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.