Fresh off the heals of the amazing Dragon Quest Builders, Dragon Quest Heroes 2 is described as a "hack-and-slash, field-roaming action RPG that sends players on a new adventure to restore order in a once peaceful world filled with hordes of monsters and battles of epic proportions." Sounds good to me. I like the more cartoony, less-serious style here. It's a nice contrast to something like Final Fantasy.

Dynasty Warriors 9 - Finally a fully open-world Dynasty Warriors game. Dynasty Warriors 9 promises to be the biggest, best-looking in the long-running epic action franchise.

Fire Emblem Echoes - A "re-imagining" of the second Fire Emblem game (Fire Emblem Gaiden) Echoes comes to the 3DS surprisingly soon after the launch of Fire Emblem Fates last year. But we're not complaining. The more Fire Emblem the better. The game looks to diverge from the modern entries in the series, with some dungeon-crawling and no marriage mechanic.

Fire Emblem Heroes - The first Fire Emblem mobile game, and the second major mobile release from Nintendo (not counting Pokemon GO) this one is sure to be controversial. I think it looks like a pretty good take on the turn-based fantasy RPG. The free-to-play game is coming to both Android and iOS, and is basically a scaled-down version of a regular, core Fire Emblem title.

Fire Emblem Warriors - This Dynasty Warriors spinoff follows in the footsteps of Hyrule Warriors on the Wii U by taking the Fire Emblem universe and cast of characters and inserting it into the massive-scale action combat of the Warriors series. It should be good, mindless fun, if not the tactical goodness of a core Fire Emblem game.

The Flame in the Flood - A girl and her dog survive in a roguelike wilderness by raft and over land, scrounging for resources, setting up camp, and evading predators like huge bears. Cool art-style and a great trailer for its PS4 release.

For Honor - Knights, Vikings and Samurai do glorious battle in this quirky multiplayer title from Ubisoft. If you like action fighting games with a touch of MOBA, this might be the game for you. I've played the alpha, but am waiting for the upcoming beta and full release to offer up any sort of valuable judgment. It's a great concept, but so much hinges on how satisfying the combat ends up being.

Friday the 13th - Play as Jason Voorhees or one of a handful of camp counselors in a multiplayer, asymmetrical PvP horror survival game.

Ghost Recon Wildlands - A vast open-world, anti-cartel special forces game, Ghost Recon Wildlands will either restore our faith in open-world gaming or turn out to be just another in Ubisoft's long line of overly similar, repetitive titles. I'll be honest, it's just really hard to know what to expect from this one. There's definitely hints of The Division in here, but there's not much of what I would consider Ghost Recon. I hope I'm pleasantly surprised.

Gravity Rush 2 - The follow-up to the PS Vita's original gravity-bending action game, Gravity Rush 2 is already getting pretty good, if not totally amazing, reviews. (It's 79/100 on Open Critic.) I've played the demo, and while I love the art-style, I'm still not sold on the gameplay itself---either because I need more time to master the controls, or because floating around while manipulating gravity is actually kind of clunky. Either way, this is a big game with lots of content and a fascinating twist on action combat.

Guardians of the Galaxy: Telltale Series - Say what you will about the Telltale games---at best they're compelling narratives with interesting choices; at worst they're clunky attempts to blend gameplay and cinema---but I'm still excited for a Telltale version of Guardians of the Galaxy, my very favorite Marvel Cinematic Universe movie.

Halo Wars 2 - The second real-time strategy game in the Halo franchise, Halo Wars 2 has already been getting a bunch of hype as a return to the classics of the genre. Anyone who enjoyed playing Command & Conquer and wishes there were a similar game for Xbox One will probably find lots to love here. It's also one of the only major exclusives coming to Microsoft's console.

Hitman: The Complete First Season - The new Hitman game was released throughout 2016 as a series of self-contained episodes. Now you can get all of those in one package. I was really impressed by this Hitman and anyone who loves stealth games should really check it out. Just watching this trailer makes me want to dive back in and play the episodes I missed.

Horizon Zero Dawn - I've been a skeptic about Horizon Zero Dawn for awhile now, probably just to keep my expectations in check to avoid disappointment. But the latest story trailer for the game won me over and now I can't wait for the PS4 exclusive from Killzone developer Guerrilla Games. I mean, it has robot dinosaurs and a female protagonist with some of the best hair in video games. What's not to love?

Injustice 2 - The premiere DC Comics fighting game returns to modern consoles with bigger and better graphics and a whole bunch of superheroes and villains to choose from. Should be fun.

Kingdom Come: Deliverance - A realistic, first-person Medieval RPG. No magic, no dragons, no fantasy. The game is designed to immerse players in a gritty European world that eschews the fantastical for the historical. Echoes of Mount & Blade with much better-looking graphics. Hopefully this one will come out in 2017.

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild - Easily one of the most hotly-anticipated titles of the year, this one's coming to both the Wii U and the brand new Nintendo Switch. The game borrows some of the art-style of Wind Waker, and is the first truly open-world Zelda game. It makes other changes as well, including stat-based weapons. It looks awesome.

Lego Worlds - Following in the footsteps of games like Minecraft and Dragon Quest Builders, this is a LEGO sandbox game. Gone are the story-driven elements of most LEGO video games. Instead, players can just build to their heart's content.

Lords of the Fallen 2 - I was fairly mixed on the original Lords of the Fallen. It was a Souls-style action-RPG that borrowed some of that game's mechanics but none of its cold, dark heart. There's very little about the sequel in the news, and with big changes in direction and the loss of the lead producer, this one's very much up in the air. It's slated for a 2017 release, but who knows if that will happen.

Mario Kart 8 Deluxe - New characters and a new battle mode, plus 1080p resolution, make this a "deluxe" version of the game that came out for Wii U in 2015. Easily my favorite Mario Kart game, I'm excited to play the new battle mode with Splatoon characters. I do wish that there were new tracks, or a Mario Kart 9 was in the offing, though.

Marvel Vs. Capcom Infinite - Marvel superheroes vs. Capcom video game characters. It's another fighting game in the vein of Street Fighter and Marvel's answer to Injustice 2.

Mass Effect Andromeda - A new Mass Effect that leaves the original trilogy behind (millions of light-years behind, actually). This time around you play as a new non-Shepard character exploring the vast and dangerous Andromeda system. The game uses the Frostbite 4 engine and looks gorgeous. The question is whether it will have great characters like the original trilogy---and whether its story will be satisfying.

Ni No Kuni II: Revenant Kingdom - Ni No Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch was a terrific video game realization of a Studio Ghibli world, but it had tedious combat. I'm hoping the sequel will have all the charm of the original but with better balance between story and gameplay. It sure looks amazing!

Nier Automata - Platinum Games' weird cyborg action game is amazing---or at least, the demo of the game is amazing. The game itself certainly seems to be shaping up into something truly special. Fast, frenetic combat in a weird, dystopian sci-fi world; crazy use of shifting perspective; huge boss fights---what's not to love?

Nintendo Switch - I'm including hardware since there's some big hardware releases in 2017, and the first of those is the Nintendo Switch. It's a hybrid portable and home console that can be played at home hooked up to a TV or on the go. And it looks pretty great, honestly. I have some concerns, of course, but I'm rooting for this to succeed.

Nioh - This is one of my most highly-anticipated games of the year. It's a Samurai game that takes a bunch of lessons from Dark Souls and then does a lot of new things with them like introducing different fighting stances, black-powder guns, and much more. I've played three demos of the game, and each one has been incredible---though it's not for the faint-hearted.

Persona 5 - If you've ever played a Persona game you'll already know how excited you should be about the release of Persona 5. I'm a latecomer to the franchise, starting with Persona 4 Golden on the PS Vita. It took me a while to get into the game, but once I did I was hooked. Between the almost mundane management of day-to-day stuff and the demon-slaying and dungeon-crawling this is just a wholly unique JRPG.

Poochy & Yoshi's Woolly World - The 3DS version of Yoshi's Woolly World has all that game's levels but introduces more Poochy gameplay. A fun little platformer.

Prey - A cross between Half-Life 2 and Alien, Prey looks absolutely fantastic. It's a sci-fi thriller shooter set in a creepy space station that looks like it has as much puzzling as it does shooting. Very excited about this one.

Red Dead Redemption 2 - The long-awaited sequel to Red Dead Redemption is finally coming to PS4 and Xbox One. We don't know much about it yet, but we do know it's going to be amazing. Another big open-world Western from the makers of Grand Theft Auto, I just hope that this time around there's less cattle-herding.

Resident Evil 7 Biohazard - A major change of pace for the Resident Evil franchise, Biohazard is a first-person horror game with little in the way of shooting guns, and lots of running away and hiding. It looks actually scary, too, and has a VR game mode.

Rime - Once a PS4 exclusive, Rime is now a multi-platform adventure and puzzle game. Hooray! The indie game looks (and sounds) gorgeous. I don't even care what it's about, I just want to visit this world. (Of course, I included this on my top games list of 2015, so it's been a long time coming thanks to delays and other issues. Hopefully the final product is as amazing as it looks.)

South Park: The Fractured But Whole - I loved the buggy, hilarious South Park: The Stick of Truth RPG. It was everything great about South Park in a ludicrous, and hugely entertaining, video game. This one looks like more of the same, and I mean that in a good way.

Splatoon 2 - Speaking of "more of the same" that's pretty much what Splatoon 2 looks like, though it won't utilize a second screen in the same way the Wii U version did. Splatoon is Nintendo's latest shooter franchise, and pits teams of players against one another in paint shootouts. It's a very Nintendo sort of shooter, and the sequel looks like fun.

Star Citizen - The king of crowdfunding probably won't come out in 2017---it's already been delayed plenty---but we can always dream can't we? This space sim has captured the imagination of thousands of gamers and raised tens of millions in crowdfunding. Let's hope the final release lives up to the big promises.

Styx: Shards of Darkness - The sequel to Styx: Master of Shadows, this one looks like a pretty big improvement in just about every way. If you like fantasy stealth games, of which there are too few, Shards of Darkness may be the game for you.

Super Mario Odyssey - This weird-looking open-world Mario game is the first Mario title coming to the Nintendo Switch. All I have to say is that New Donk City looks like an excellent and super strange new location for our favorite plumber to explore.

Tales of Berseria - The 16th game in the Tales series, Tales of Berseria is a JRPG that features action combat and a dark story of revenge in a demon-infested world. I've played some of the game already and like it quite a bit. Not the best-looking JRPG coming out in 2017 but really intriguing story.

Tekken 7 - The return of the classic fighting game for its seventh main entry. It looks very pretty.

The Bard's Tale IV - Torment: Tides of Numenera developer is picking up this long-dormant RPG and...well, there's not much to go on just yet, so take the 2017 release with a grain of salt. Still, this is a pretty trailer with nice Gaelic music.

Torment: Tides of Numenera - Hey, speak of the devil! inXile's massive crowd-funded game based on Monte Cook's pen-and-paper RPG is finally upon us. The heavily story-driven game (prepare to read a bunch!) is the spiritual successor to Planescape: Torment. Very exciting indeed.

Uncharted: The Lost Legacy - The first Uncharted game not starring Nathan Drake, The Lost Legacy is both DLC and a stand-alone game, so you don't need Uncharted 4 to play it. It takes a different approach to the franchise than Drake's escapades, and I for one am really intrigued by what exactly that entails.

Valkyria Revolution - A spin-off from the Valkyria Chronicles games, this one takes place in an alternative universe and ditches turn-based combat in favor of action. I'm not sure how to feel about that, given how great Valkyria Chronicles is, but it could be cool still.

Warhammer 40,000: Dawn Of War III - There are too many Warhammer games out there, but another in the Dawn of War series is very welcome. Real-time strategy games are fun, and Dawn of War has always done this kind of large-scale battle really well.

Xbox Scorpio - Code-named the "Scorpio," this is Microsoft's version of the PS4 Pro---a beefier, faster, more amazing take on the Xbox One. At this point, I honestly think Microsoft should just release a brand new Xbox that blows the PS4 out of the water, but I guess we live in iterative times.

Yakuza 0 - The prequel to the long-running Japanese crime game franchise, Yakuza 0 is already generating a ton of buzz. I've played it and love the combat, but haven't gotten far enough into the game to say much else. Either way, by all accounts this is one you won't want to miss.

Yooka-Laylee - A cute platformer that hearkens back to the best platformer games of Ye Olden Times, Yooka-Laylee looks pretty adorable and fun, and is being made by developers who worked on Banjo-Kazooie and Donkey Kong Country.

1-2-Switch - The first-party game for the Nintendo Switch. Alas, it isn't a pack-in and you have to pay $50 for it separately. That's a mistake, but hopefully this will have lots of fun mini-games that make use of the new console.

I'll add more games to this list as they're announced. Obviously some big ones---Call of Duty, Assassin's Creed, Skylanders, etc.---are coming out this year but haven't been announced. Stay tuned, and please let me know if something is missing and I'll add it straight away. There are likely other games that I'm simply not familiar with that didn't make the list, and I'm more than happy to take a look at new titles and edit them in.

Thanks! And Have a good day!