Torment: Tides of Numenera is now in Early Access

InXile's party-based RPG Torment: Tides of Numenera went into beta last week—provided, that is, that you'd backed the game on Kickstarter at a level that offered beta access as a reward.

at a level that offered beta access as a reward. For everyone else, it was tough noogies until today. But now the game is live on Early Access, and if you just can't wait until it's finished to play it, you can leap into the action right now.

The Early Access release weighs in at an estimated ten hours of play, a sizable chunk for a beta but still a relatively small slice of the roughly 50-hour length of the full game. And even though it was delayedlate last year to make it “a more polished and complete beta test,” inXile warned that “you will almost definitely encounter bugs,” including a couple that can stop the game dead in its tracks.

“We do not have a set update schedule, but we will be doing rolling updates before final release later this year to address your most-requested ideas and get more feedback as the game evolves and improves,” the studio wrote in the Early Access announcement. “Torment is in active development, and you will be gaining access to development snapshots—this means that we will be implementing hundreds or thousands of changes every build, so you will see the game grow along with us.”

Torment: Tides of Numenera is the “thematic successor” to the much-loved (and criminally-ignored) Black Isle RPG Planescape: Torment, and going by the description on Steam, its lineage runs very true. “You are born falling from orbit, a new mind in a body once occupied by the Changing God, a being who has cheated death for millennia. If you survive, your journey through the Ninth World will only get stranger… and deadlier,” it says. “With a host of strange companions—whose motives and goals may help or harm you—you must escape an ancient, unstoppable creature called the Sorrow and answer the question that defines your existence: What does one life matter?”

Torment: Tides of Numenera is $45/£31 on Steam. A full release date hasn't been announced but when last we looked, it was expected to be ready to fly later this year.