Game Facts
This game was released at around the time of the Baldur’s Gate and Icewind Dale series in 1999, and is similarly an Infinity Engine game where a party of D&D adventurers explore a 2D isometric world. This world just happens to be that of Planescape, a setting that focuses on the multiverse outside the worlds of the prime material plane that “ordinary” characters adventure upon. So what, you may ask. Well, if you want to find out a little more about why a 2nd Edition D&D game with an outdated 2D graphics and a stupidly awkward interface is still spoken about among the gaming cognizanti in hushed tones of reverence, then read on.
Opinion
The fact that I am so obviously not one of the gaming cognizanti is amply illustrated by the fact that I only just finished the game! Don’t ask me why. The version I played was essentially the Community Enhanced Edition, a collection of unofficial patches and bug fixes. In any event, I am in the unusual position of being able to sample the game in all its 2D glory from a completely fresh perspective, but with the background of playing many apparently similar games.
The main thing which struck me as a result of this was how influential the game was in terms of subsequent game design. The characters, most notably Annah played by Sheena Easton (yes, Sheena Easton the Scottish pop singer – where did that come from??), have become archetypes, perhaps stereotypes. Yes, I know Annah was not the first NPC character of her kind, but one nevertheless has the impression that she influenced many subsequent game designers – either the same ones moving on to other projects or those originally inspired by playing the game.
The same applies to the plot; its “gritty” fantasy, avant-garde, slightly steam-punk tone has been oft imitated, but never equalled in a computer game, certainly a D&D game. Possibly the best example is Mask of the Betrayer, the Neverwinter Nights 2 first sequel. But that game is dependent in part on a plot device from its immediate predecessor, and while it rises to worthy heights with the crusade against the injustice of the Wailing Wall, the ending is somewhat anticlimactic, a feeling that your choices somehow didn’t matter. The “soul eater” game mechanic was also annoying in practice, constantly trying to keep your spirit energy from draining. Not so with Torment. The plot never stops building until the climax, while the “immortal” game mechanic provides a perfect justification for respawning after death.
A remarkable feature of Torment is the ludicrous amount of dialogue. But the writing is so good, and the characters so true to themselves, that it never grates. You simply happily read it as you would a novel. Once you “buy” into the unique character of the game, it seems natural to wander up to a very minor NPC in a classroom, then to be delivered a lecture on the Blood War that lasts several minutes real-time. In a “normal” game, if you wanted to learn to become a magic user rather than simply choose it at character selection or a level up screen, it would be considered the height of sophistication instead to visit some old wizard in his crooked tower and click through a couple of cod-Shakespeare dialogue lines, or pay a few coins, and “hey presto”, magic missiles would be at your fingertips.
Not so in Planescape: Torment. You bump into a strange crone who is a kindly midwife. She sends you on a series of quests that would be simple fetch quests were it not for the bizarre nature of the items. At some point only later, perhaps not until the very end of the quest (but you get a sense of reward rather than anticlimax if you work it out beforehand), you suddenly realise that the eclectic items all actually go together to make your very own first magic scroll. You have inadvertently taught yourself the beginnings of the “Art”. And then of course the midwife is more than she seems…
The game leans very heavily on the lore of Planescape as set out in the tabletop D&D rules supplement. This in itself is a remarkable piece of work, and the game makes the most of it and then significantly enhances it. You wake up with no memory of who you are, or where you are. On a mortuary slab. And you are a zombie, or at least a sentient zombie. And your first henchman is a skull, a floating skull. Not a demi-lich, no. A skull whose only attacks are to bite opponents with various sets of false teeth and to hurl insults. You start with a set of instructions, a clue. But you cannot read them. No, not because you have not got to the right level, or because the game designer deems you are not allowed to find the clue-reading widget until you have got past x, y and z. No, this is Planescape. It’s because it’s tattooed on your back. And the sarcastic skull has to read it to you, the bits he feels like reading anyway, until you get to know him much better…
All of this might sound cheesy, and I suppose it is, especially after all the pale imitations that have followed. But it is a testament to the fact that the designers’ writing skills are simply superior to mine that when you read it there instead of here it seems to fit perfectly with the game setting. The setting for the first half of the game is the Hive, in Sigil. A suspended “ringworld” in the centre of the multiverse, where ordinary folk go about their business speaking in some cockney criminal-type slang and happily rubbing shoulders with zombies and fiends also simply going about their business. Sigil is ruled by the Lady of Pain, a being with the power to keep out meddling gods, devils and demons. There are no temples to deities in Sigil – they are strictly banned by the Lady and her rebus message-speaking servants. Instead of religions there are factions, groups that cling to a set of ideals that somehow seem more pure because they are uncluttered with notions of blind religious worship. So there are the Dustmen, who collect corpses and deal in zombies. But not necessarily evil; they serve a pragmatic purpose and have a valid philosophy on life. There are the Sensates, who believe in the quest to have experiences – good, bad and indifferent – simply for their own sake. And the Godsmen, who believe in forging your own destiny, that each humble mortal has the potential to become a god.
But Sigil is somehow more than a policed religion-free neutral ground or no-man’s land. There is some darker mystery. The Lady of Pain represents suffering, and it is said that all the suffering experienced by mortal souls in the multiverse emanates from Sigil. Hence the epithet – Torment. And you are one of the archetypal tormented souls, and in turn the source of torment for your companions.
As the plot wends its unhurried way – you should certainly not hurry your way through this game – you are introduced to many planes other than Sigil. Each of these in its own way carries a message about morality. The journey is as much philosophical as geographical, the game’s designers leading you like Dante on a tour through the Divine Comedy. This is no better illustrated than in the Outlands, a wide flat plane surrounding the infinite spire about which Sigil rotates. Surrounding the Outlands are the outer alignment planes. The further from the centre of the outlands, the more the outer plane adjoining that segment of the Outlands becomes influential. There exist gates to these outer planes, and around these gates are towns of fairly ordinary inhabitants. But the general morality of the inhabitants follows that of where the gate leads. And if the morality becomes too entrenched, the whole city slips into the outer plane.
The interesting thing is that the inhabitants are at best dimly aware of this. In Curst, drifting towards the neutral evil chaotic-leaning prison plane of Carceri, the people are even less aware of their own evil morality. Everyone is only trying to get by in a harsh world, retaliating first before they are betrayed themselves. They don’t know they are in an aligned world. They don’t consider themselves “evil” – perhaps everyone else might be. They might not even know that they have fallen into hell… until its denizens come a-calling for their souls. It is up to the PC to “change the nature of a man”, and the town can just as easily shift back.
If we were to talk about the drawbacks of the game, they are not hard to find, especially so many years later. The game graphics look nice, but I didn’t like to take the resolution up all the way using the custom enhancements because the NPCs just looked tiny. I went for an intermediate pixelly look. I don’t know if it was just the combination of a ridiculously modern graphics card and the community tinkering, but the game froze badly during casting spells, with the visual effects often degenerating into a mess of overlapping spritey postage stamps. It was like playing a DOS game without freeing up your 640k of RAM. The game screams at a min-maxer like me to be a magic user (pre 3rd Edition language for wizard), but with the discouragement to cast spells described above, I ended up being like a fighter with a dagger. No change there.
Further discouragement to do more than gaze at your characters in a spasmy combat scrum with white and red numbers floating everywhere at total random comes in the perversely awkward user interface. There are no quick slots; what are called quick slots are simply just “other” slots in your inventory. Using any ability or casting a spell involves right clicking on the PC icon, but checking it is actually the right PC because clicking again will select the next PC in line, and this pauses the game and brings up a menu which might get in the way. You then click which class of ability, and then click round a circle to select a spell – a spell whose description you cannot read unless you go out of the whole menu and into the spell-book menu. Then you select where you want the spell to be cast. And then you have to press escape to activate the spell. Everything then remains paused several moments while the animation occurs. Then you might have to repeat the targeting for a spell with multiple target activations. You get the picture…
Picking up items and the inventory limits are also pretty annoying, especially when you can’t find the treasure drop of your newly raised dead NPC.
To design an interface as bad as this is a work of art, a description usually levelled at this game for more positive reasons. Hey, who cares? It’s all just part of the quirky seedy steam punk atmosphere. Combat is a virtual irrelevance in this game.
OK, instead of listing stand-out memorable moments, this game now simply needs to be described using a special html flag.
<hyperbole>
Can you think of another game where you might mull over the philosophical meaning of one of the phrases used by some of the NPCs? Didn’t think so. This is a far cry from “…but then I took an arrow in the knee.” The phrase in question is of course a question, “What can change the nature of a man?”. And the solution is that it is simply a question not a riddle. And the answer, or at least this reviewer’s answer is… only to be clicked if you have already played the game and don’t want your own thoughts on the answer spoiled.
Is there another PC game where you could analyse the three facets of a classic fictional character archetype (Ravel) in the way that you would do with the works of Chaucer for an English Literature examination?
Another game where you would ponder the insignificance of man, the meaning of slavery and freedom, whether it is more evil to be so in an organised or thoughtless fashion, or how easy it is to slip from one code of morality to another if you consider that the end justifies the means?
Another game where you stop playing and shiver a moment as you consider the torments meted out upon mortal betrayers or upon those who become too embroiled in the eternal Blood War.
</hyperbole>
What Next?
Exactly. What next? How do you follow it? There have been pale imitations of the Planescape setting, but not even the Neverwinter Nights modding community has dared touch Torment itself.
I for one say, let it stand.
Summing Up
Planescape: Torment is a one-off. One would find it hard to imagine that a group of designers would get together again and have the ambition to create a work that goes so far beyond what one would normally consider a satisfactory story-line for a video game and a sane level of dialogue volume and quality. Maybe I’ll be proved wrong.
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