Part 49: Our Long Numenera Nightmare Is Finally Over

Our Long Numenera Nightmare Is Finally Over

Last time on Tides of Numenera we learned the real truth of the Sorrow: it's not an avenging angel, but a random death robot built by some rich assholes to genocide their own people for using Tides wrong, then it came here to gaslight us like a jealous ex. It offered us the same choice we've received all game: who should the trolley run over?



: I reject your authority, Sorrow. I will use the Resonance to destroy you, and all of us will live free.



Fuck you. How many people lived in the Dalad world? If the Resonance is a scalpel as you say, why can't we cut the Sorrow out and leave the other protections?

The answer, I suspect, is that this is the Sorrow's last bit of "fuck you".



This is a very important choice. If you don't pick your dominant Tide the Sorrow kills you in the process. However, as we are Blue/Gold aligned...

: [Raises Gold Tide] The castoffs are my family. I will do what it takes to protect them from you.





This is what the game developers consider to be the bad ending, as they are warning you off pretty hard here.

: Unleash a Tidal Surge.



Picking the right Tidal Alignment lets us shoot a big Cutscene Laser at the Sorrow, resulting in a 2 minute death animation.



The game is about to get extremely hypocritical here.



They FINALLY allowed the animators to do something meaningful.



Now you might be confused why the bad ending has a being of darkness and death exploding into light, but that's Numenera, nothing is spiritually significant or has any meaning!



It explodes into shadow dicks, I assume that's where it got all the Black Demon Seed.



Are you ready for the guilt trip?



The game starts playing background noise of a bunch of screaming and terror here. It would be moderately effective if I weren't laughing my ass off. See how Callistege is there despite having disappeared into the datasphere in our not-romantic moment? I remember, but the game doesn't.



Remember how Callistege disappeared into the datasphere? If you're being generous you could say the Sorrow blew it up from the Labyrinth when she exploded. I am not inclined to show this game any generosity. I guess we needed that near-panty shot of our traumatized companion. She's a woman in Numenera, the game is of course going to treat her terribly.



This is probably supposed to make me feel bad that the First Castoff approves, but I have no connection to this setting or any of these characters.

: Where will you go now?



: Do you think the Sorrow's really gone?



: Turn to Matkina. "What will you do now?"



Remember when the game wanted us to believe that Matkina was a cold, calculating assassin? Matkina is a hired killer and gang enforcer. Are we really to believe she would have accepted her death at the hands of the Sorrow so easily?



These are the words of a killer for hire. Her focus is literally that she's a murderer. If I was being generous I would say that what we did is supposed to be so evil and selfish that it disgusted a trained assassin, but the Gold Tide told us that we were a charitable and empathetic person for doing this.

: Though I do like the idea of putting some space between the Sagus Protectorate and me. Maybe I'll head to M'ra Jollos. Learn how to breath water for a while.





: Leave. Figure out your next steps later.

Fuck this shit, and fuck this game! The Last Castoff is OUT!



No summary this time. This ending is a joke far better than anything I can conceive.

Anyway, it's time for the ending slides! An "expansive epilogue" was promised for 2.85 million dollars. Are you ready? Here we go!



This is Numenera in a nutshell. We drove thousands of people mad. We were remembered for our wisdom and selflessness after inflicting madness and terrible prose on the world.

Edit: I misattributed this, the Sorrow just says "thousands." The Sorrow has destroyed entire worlds. This is batshit.



Wait, I'm confused. The game uses Matkina as its mouthpiece to explain that running over the people of Sagus Cliffs with a trolley was very wrong because a bunch of people died. She then ran a campaign of mass murder to seize power in the Bloom and executed people to make examples of them.

What is this shit?



Tybir got the bad ending. Oh no. Such a sympathetic and useful character.



All of the people on this screen were awful at their jobs. Look at the sheer amount of writers. Holy shit, they actually got women to sign off on crap like the Omahdon quest. I see Colin McComb is the "lead writer." Colin, I hear you're a good person, but the sheer amount of terrible prose and your inability to actually stick with a theme instead of jumping incoherently all over the place makes me never want to read anything you wrote ever again.



I guess some good came out of this? We freed Tides Dog. I feel like Tides Dog was the thread's favorite party member because he didn't spew garbage everywhere. I fully expect the next Numenera game, if there is one, to have Tides Dog come back spewing verbal diarrhea about nanomachines all over.



Rhin didn't like us for something she never saw us do, but she's happy she was able to repay us by helping us commit mass murder.



Anyway on to the sidequest characters! Aligern and Callistege do get endings, but I think Callistege is now trapped in a coma fighting her echoes forever and Aligern just died on the way back to his home planet. Zebb was one of the three little music kids who lived in the abandoned collapsing house. No idea how he didn't go insane when Aligern, a trained nano, snapped like a twig.



Wait. The Changing God is dead and the castoffs are in hiding because they can die now. What are they fighting over?



The baby robots lived at least.



We gave her leverage. She had the leverage that the city was supplying batteries. That's literally how the US foreign aid program works. We literally handed her the situation on a silver platter, and she fucked it up.





I assume Coty went to another dimension where everything was less stupid.



As all we saw of Artaglio's traditions was "sitting around and drinking until a vaguely pretty half-bald woman asks you to do something stupid" I cannot imagine their lives lasted very long.



We saved Aardiriis. She didn't die. We teleported her out. How many "reactivity" promises were in that Kickstarter?



That's it.

What a piece of shit.

This concludes the playthrough part of the LP. I am going to write a postmortem post about how this game managed to fuck up literally every story beat it tried to hit and then clean this thread up for archives. I do want to say one thing before that:

Thank you to everyone in the thread who stuck with me through this game. I can't tell you how gratifying it was to see the thread having similar reactions as I did going through this game. I'm glad for everyone who came in and voted on where the trolleys should go or just read along to see what the hell was going on with this supposedly "deep" game. This game sucked, but having you guys along for the ride was a ton of fun. Thank you, and avoid the trolleys!