Torment: Tides of Numenera Kickstarter Update #3, $1,976,951 and Counting

inXile Entertainment continues to keep pledgers up to speed on their plans for Torment: Tides of Numenera, with update #3 introducing us to a new video series, a strategy guide add-on, a new True Believer tier, and more stretch goals.  Hey, George Ziets is back!

$2.5 Million: George Ziets, Death Mechanics The Castoff’s Labyrinth, Monte’s Novella, New Companion, Colin’s Apology (Part 1)

Ziets!

We are thrilled to announce that George will be joining Torment as a writer at this Stretch Goal. This is a personally meaningful addition to me. You may know George from his role as Creative Lead on Mask of the Betrayer, where he led the story and character design for the game. Working on that game was one of the highlights of my career and I have George to thank for much of that. His creative aesthetics are perfect for the themes we are exploring in Torment and I’m very much looking forward to collaborating with George again.

New Novella

Monte will be writing a Torment novella at this mark as well. For a sample of Monte’s creative writing for Numenera, you might check out his short story, The Amber Monolith. http://www.numenera.com/the-amber-monolith/

Companion

This Stretch Goal will also bring the 6th companion. Some noted to us that maybe I said too much in describing (The Toy) in Update 2, so we’ll leave this one mysterious for now.

Castoff’s Labyrinth

We’ll also be adding the Castoff’s Labyrinth, an area that will play into our treatment of death in Torment at $2.5M. Expanding upon this (labyrinth of the mind) will also serve as an ongoing Stretch Goal for us from this point on. We’ll be providing more detail about this area, and Death Mechanics soon, but here’s a piece that Colin wrote describing it:

“Death is the end. That’s what they say. But that’s not entirely true, is it? When Death crashes over you like a looming wave, you don’t die. Your body knits up fast and your eyes stare off. You move and twitch. So what is it you’re seeing? Where do you go when you die?”

When you open your eyes, you’re in a chamber with four… no, six… make it five walls. Call it five. It’s almost definitely five walls. Each of them has a door of different material, each of them wavers before you, but they become more distinct the closer you approach. The chamber is dark and dripping, a faint tremor like a slow pulse shaking the floor on a long timeline. You put your hand to the door and it opens for you, and before you lies a crumbling stone walkway over fathomless mists. You can see no roof above you, nor stars nor moon. The mists curl and lap at your feet, broken occasionally by stray eddies of wind.

There is a feeling of recognition deep inside you. You know this place. And ahead, across the span, you see a familiar face.

“What are you doing here?” you ask

“You’re dead,” she says. “What I mean is that you’re not dead. You’re coming back to life. And now you’ve got fragments of us in your head. Every time you take our suffering, we get stronger. In here, I mean. But if you want to come back to the world, you need to find your way out of here.”