my most compressed tldrest impressions: b o r i n g
I'm not sure how much stock to put into this assessment, since you complained about having to go places and do stuff in Underrail.
Okay, in that case allow me to elaborate.
To start with what I liked:
- The effort mechanic, i.e. spending attribute currency to boost your chance to pass a skillcheck, is something promising and probably the only attempt in the history of 'big' crpgs to introduce the concept of fate points or rerolls to some degree. Arcanum also had fate points, but their implementation was terrible. Frayed Knights also had them, in the form of adventure stars, and their implementation was a hundred million billion times better than numanuma's effort, but unfortunately Frayed Knights was played by a dozen people at best.
- There are bits and pieces, mostly tertiary characters, who can be interesting, like a book merchant who speaks in "narration", or city guards who are manufactured when a citizen gives away a year of his life in levy, or an intertemporal adoption service. Unfortunately, those are typically tertiary bits, and even still they are fairly underrepresented.
- The first "crisis" is also something fairly promising, and it's cool to see an RPG finally make use of stuff like dialogue skills in combat (talk to an enemy in combat and [intimidate] him). Unfortunately (see where this is going?), all the other crises I went through were of the "just kill 'em all" variety.
What I didn't like:
- There is so little actually going on in terms of gameplay in this fucking game that the only way I can describe it is "Dear Esther with skillchecks". 95% of the beta is spent running between characters and talking. Go to ZoneX, talk to Char1, then to Char2, then back to Char1, then to Char3 in ZoneY, then back to Char1 again. Every now and again you press the [skillcheck] option to gain a Creepy Memory (tm) and get +2 xp, or cut your running around by a few characters. Almost everything here is handled via dialogue, and typically it requires 0 effort to handle said everything. Now, this wouldn't be necessarily bad if the dialogue was good. However...
- The dialogue is most certainly not good. Apart from the few interesting tertiary characters, it is mostly complete tripe. Too long, overwrought, bland, nonsensical. I was paying close attention to it because I was consciously fishing for examples of really rampant stupidity (and ho boy there's lots), but even then some of them I couldn't stomach. There's a Not-Smoldering Corpse Bar in the city with a bunch of ex-adventurers or whatever, who are so extraordinarily boring that after a few dialogue nodes I just surrendered and continued with "press 1, press enter to continue without reading, press 1, press enter, press 1" because it was honestly just unreadable. Without the conscious fishing I mentioned, I probably would have skipped half the texts in the game in this manner. Still, bad dialogue can at least be saved by a servicable story. However...
- I can't quite decide whether the story is non-existent or completely stupid. In essence, your "main objective" is supposed to be "You are a
bhaalspawn castoff. Find someone who can fix your macguffin to stop
Dahaka The Sorrow from eating you". The Sorrow is some kind of horrific cosmic horror that really really wants to eat you. Except the Sorrow appears just once during the intro and doesn't appear ever again. Some really fucking extra critical threat this. Of course, you soon find out that your macguffin can probably be fixed only by another castoff. You find said castoff, and she tells you to go find a castoff in a whole CITY of castoffs, and maybe HE can fix your macguffin for you! Meanwhile, while running around between zones, you will notice that suspiciously much going on in the world, the city, everything, has castoffs behind it. Castoffs are hiding behind every corner and in every memory, they are legion, and they are responsible for EVERYTHING. Every moment in the history of the city? It was castoffs! People in the city going crazy? It was castoffs! Strange machinery? Castoffs! Slavers? Castoffs! Cults and scholars? Castoffs! Castoffs, castoffs, castoffs, more like fuck offs! Castoffs being the sole answer to every single problem in this fucking game is not only absurd, it's also fucking idiotic. Each time something happens, you know there is AT LEAST one castoff behind it.
- Numenera, both the setting and the ruleset, is complete and utter garbage. The setting is garbage because it's a circus where everything goes. Fallout 3 is less of a clownish theme park than Numenera. The ruleset is garbage, and I have a feeling inXile also happened to notice that once they sat down to the game mechanics - I am 100% certain they had no idea what they were getting into when they announced that Tworment would be using the Numederpa system, and it shows by the additions that they kept making to it. Tl;dr, Numenera is a system where, in combat, you say "I attack", then roll d20 and you either hit or not. There is nothing else to it, no defensive rolls or actual modifiers, nothing. So inXile at least added stuff like Willpower and Evasion mods to combat, because "I attack, the end" wouldn't make for good combat in a crpg. But it's all sisyphean labour, because even with the fixes and additions, the ruleset still remains fucking numederpa, and because of this, the whole "crisis" shtick is completely wasted.
And because the underlying Numederpa system is total garbage, everything that stems from it is also garbage. Character management/advancement/definition is garbage. Itemisation is garbage. Combat is garbage. The effort system, while promising conceptually, actually falls flat on its face in practice - when inXile added HP to the game, everyone assumed it was an attempt at dumbing down. No, I say it was another desperate attempt to find their way out of a retarded system that they cluelessly forced themselves into. Whether that was a good idea is up for debate.
- From the 3 stats (might/speed/int) skillchecks are so lopsided towards int that it's not even funny. My character was focused on speed/stealth/agility, and I felt like a total chump for doing that. Good that I didn't go with might at least, because that one's EVEN more underrepresented.
- The companion characters are all massively uninteresting, except Erritis the blondie stereotypically heroic hero. Tybir is so generic and cardboard, I can't even describe him in any specific way. Aligern is some sort of emo grimdark guy and that's it. Callistege, the woman who can communicate with her versions from different dimensions, could easily be interesting, but they actually managed to make her 100% uninteresting, which is quite the achievement. There's also some little girl whose VO was driving me nuts and some grimdark edgy (CASTOFF) assassin from Matkina who'd probably be called xXxALTAIRxXx if she was a male player character in an mmo. Erritis is the only one who works because he is the only one to go all the way in with his concept. He's a lawful stupid heroic hero, and everything he does/says is a reflection of this, which is a) comical, b) uncommon. Callistege's interdimensionality you hardly even notice. Tybir is cardboard. Matkina is generic to the bone.
- The very obvious "hoho c wut I did thar" references to PS:T. A character named "O", an npc referring to you as "Adahn", the Not-Smoldering Corpse Bar, etc etc etc etc etc. It reeks of cheap fanservice. And despite all this, even though the game is titled "Torment", there is practically next to zero actual torment in it. Except for a character named "tormented levy".
I could probably go on or expand upon the above, but those are my chief complaints. The game is stupid, predictable and boring, further spiced up with a garbage ruleset and setting.