Classic Game Club #32: Planescape: Torment

Planescape: Torment starts in a morgue. Your dead body is wheeled into the facility on a slab by a zombie worker. You’re deposited there, surrounded by embalming fluids and other mortician’s tools and dead bodies. Thus begins the tale of the Nameless One.

At first blush, this is a game that subverts some genre conventions, while embracing some cliches like a lead character with Amnesia. You’re immortal, so even though the game is made with the engine that powered Baldur’s Gate, it breaks out of the gameplay loop of constant saving and loading that characterized that game. In this game, if you die, you sometimes end up back in the Mortuary where you started. And sometimes it even helps bring back memories. It’s a game that’s set in a very unconventional universe.

Unlike Baldur’s Gate, it doesn’t assume that you’re already familiar with the fundamental underpinnings of that universe. It describes things to you in loving detail both in the game as you play, and also in detailed journal entries. It embraces unconventional spells with sometimes super elaborate animations more akin of JRPG conventions than Western RPGs. Instead of adopting a faux-medieval vocabulary for it’s denizens, they adopt a variation of 19th century British slang.

Best of all, the game is such a joy to play as a blank slate character where you don’t decide up front what alignment you will be. Your actions and your decisions through dialogue choices determine that throughout the game. The first time you see a conversation tree in Planescape: Torment where you can reply to someone, and in some of the replies there is the prefix “Truth:”, it’s a revelation, and you know you’re playing something different and something special. A game where the writing is very engaging and the dialogue choices have a deeper layer of meaning than just what you’re saying to the person you’re engaging in conversation.

There’s another truth about Planescape: Torment that’s worth mentioning though. It does these things not just to go against genre conventions and be different. You’re not just immortal for gameplay reasons. This is a game about death. And it explores a topic that’s seldom explored in games, despite death being a constant presence in most games.

So come join us in playing Planescape: Torment. The game is available from GoG. GoG also has this great modding guide on which mods to install to run the game on modern monitors and modern resolutions with a properly scaled UI. Be warned that it’s still an infinity engine game, so expect some of the same interface annoyances.

Install it, mod it, play it, and then come back and share your thoughts as you play through it.

Game I have a copy of: Check
Game I’ve never actually played: Check
Game considered an all time great: Check.

Hmm…

I am in the same boat, Craig.

Downloading now…

Wow, excellent pick. I have so many great memories. Such great writing.

I made it out of the Mortuary.

In the past I played this game at launch, and I think I was in some kind of underground place fighting some kind of rat god/hive-mind when I had to go home for Christmas break. And when I got back from break, things got busy with school. Then several years later, I started over, and I got to about the same point again, this time becoming a Mage and discovering so much in the game I hadn’t seen the first time. Something else happened in real life to interrupt the game, and again I couldn’t go back for a few months so I shelved it for some future playthrough.

Well, the future is now!

I’m amazed just how much they packed into just the Mortuary. You can speed through the place, but I examined every shelf, every zombie worker, ever locked cabinet. I found a way to open the front gate and also a secret exit. I love that you can make your own notes on the in-game map. The right-click actions menu seems weird. The high resolution play means that the interface is weirdly divided up. On the left bottom corner is one set of menus, and way over in the bottom right corner, there’s another set of menus.

Still, when you’re exploring this world, I slowly found the interface and menus become unimportant pretty quickly.

Now I find myself in the Hive.

Be careful when you explore the City of Doors. Some portals can lead you to unexpected places. ;)

Thanks for the link on the modding guide. I got all of that installed and now am wandering around the Mortuary with no idea what I should be doing, but I believe that is how it should be for now :).

Yay! When I chose this game, the biggest thing I was scared of is that people would get intimidated by the size of the adventure. But I hope more of you join in this weekend and let this game pull you in with it’s awe-inspiring art, writing and music.

And high level spells!! My memory may be rusty but I recall it being the first game I could actually cast 8th and 9th level Mage spells in. Might have to see if I can replay this on a Mac…

EDIT - and it turns out the GoG version is Mac friendly so I’m downloading it now. I’ve been meaning to replay it for years now…amazing game.

I’m a bit put off by all of the mod options. Which ones did people pick? Won’t we be playing completely different games?

I followed the recommendations of the guy linked above in the original post. Most of the first few mods are to do with graphics, font/grammar fixes, bugs, etc. The last one or two can change gameplay, but many are QoL features, I believe, and the ones that can break it a bit are recommended to not install for first time players, which I followed.

I am going in with a build that will probably suck, and I didn’t do any research ahead of time, but I will see if I can make it work, heh. My guy is dumb as a bunch of rocks, though, so no high level spells for him, and possibly no spells at at all! :)

Same here, I think I just followed the guide on what to install, since it’s what’s recommended for new players. Although, I don’t think I turned on subtitles during cutscenes, for example. That, I figure, is for people who might have English as a second language.

I’ve reached the 10 hour mark, and I’m finding it hard to survive in the Hive at night. I still haven’t found any location where I can rest for the night. The rest button results in either a “This place is too dangerous to rest here” message or a “You cannot rest here” message. Lots of thugs and thieves and hoodlums out at night, and since I made a character who will be a Mage in the future, I make a pretty terrible fighter. Nearly all fights with these thugs end up with me back in the Mortuary so far.

But it’s so nice not to have to save and reload! I can just go in a different direction from the Mortuary, or go back and try to win the fight.

Man, the Hive is a far more dangerous place than I remember. Especially at night.

I think that’s the single weakest aspect of the game. Imo it breaks off from a lot of tropes in RPG, but they still felt the need of putting filler combat with generic thugs. It was annoying, and in the end it didn’t serve any good purpose: when I remember all the good parts of the game, fighting some random mooks isn’t one of them.

Yeah, I didn’t understand this complaint when I first played the game at launch, since I’d distributed my stats to be a fighter. And these thugs were just a cheap source of experience.

Having a horrible time trying to mod this on Mac. The guides all deal with the Windows version…very confused. Anyone happen to be playing on Mac?

Never played this but I do remember all of the accolades it received in all of the gaming print mags of the time. I ended buying a boxed copy off of eBay sometime in the early or mid aughts for like 50 bucks I think but I didn’t have the perseverance to push through the beginning. There’s something about reading walls upon walls of text on a desktop PC that’s really off putting. I’m thinking this time around I’ll install it on my Surface Pro 3 so I can kick back in the reclining and treat it like an interactive ebook.

I’m not particularly D&D fluent and I hate to invest skill points into something that seems cool and useful but is actually next to worthless because the devs were lazy or just ran out of time.

JMR: Planescape works quite a bit differently than more D&D games in that way. You start the story as a fighter. But later you have the chance to change into a Mage or Thief. Being a fighter definitely makes the game a lot easier in the small fights, I can testify to that. But I wanted the high wisdom and intelligence to uncover more memories and additional dialog choices. And I figure I’ll become a mage when that option becomes available. But I haven’t had to choose any skills yet as a fighter when I leveled up, only an additional character point to put into my base stats. Which I foolishly put into Charisma, because having high Wisdom and Intelligence isn’t enough. I also have to have everyone like me too.

Don’t go into the Smoldering Corpse bar until you’re in the mood to read a lot of text.

Fascinating stuff though. It’s almost as if the Planescape universe could co-exist with any other universe created.

Tempting to jump on board, but I am currently in the middle of Baldurs Gate . it’s very tempting to jump ship though.