I’ve reviewed other stories where the protagonist has no name, but typically it’s nothing more than a cheeky gimmick, while in Planescape: Torment you could call that fact the crux of the entire game. You wake on a cold, stone slab in a mortuary, covered in scars, with no memories at all or record of your name. A floating skull named Morte pops up, tells you you have a message from yourself carved into your back in scars telling you to seek your journal and a man named Pharod, gives you advice on how to escape, and starts following you around. You also discover that you are functionally immortal: whenever you die, you simply wake up a little while later (which explains how you ended up in the mortuary.) And so you set off to recover your memories and name, and learn the secret of your immortality.
As the name implies, Planescape: Torment takes place in the Planescape campaign setting for Dungeons & Dragons, which (as that name implies) has a large focus on visiting and exploring different planes. Although it’s been phased out over time, D&D has an alignment system where everything lies somewhere on an interlocking axis between good and evil, and between lawful and chaotic, creating nine possible alignments (since for each axis you can be on either end or the middle, called “neutral”). When I say everything in the system has an alignment, that means everything—including the planes, which are organized within the multiverse based on alignment.
The primary location for the Planescape setting (and Planescape: Torment) is Sigil, also known as the City of Doors, which is a true neutral city located in the center of the planes. Planescape has two primary unique features which inform the setting.
The first is that in Planescape, thoughts dictates reality just as much as reality dictates thought. This means that there are all sorts of oddities borne of belief and emotion tucked away in all corners of the world, and no rumor, no matter how wild, can ever be truly discarded. The arrangement of planes within Planescape is both prescriptive and descriptive, meaning the actions (and alignment) of its denizens can affect the physical location of a plane within the multiverse.
The second is portals. Sigil is known as the City of Doors because it is filled with portals, which have two main features. First, any enclosed area can be a portal. Second, a portal can only be used if you have the proper key, which can be anything—a general item, a specific item, a certain action, a smell, or even a belief or memory. Portals can go anywhere, and a large portion of the plot is devoted to finding portals to the places you want to go to.
The magic of Planescape: Torment is that, while the rules of the world are completely foreign and absurd, they’re respected and carried through. (Of course, I’d hope a campaign setting was fleshed out and had a lot of thought put into it.) The rules of the world are reflected in the characters, and while the game does give direct exposition (one of the perks of an amnesiac protagonist), it also shows the ramifications. For instance, there is one character who is afraid of accidentally going through a portal, so they literally haven’t gone inside for a decade (since a door could secretly be a portal). It’s one thing to tell us how portals work, but then this character illustrates the low but constant risk portals present to the citizens of Sigil.
In my mind, Planescape: Torment can be divided into four acts.
The first act is the introduction, and honestly it’s a bit rocky. At the start of the game, neither you nor The Nameless One (the official “name” for the protagonist, or TNO) have any idea what’s going on. You’re weak, and don’t have many tools to deal with the game’s challenges. The world is off-putting: the game’s palette is full of washed-out grays and browns, Sigil has its own dialect and jargon, and its residents aren’t particularly friendly. This is compounded by outdated graphics; while the main window is zoomed out enough to be fine, each character has a portrait which uses late-90s 3D graphics. They’re just stylized to be coherent, but still visibly constrained by the technology at the time and generally weird. In short, Sigil isn’t inviting; it’s not someplace I want to be, or to spend my time in. I want to get out as fast as I can, but the game doesn’t give much guidance on exactly what I’m supposed to do or who I’m supposed to be or how I’m supposed to act.
The second act is the longest, and where most of the magic happens. If you give the game a shot and open yourself to the experience, the structure of Sigil—as it has developed within chaos of the odd rules of Planescape—begins to emerge. You start to learn the jargon, how things work. Sigil is a city of information, and as you hunt for leads on Pharod and your journal (and sidequests), you hear all sorts of other stories that embellish the world and its residents. The game is extraordinarily deliberate about scattering seeds for its plot threads, so as you progress in this act, you’ll often encounter people, scenarios or concepts you’ve heard of before. This gives clues on how to deal with them, and solidifies the feeling that the game was written as a cohesive whole. If you take the time to explore the nooks and crannies of Sigil, and learn the logic by which it operates, you can have a deep, almost sandbox-like urban adventure in a truly unique fantasy setting.
The third act is a lot like the second act, but not as good. It takes place after a certain major plot event, which I won’t spoil, but I think anyone who’s played the game can understand that the game feels a bit different before and after this point. It’s like the second act in that you’re gathering and chasing down rumors, but it’s done with much less care. Part of the issue is that the third act is much shorter, and so simply felt rushed. I thought that the plot crumbs were scattered very well in the second act; you might hear a rumor hours and hours before you actually encounter the subject, which makes you feel like you’ve actually found something rare and special. In the third act, you might learn that you need to find some rare and mystical, fabled object imbued with great power and a storied history, for which many men have fought and died. And where is it? Two screens to the right. There’s no mystique when anything we need ends up just being right there, and this act is also where the majority of mandatory battles take place.
The final act cleans up the story, and is a return to form. There are only a few new sidequests and the final dungeon so the game is focused on tying up existing plot threads rather than weaving new ones, but it feels much closer to the second act than the third.
I feel like I’m starting to sound like a broken record, but the writing and story of Planescape: Torment really is phenomenal, if you can get over the rough intro and allow yourself in. Pretty much everything in the game is in service to the plot in one way or another, even if it isn’t always readily apparent. Of course, most pieces of media are designed with the whole in mind, but Planescape: Torment is designed like a mystery, causing later information to constantly recontextualize earlier events.
On a smaller scope, a lot of the writing is functional, but Sigil’s unique vernacular is fully implemented in the script. But the place the writing shines is in the stories and vignettes that pop up from time to time. I don’t want to spoil any of them, but it’s amazing how much the game is able to accomplish in only a few textboxes.
One minor gripe I had with Baldur’s Gate was how dialogue choices were generally constrained to a few options and the plot was essentially on rails. Truthfully, Planescape: Torment is similar in that regard, but I think it works better. And not just because I like it more. The difference is that Baldur’s Gate lets you create your own character and tells you that you can play them however you want, while Planescape: Torment puts you into the shoes of TNO and guides you through his story. When I only have a few choices in Baldur’s Gate and none of them match how I’d really want my character to respond, I feel like the game is holding me back. Meanwhile, the options in Planescape: Torment can be interpreted as responses TNO would consider, so what I would say doesn’t matter. Oftentimes there will be a long-winded oddly specific answer unlocked by having sufficient wisdom and/or intelligence, which felt a bit awkward to pull out of nowhere, but I suppose that’s just an issue with replicating high mental stats in TTRPGs and video games. Planescape: Torment also frequently gives you a multitude of options when talking with NPCs, and provides options with nuance like “Make a promise” and “(Lie) Make a promise,” allowing you and the game to stay on the same page with your intentions when dealing with NPCs. The plot, like Baldur’s Gate, is linear, but most situations have multiple ways you can resolve them, and, thematically, how TNO navigates his quandary is almost as important as its resolution.
As an Infinity Engine game based on Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 2nd Edition rules, Planescape: Torment plays a lot like Baldur’s Gate, but it’s also completely different. Once again, it’s an isometric RPG that plays like an RTS-lite, with the same six attributes, the dreaded thac0, spell slots, and so on. But, because Planescape: Torment is focused on story, the rules are also simplified and consolidated to a decent degree. There are only four classes (warrior, rogue, wizard and priest), and characters are either locked into melee or ranged. The variety of equipment is much lower, as item focus is more on consumables.
Baldur’s Gate was all about freedom—Gorion’s Ward was fully customizable, and while companions had set attributes when you recruited them, they could then be modified once you recruited them (such as adding a dual class or giving them new proficiencies). Plus the number of potential companions allowed you to design any sort of party you want. But Planescape: Torment is about story, and so the characters are much more closely tethered to it (and are that much better for it).
TNO is set as a character, although you can decide his stats and class (and weapon proficiencies, although that system isn’t as straightforward as it is in Baldur’s Gate). TNO is unique in that he can be a warrior, rogue, or wizard (while every companion is locked into their class), and in fact can swap classes (by talking to a trainer of the appropriate type). Each class has separate levels so you generally want to choose one class and stick with it. (Your stats are static, so even if you do switch you won’t be completely useless; there was actually one special lategame sidequest fight where I needed to change TNO’s class to win.) There are also many story opportunities for TNO to increase his stats, so he ends up much stronger than a typical character.
One extremely welcome change in Planescape: Torment is the fact that if TNO dies, you just wake up a little bit later at a reset point. (In Baldur’s Gate, you’d get a game over if Gorion’s Ward died—even if a party member would’ve been able to immediately resurrect them.) This hugely cuts back on frustrating stray game overs, and ties wonderfully into the main mystery of the story. (It also makes game overs actually a bit difficult to find!)
Another fun inversion from Baldur’s Gate is the fact that important stats have been swapped. Baldur’s Gate is mainly focused on combat with some story and roleplaying tacked on (sort of like the D&D system as a whole), which meant that every character needed the physical combat stats, but mental stats were largely irrelevant (other than the primary casting stat for spellcasters, and maybe charisma for your party face).
However, in Planescape: Torment the focus is on story, roleplaying, and making dialogue choices. Some dialogue choices require a minimum level in a certain stat to succeed, or even to appear as an option—and the mental stats are required much more frequently than the physical ones. While any sort of TNO can make it through the game, investment in mental stats will give you many more options in how you approach most situations than a physical-focused TNO.
For this reason, companions are also primarily present for their story contribution. While there aren’t as many companions as in Baldur’s Gate, they are much more fleshed out. You can talk with each of your companions, who will tell you about themselves and about what they think of the journey, which develops and expands over the course of the game.
While saying that combat in Planescape: Torment is optional would be an overstatement, it certainly has much less of a focus than in Baldur’s Gate. The are a few mandatory fights (but only a few), although cleaning up the random monks you encounter will help pad up your experience and gold. Enemies are mostly melee and there are no protective spells, so combat is mostly a slugfest. Only one companion is a priest (who can provide healing), but every other companion is a warrior, rogue or wizard (or some combination of those), which basically means they just provide damage in one form or another—which is why they can be chosen for story rather than strategy.
If you want a video game with a good story, and don’t mind an odd world with outdated D&D mechanics, Planescape: Torment is a magnificent masterpiece that takes advantage of a unique D&D campaign setting to tell a fantastical story that wouldn’t work anywhere else and yet also provides plenty of philosophical questions about our own world and lives.
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