The game takes place in The Ninth World, a science fantasy campaign setting written by Monte Cook for his tabletop RPG Numenera.

Torment: Tides of Numenera, like its predecessor, is primarily story-driven while placing greater emphasis on interaction with the world and characters, with combat and item accumulation taking a secondary role.

[4] The player experiences the game from the point of view of the Last Castoff, a human host that was once inhabited by a powerful being, but was suddenly abandoned without memory of prior events.

In the far future (one billion years), the rise and fall of countless civilizations have left Earth in a roughly medieval state, with most of humanity living in simple settlements, surrounded by technological relics of the mysterious past.

The protagonist of the story, known as the Last Castoff, is the final vessel for the consciousness of an ancient man, who managed to find a way to leave his physical body and be reborn in a new one, thus achieving a kind of immortality by means of the relics.

The actions of this man, known as the Changing God to some, attracted the enmity of "The Sorrow" (renamed from "The Angel of Entropy" to reduce the potential to imply a religious role), who now seeks to destroy him and his creations.

[9][10] While the overall story varies wildly depending on personal preferences and specific interactions, the central storyline follows the Last Castoff as they search for a way to defeat or escape the Sorrow.

They explore Sagus Cliffs after falling from a great height into a domed structure, destroying an artifact known as a resonance chamber that is believed to be capable saving the Last Castoff from the Sorrow.

[11] Talks about creating a sequel with the help of a crowd funding platform resumed in 2012, but attempts to acquire a Planescape license from Wizards of the Coast failed.

[13] In January 2013, inXile's CEO Brian Fargo announced that the spiritual successor to Planescape: Torment was in pre-production and would be set in the Numenera RPG universe created by Monte Cook.

Development of the game began shortly after the acquisition of the Torment license, and various inXile staff will transition over to the Numenera team as production on Wasteland 2 winds down.

[24] The planned release date announced during the fund raising campaign was set to December 2014, but was later postponed "a few months" due to the need to implement the numerous achieved stretch goals.

[26] The game would ship DRM-free to the Microsoft Windows, MacOS and Linux platforms and would be available in six languages: English, French, German, Polish, Russian and Spanish.

"[36] Leif Johnson from IGN gave the game a score of 8.8/10 saying that "Torment: Tides of Numenera delivers a deep and satisfyingly strange RPG world loaded with text-based storytelling.

"[38] Chris Thursten of PC Gamer awarded it an 89/100 stating that "A slow start gives way to a thought-provoking adventure in a remarkable setting.

"[39] "Aside from some issues with encounter balance and my yearnings for more detail, it’s a beautiful, challenging game, content to be ambiguous, rich and confounding in ways that few other RPGs have ever pulled off" was Carli Velocci's conclusion with a score of 8/10 on Polygon[40] Alice Bell's score of 8/10 on VideoGamer.com said that "Great writing and environment design, combined with an epic story and wide range of player choice, make Tides of Numenera a wonderful RPG.