6. Torment: Tides of Numenera

Explore the Ninth World as the “Last Castoff”, an amnesiac humanoid power receptacle who was left to die for unknown reasons, that don’t ever appear to be answered. And just so you know, combat is not the main focus of this game. So if you’re looking for hack and slash, skip ahead to Umbra. This is not your game.

You start off with your unknown protagonist, for which you get to choose only a gender (and probably a name, although that hasn’t been explicitly stated), before being thrust out into the cold, terrifying world. From now on, your personality and skills will be decided by the decisions you make out in the “real [game] world”. Very much like life.

Through these decisions and interactions with NPCs and the world in general, you can develop into one of three standard character classes, Warrior, Mage or Rogue, although in-game they are referred to as “Glaive”, “Nano” and “Jack” respectively. These can be customized further still with other adjectives (e.g. “Tough”), which will affect your character's skills and abilities.

And continuing in this vein of taking standard game mechanics and shifting them slightly to make them more confusing, ToN will use “Tides” instead of the usual alignment style, which are… Somewhat complicated.

But basically, having types of Tides is a way to display the way in which you’ve lived; not necessarily whether you were good or evil, but your general… Way. And this Way (your “Legacy”), when occurring in conjunction with the use of certain items (language getting technical in order to avoid spoilers, sorry), gives you different rewards. And that’s the end, I promise.

Tl;dr: It looks like a pretty good game. Check it out.