O tempora is a series of retrospective posts where I play games from ages before to see if they stood the test of time.
When I started this revisit of Infinity Engine titles I was intentionally going out of order of release. I started with the IWD series, which I never particularly cared about and then went with Baldur’s Gate games which I like a lot, but I was saving my favorite for the last. I was slightly nervous, since it has been a while since I’ve replayed Planescape: Torment. And since when I played Torment: Tides of Numenera last year I compared it quite unfavorably to its biggest inspiration. What if my memories were a bit too rosy and the game didn’t age as well as I expected?
Nah, it’s still fantastic, Enhanced Edition or not.
What made Planescape: Torment unique in 99 is, pretty much, the same that makes it an oddity today. It plays like a story-driven point and click adventure with very heavy emphasis on dialogues and traditional adventure problem solving with traditional RPG attributes existing to primarily enhance these aspects of the game. There is a party and the combat system, the same as in the rest of the Infinity Engine games, and magic looks absolutely amazing when you use it. But…You probably won’t, because there are very few locations that require combat no matter how you play and even those aren’t particularly tough with a relatively non-combat-oriented characters.
Which is the preferred way of playing the game. Due to its focus on the story, your main attributes are Wisdom, Intelligence and Charisma, as these specifically unlock the most of the story and the dialogue options in the game. Playing as a balanced out or even fighting-focused character is possible and you won’t miss any of the key story beats, but a lot of additional and often incredibly interesting information will be missed out. Not to mention the fact that unlike dialogue-oriented character builds, combat-oriented play doesn’t really have any real “rewards” or truly unique features or events to it. That in addition to the fact that combat itself is pretty boring.
That is, probably, the biggest and only issue of the game since the day it was released. And something the aforementioned Torment: ToN addressed and in a really creative and fun way. Yet, Planescape has so much to it that this can only be a problem for you if you don’t like stories and lots and lots of reading.
If you do love reading this game has one of the most memorable, most unique, most imagination stimulating stories I’ve ever encountered not just in gaming but in any storytelling medium ever. If you’re not aware of the setup of the game – you are The Nameless One, an immortal creature of an unknown age who looses all of his memories upon death. As such, every time he awakens with no understanding of who or where he is and, based on these first experiences, forms a personality that can be mildly or wildly different after every reincarnation. Except, the memory loss stopped after the final one that happens at the start of the game and The Nameless One, perhaps for the first time, has a real chance to understand who and what he is and what caused him to be this way.
While amnesiac characters where a bit of a tired trope even by 99, Planescape: Torment uses it to create something utterly unique and perfectly fitting the bizarre world that you explore. The city of doors Sigil, full of portals that can drop you to some random plane of existence if you’re not careful, is full of weird, amazing, creepy and sometimes outright disgusting creatures and characters and experiencing them as an amnesiac, who actually has lots of experience behind him he simply forgot, works wonders. Game eases you into weird concepts and wild changes to the D&D rules so no matter how complex a situation you find yourself in really is, you’re rarely, if ever, at a loss. It’s a masterclass of making things complex enough to be truly inspiring, yet simple enough to understand them at first glance.
There’s always “just enough” of everything. Just enough quests and situations so they talk on the game themes and create unique and memorable experiences. Just enough companions so you have a full party of unique and well-written and developed characters. Just enough locations to outline the scale of the adventure, without being too huge, too empty, too overwhelming. Game does seem to be somewhat lacking in later parts, though not the ending, where you jump through several amazing locations in quick succession, each of them having way too little screen time. Especially since the biggest of them all can be (even accidentally) skipped almost completely.
But the world feels grand, it feels alive, it feels real in its unreality. Despite constant clever hints at the influence that The Nameless One might’ve had on the world and its people over the lifetimes he lived, you never feel like the world revolves around you, something that killed the mood of Torment: ToN completely. This story is personal, but it’s ignored and misunderstood by the universe at large, even when your actions influence it directly. And even that feels so perfectly explored as a theme, even that feels “just right”.
Mark Morgan’s soundtrack is perfect. Perhaps, less varied than Jeremy Soule’s score for IWD, but incredibly memorable nonetheless. Voice acting, while rare as it was common for the time, is fantastic. The visual side of the game is something amazing, especially now in higher resolutions. Enhanced Edition of this game is far less questionable than with some of the other titles. It doesn’t try to do too much and focuses simply on making the game play and feel fantastic today, fixing old issues, improving some elements, making everything look even better than it used to. And it’s the best way to replay the game today. Though, as I was playing, I did encounter quite a few crashes, something that didn’t seem like a universal issue, but still a thing to keep in mind.
Planescape: Torment remains one of my absolute favorite titles. It took the best concepts of the “western” cRPGs, mixed in the best concepts from jRPG classics and created a perfect story-driven blend. It’s hard to compare it to even the most direct comparisons, like Torment, not because it’s perfect (it’s not), but because it’s just so imaginative, so inventive, so exciting and so timeless that it’s easy to completely overlook any and all of its shortcomings. If you haven’t played it before, you absolutely have to, chief.