“What can change the nature of a man?” That is the central question at the heart of Black Isle Studios’ Planescape: Torment, one of the most unique computer role-playing games (CRPGs) ever created and an absolute triumph of brains over brawn. While some may baulk at its text-heavy nature and the clunkiness of the combat system, others, fed up with or uninterested in the current spate of 3D action games, or indeed Black Isle’s other, more Tolkienesque RPGs, will certainly get a kick out of this novel, challenging and thought-provoking exploration of human nature.
You begin lying on a mortuary slab, horribly scarred and unaware of who you are, how you got there and, perhaps most pertinently, why you aren’t dead. Your only companion turns out to be a floating skull named (what else?) Morte, who seems rather insistent that he tag along and is full of good advice but seems to know more than he lets on. Two things become readily apparent:
1. you have amnesia, and can’t remember your own name, much less what you’re supposed to be doing;
2. you can’t die.
The various tattoos that adorn your body, Memento-style, inform you that you used to have a journal, the contents of which may provide some clue as to your identity and the nature of your condition, and that it is imperative that you track down a man named Pharod. Apart from that, you’re on your own.
Of the five Dungeons & Dragons games created using Bioware’s Infinity Engine, Torment is the one that stands out the most from the rest of the crowd, for two reasons: the setting and the style of play. Whereas the four other games were each set in various regions of the Forgotten Realms, a thoroughly Tolkienesque “high fantasy” universe populated by the usual array of noble elves, crotchety dwarves, vicious goblins and fire-breathing dragons, the decision to locate this game in the dramatically different and altogether more imaginative Planescape campaign setting ensures that it remains fresh and full of surprise. Less a universe and more a multiverse, Planescape consists of a series of world known as the Planes, connected by various portals that can be found in the most unlikely locations. It was created by Zeb Cook in the mid-90s and, nowadays, seems to have been more or less shelved, which is a shame, because for me it’s among the most evocative fictional worlds ever created.
A lot of this, I suspect, can be attributed less to the setting itself and more to the way in which its adaptation was handled by lead designer Chris Avellone and his team. In the Infinity Engine roster, Torment’s release was sandwiched between that of Bioware’s Baldur’s Gate, which adopted a reasonable balance between story and combat, and Black Isle’s own Icewind Dale, which largely eschewed narrative depth in favour of prolonged, battle-intensive dungeon crawling. The latter is essentially the antithesis of Torment, which relegates combat to secondary status and instead greatly emphasises plot, conveyed mostly in the form of extended text-based conversations. I’ve heard the game being described as one of those old DOS-based text adventure games wrapped in the skin of a modern (late-90s) isometric RPG, and indeed, the first time I played it, I was struck by how reminiscent it seemed of those old “choose your own adventure” novels – the ones which gave the reader various options in terms of how to progress the narrative. I personally loved these sorts of books, but I’d imagine that those who didn’t share my affection for them would find the screens of dense, often highly verbose, prose incredibly off-putting. In fact, those who struggle with anything more narratively complex than a Quake deathmatch are likely to end up hurling their keyboards at their monitors. Torment is not a game for those who just want to go around killing everything.
That said, it’s not impossible to play the game with such a mindset. Torment is relatively open-ended in its character creation process, allowing players to assign stats of their choosing at the start and then providing the option to switch back and forth between the standard D&D classes of Fighter, Mage and Thief at will by talking to various “trainers”. Throwing all your points into the Fighter-friendly attributes of Strength and Vitality at the expense of Intelligence, Wisdom and so on is certainly a viable option, but certainly not the recommended one. In fact, the game favours those with high Intelligence, Wisdom and Charisma so heavily that it seems clear that its designers intended for it to be played this way. You see, the higher these three stats are, the more dialogue options become available, often providing far more rewarding results than simply going around bashing skulls. A character with high Charisma, for example, can often charm his way out of a combat situation (and in doing so earn himself a far nicer bonus in experience points than would have been the result of simply fighting). Likewise, characters with high Intelligence and Wisdom possess considerably greater reasoning abilities: one of my favourite memories of the game, and one that a lot of players mention, is an occasion in which I actually talked another character out of existence. Through the power of words, I literally convinced him he didn’t exist, and he promptly disappeared off the face of the earth. Another superb example comes towards the end of the game, where a certain character with whom the player has to do battle is feeding off the chaos that has erupted among the population of a town. The first time I came upon this section, I ran straight through the town and confronted him head-on, only to find that he was simply too powerful for my group to defeat. I reloaded an earlier save state and went through the town, helping to put an end to various disputes and restore order. In doing so, I greatly weakened my enemy to the extent that, when I came to face him for a second time, killing him was remarkably easy. Could a player who had beefed up on Strength and Vitality have charged head-long into the battle and ground him down through sheer brute force? Possibly, but I bet it wouldn’t have been even a fraction as satisfying.
With so much text, it’s remarkable that the settings and characters are as evocative as they are, an accomplishment that I attribute to the wonderful synthesis between audio, visuals and scripting. There isn’t much music in Torment and even less recorded dialogue, but what little there is definitely counts. Nearly a decade on, Mark Morgan’s haunting score (reportedly thrown together in a mere few weeks) remains among the best ever written for a game, while the occasional snippets of vocal work, provided by a cast that ranges from Homer Simpson himself, Dan Castellaneta, to Glaswegian singing sensation Sheena Easton, suffers from none of the ham and cheese that normally afflict video game voice acting. The latter voices a particularly memorable character, a feisty Tiefling (demon) named Anna, who possesses a fearsome temper, a mane of red hair and, best of all, a tail, and whose banter with the other characters is an absolute hoot. Unlike many games of this sort, the various different individuals in your party also talk to one another of their own accord, a trait also glimpsed in Baldur’s Gate II but to nothing like the same extent. Engaging in deep philosophical conversations with your party members, whether talking about you, them or someone else, can often lead to surprising rewards in the form of experience bonuses or stat boosts (for either you or them)… with the occasional unintended negative effects. For example, one character who shows up late in the game is an animated suit of armour named Vhailor, who crusades throughout the lands meting out his own particular brand of justice upon any that he deems to have broken the laws of the Planes. Asking him what he really thinks of a character like Annah, for example, is probably not the wisest move. Other characters include Fall-from-Grace, a former succubus who has taken a vow of celibacy and now runs the Brothel of Slating Intellectual Lusts, and Nordom, a robot who is developing a personality of his own.
Few other games possess even a fraction of the level of imagination that can be seen in the existence of this diverse array of personalities. It is, of course, possible to completely ignore all this and simply go around bashing skulls together, but in doing so, you not only miss out on one of the deepest and most intelligent storylines ever crafted for a computer game, but also have to wrangle with the Infinity Engine’s less than intuitive combat system. Now, personally, I love every single title created using this engine to one degree or another, but I’m the first to admit that enjoying these games can at times be a slightly trying process, requiring you to work around or learn to ignore various minor and major irritants. The combat system is a particular sore point, and while Torment does add some much-needed improvements, mainly in the form of changes to the interface, it’s often better, for sanity’s sake, to simply avoid fighting as much as possible. All this is further confounded by the crippling bugs that ran rife in the initial release of the game, the absolute worst being a memory leak that would cause the game to get slower and slower before grinding to a halt altogether. The worst of these bugs were dealt with in the 1.1 patch, and those that weren’t have been addressed by various fan-made fixes that have been released online following Black Isle’s unfortunate dissolution. Unfortunately, none of these fixes have been able to solve the graphical glitches that afflict the game when played on modern video cards; disabling hardware-accelerated effects may get rid of the garbled spell effects, but they also slow the game to a crawl, even on high-end systems.
Planescape: Torment is a masterpiece. Its sales were modest at best, and it generally doesn’t get the mainstream appreciation it deserves, but such is often the case with the true classics of any medium. That its plot and characters can hold their own against many of the finest examples of cinema and literature is an achievement not to be sniffed at, and, while it’s a shame that there will probably never be a sequel or indeed any other game set in the Planescape multiverse, the people behind Torment can take pride in the fact that they created what may well be the best role-playing game the PC has ever seen. 10/10
