"Feels like a book trapped in a videogame."

Planescape: Torment was an attempt to break every single cliché there is in RPG gaming. Most people won't remember it. Others will probably be split half and half; if you compiled a list of reasons of why people like or dislike the game, their lists will probably look similar. Planescape: Torment attempts to interest the player by getting them interested in the plight of the Nameless One, the main character who struggles to come to grips with his mortality and tries to remember who he is.

It must be said, Planescape: Torment does a breath-taking job of character development. These characters are some of the best ever seen in videogames. You have a wise-cracking skull, an immortal amnesiac, a chaste succubus, a suit of armour animated by his own will to deliver justice… the originality on display is nothing short of amazing. The characters, refreshingly, have their own damn stories. This is something most RPGs seem to neglect. Your party members are just as important as the main character. They help motivate your drive to found out what happened to the Nameless One, why he's immortal, and why he longs for death.

Yes, it would seem Planescape: Torment wants to be driven by story, instead of by gameplay. This comes in the form of a sea of text that will be dropped at every opportunity. With no journal system, take a days break from playing Planescape: Torment and you'll quickly be overwhelmed with everything that you have to do. The main story has very little in the way of guidance. From the get-go, you have to find someone called Pharod, find your journal, find your name, find your pants… some sort of early game MacGuffin would've been nice. But noooooo, Chris Aveloone just has to subvert every RPG cliché he can think of. What this results in is a game with not that much direction to start off with. It takes a staggering amount of time to actually start digging around in the fleshy, interesting bit of gameplay when the plot starts to thicken and when the characters start to say and do things that are relevant.

Once you've penetrated the games Fortress of Text, you'll discover that a lot of attention has been put into showing the setting, and distinguishing it as much as possible. Despite this, I felt the setting could have been made better. Every single distinguishing thing about the setting is discerned from the incredibly text-laden dialogue. If you don't spend time picking out facts from them, you wouldn't be able to tell otherwise. Good games can create atmosphere from sound and from visuals. Planescape: Torment likes to go the tl;dr path and create atmosphere from text. If there's a problem, Planescape: Torment throws text at the problem. Need to explain the purpose of an item? TEXT-HEAVY ROLLOVER! Trying to get a quest from an NPC? TEXT-HEAVY BACKSTORY! Every man and his dog will drop their routines to give a monologue about how miserable life is in the Hive, and how you're a fool for trying to entering the Maze of Puzzle… the game overuses dialogue. The game has a novel-worth of text. And I'm not talking about no Stephen King or something either. This is the Fyodor Dostoyevsky, unabridged, extended with foot-notes, directors cut amount of text. Developer Chris Avellone even mentions that one of the regrets with Planescape is how text-driven it is. In this alternate fantasy universe, nations are driven by text. Instead of machines running on steam, or oil, they run on text. Planescape is in its own genre that shall now be known as textpunk.

Despite there being a hell of a lot of text, the game can still stand up on its originality. And surely it could stand up on its gameplay? (it can't, but more on that later) The game likes to avert every cliché in gaming. If you like tvtropes, you'll love Planescape: Torment. Chances are, if you've heard of this game, you'll have heard that the main character is immortal, and you'll have heard that the game uses multiple opportunities to take advantage of that. One dungeon involves you having to repeatedly run through death-traps to try and solve a puzzle. If you die, you'll just wake up again in the mortuary where you started the game. This mechanic works surprisingly well. Another good thing about this game is how equipment works. You don't upgrade your sword every time you come across a new chest. Most characters have their own special weapons that only they can use, but the main character can use whatever is around, and usually you'll want different kinds of weapons for different situations. The first time you kit and outfit your party is a nervous and often-times frightening experience as you don't know what you want to take. In an RPG first, random items that boost you with status effects are actually helpful, and will probably form the corner-stone of your pre-battle preparation. The Witcher is probably the only other game where you do so much pre-battle preparation. This emphasis on item-usage is great, and the de-emphasis on constantly upgrading weapons and armour adds an actual element of strategy to the game. When you do upgrade items on your character, it's something unique. Like the kind of eyes in his head. Yes, since your character is immortal, this apparently means he now has the ability to replace his eye with someone else's in some kind of weird Frankensteining process. It's great, and it works.

Once you do get into battle, the games habit of poorly designed user-interfaces rears its ugly head. It likes to use radial menus. Radial menus with a LOT of buttons, no tutorial, no help menu, no roll-over instructions. It took me half the game to figure out how to cast spells, and then another half to figure out why I could only cast them a few times. Combat is also very, very fast, and employs the dreaded real-time with pause. Real-time with pause isn't bad, except the combat is very fast and oftentimes, very hard. When you have to pause every three seconds to issue orders, it makes combat feel like a chore. And this is somewhat of a nice feeling. The game almost forces you into talking your way out of things. It's possible to complete the game by only killing 3 or 4 enemies. Dialogue (and a high Wisdom, the stat that governs dialogue) is pretty much the only way through the game. Reading text is boring as hell when you're presented with a novel, and needs to be broken up with copious amounts of combat. Unfortunately, combat is only once in a while, it's difficult, it's broken, and it's over before you can blink. It's nice that a dialogue-based character is a very real possibility, but it's not nice when it's the only possibility. You see, in a game, you're not mistaken for expecting to do game-like things, such as carving a six in some berks head. In Planescape: Torment, not only is this a bad idea, but there's usually some advantage to talking your way around him. The problem with that is that talking isn't an intuitive way to progress the game. It gets so bad at some points that the game feels like an interactive e-book instead of a game.

Indeed, Planescape's only driving point is its story and more specifically, it's characters. They are superbly crafted, and the world (or plane, should I say) that the game is set within is extremely interesting. But again, the problem is that the game doesn't present that interesting world like a game. It presents it like a damn university lecturer. The only thing driving you forward to see what happens is… well, what happens. The game's not fun to play by any imaginable stretch. You just want to see the fate of the Nameless One resolved. Maybe it was the technology and limitations of the time, but Planescape: Torment feels like it's trapped in the wrong medium. Planescape doesn't immerse you as well as it could. It's like a socially insecure teenager. Deep inside, he's charming, and neurotic, and thoughtful, but it's penetrating that cold outer layer. The graphics in Planescape look hideous, and the art style is… hard to digest. Especially at night, it can be nearly possible to distinguish what the hell is on the screen. The sound in the game is incredibly poor. The (samey, although one or two tracks really stand out, notably Annah and Deionarra's themes) music was notably rushed to meet the release date of the game. Music will play for about ten minutes, then you'll sit in silence until you get into a fight, at which point the same music will play again for ten minutes and then you sit in silence. Occasionally, this is broken up with voice acting, which the game could've done so much with. But I forgive them for not including it, they probably didn't want to record a million hours of audio recording and inflate the size of the game.

Oh yeah, the game is also hella hard. Remember the old days when games wouldn't hold your hands. That was mostly a product of not being able to include a lot of little niceties, or not having space or reason to include instructions with games that were generally simplistic. Planescape: Torment was kind of developed in that space between games becoming complex enough to need tutorials and that kind of thing. The game is extremely unforgiving. Like I've said, no journal system means that you'll have to keep everything in your head. If you want to get the most out of the games quests, it might pay to have a walkthrough. The game involves a lot of running back and forth and remembering who everyone is and what they want. Thankfully, the NPCs tend to be interesting enough to keep you interested in their plight. This has the unfortunate implication of sometimes overshadowing what you're supposed to be doing. Since the main quest has little direction to it (no MacGuffin to motivate you, no immediate goals in sight), you might often find side quests being more interesting because they're more tangible. That is, if you can keep up with managing them.

Planescape is a weird experience. You have to go into it with the right mind-sight. You won't play it to have fun, or to immerse yourself in a world. Instead, you'll just want to go in to find out what happens, and to learn about the characters, because they're so interesting. I didn't talk much about the characters themselves in this review, because they're easily the best aspect of the game. I don't want to ruin any characterisation of them, because that's literally all the game has going for it. If you really, really like RPGs, and you really, really like a game with a big, deep story, then go for it. This game has a very deep plot, and it requires a lot of thinking and analysis to really get the best out of it. But the game also has a lot of flaws, is hard to play, is not immersive, and has a lot going on at once. There are a lot of small, flavourful interactions, but the game basically boils down to a string of gimmicks held together by an extremely interesting premise. Although remakes tend to suck, I can't help but imagine that one with Chris Avellone at the head of the design team could actually make Planescape: the Videogame, instead of Planescape: the eBook.

Reviewer's Score: 5/10, Originally Posted: 01/03/11

Game Release: Planescape: Torment (US, 11/30/99)