Morte (reading the Nameless One's back): "says here you died of ligma"

Nameless One: "what's death"

Morte: "ligma balls"

Critics: "This game is a masterpiece. A master class in non-linear storytelling. A deep, moving, intelligent exploration of memory and identity. One of the best examples in the medium's history of game-as-art and game-as-literature."

[boots up game]

Floating Skull With Thick New York Accent: "What's crackin', chief? You dead or sumthin'? Let's skedattle outta here before those mummies get a whiff of us, or our ass is grass if ya know whadd I mean!"

Planescape Torment is truly special.

When I played it for the first time, it was already "a classic" and more than 10 years old. Yet, it felt fresh and new and completely floored me with everything it had to offer.

The party members are some of the deepest and most compelling characters I ever had the pleasure of getting to know.

The eerie setting and atmosphere with its sense of mystery, adventure, poetry and philosophy simply blew me away. It manages to buck every single trope and convention that has ever been conceived in (esp. tolkienesque) fantasy fiction. And it does so effortlessly and without even explicitly trying to do that.

And on top of all that, this game gifted me with my favorite "magic moment" I have ever experienced in any medium ever. I cried during that moment. And not out of joy or sadness. I cried because I was so overwhelmed with the serene beauty and gratification of this one moment and how every single fiber of this game lore, setting and storytelling were woven together and intertwined to create this exact moment.

With this game, the Black Isle Studios and Chris Avellone built a monument not only to the power of storytelling, but also to the ability video games have of utilizing that power.

And it is for these reasons, and many more, that this is my absolute favorite video game of all time, as well as my favorite story out of any piece of fiction I have ever consumed in my entire life.

And even now, more than 20 years after its initial release, Planescape: Torment has lost none of its toppling radiance. Not even visually.

This game is one congealed triumph.

11/10

.
.
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make it 12/10.

This is possibly the most ambitious game I have ever played. It drips with excellent writing at every turn, contemplates the philosophy of self, of suffering, and one's effect on the world. It is a shame that the medium of this game often devolves into dreary combat, but that's even more of a sign that this game was ahead of its time. Any points it loses in gameplay it makes up with ambition, care, and introspection. The macabre setting roots and unites all the shades of what the game has to offer, and The Nameless One is one of the most interesting video game protagonists ever created. I am going to be thinking about this one for a long time.

The long-term effects of crack abuse include:

Depression
Anxiety
Paranoia
Aggressiveness
Hallucinations
Sexual Problems/Dysfunction
Loss of Life
With addiction to crack also come severe withdrawal effects when the drug is not in the system. This can include things like depression or being down, fatigue, intense anxiety, irritability and in some cases psychosis. Some abusers of this drug will continue to use even though they don’t want to just to avoid stimulant withdrawal. Excessive crack use can also lead to heart problems, respiratory failure, stroke, seizures and ultimately loss of life.

One of those rare experiences that stay with you for a lifetime.
Black Isle had already released the seminal 'Fallout' in 1997 and its majestic sequel 'Fallout 2' in 1998. BioWare had also released the epic 'Baldur's Gate' in 1998 to great success, hitting all the correct notes for a great party-based CRPG using the popular Dungeons and Dragons license. All three important RPGs were a critical and commercial success.

So the template was there for Black Isle to make a safe, tried-and-tested role-playing game and gain continued success after Fallout. But instead they chose to make a game that defied conventions of the time in the RPG verse, whilst telling an enthralling tale full of poignancy and moral conflict that will stand the test of time.
People who are willing to invest in this game will find The Nameless One's quest to be one of self-discovery and acceptance. They will find a cast of companions quite eclectic – ranging from a celibate Succubus running a brothel for intellectual conversations – to an animated suit of armour with an unwavering sense of justice, not dissimilar to DC Comic’s Batman. Above all it’s a journey that most RPG fans should cherish.

Okay so this game is not perfect by any means, it’s often annoying with how clunky it is and how broken the enhanced edition can be. Quests can break and sometimes you’ll have to reload a previous save to redo a whole section just to see story relevant information. The whole game is outdated but it’s also one of the best written pieces of fiction I’ve ever had the pleasure of reading. Most of my time playing this game was reading, like others have said this is just a glorified visual novel.

The characters are great and there are really poignant lines of dialogue that I’ll never forget, especially at the end of the game. I played as a mage for this play through and it definitely helped with dialogue because the stats overlap for the “optimal build.” There are definitely parts in the game that I could’ve approached differently, especially some beginning sections but that’s the beauty of rpgs. This game definitely encourages multiple play throughs.

I’m a fan of Dungeons and Dragons so this was both familiar and also new territory. The world of Sigil and the other areas you go to was a delight to explore. I loved the visuals of the game, it was really well made and each area felt distinct from one another.

The rpg mechanics are a little lackluster and the combat irritated me until I learned to actually pause the game and manipulate each party member’s actions individually. It took to me too long to figure that out instead of just having everyone selected and attack one enemy. That was a recipe for disaster from halfway onwards.

However like previously stated the best part about the game is the story. It’s just so captivating, beautiful, poignant, and often times mind-bending. The deep philosophical themes and the fullest use of itself setting to tell a story that not many other fictional settings can is some of the game’s strong suits. The stuff with your companions are great and learning more about this awesome but you gotta go out your way to do that.

I played this on my Steam Deck and despite how unoptimized it was, I actually feel like this is a perfect game to play on the go. I don’t like sitting down for long periods of time so it was a blessing that I could just take this game anywhere and play. I definitely recommend this game if you can handle how old it is, I say the story is more than worth it. The game is glorious. You’ll just have to endure. Endure. In enduring, grow strong.

Planescape: Torment has been high on my playlist ever since I first heard about it. Recently, it's been placed next to Disco Elysium as one of the few most important narrative RPGs ever made, and previously it just was the most important narrative RPG ever made. It was not, however, highly anticipated enough for me to understand that I'd be immersed enough to play for over 6 hours on my first session.

The artifice of digitized tabletop campaigns comes in the idea of adapting an infinite playground without the restrictions of scheduling or prepping a campaign. It's about the splendor of seeing and exploring a place, doing anything and talking to anybody and being shown a reaction for every action within the bounds of the world. Torment delivers little such agency to the player, or to its protagonist. Even in death there is no autonomy, as the Nameless One finds himself stuck in an endless loop of dying and reawakening only to wander the land and attempt to find himself over and over again. He has already accomplished the feats you expect from a power fantasy campaign, only in ages past, long before the game ever took place.

The game takes place in the most boundless setting in the D&D universe and beyond, as Sigil, the city of doors, lays firmly in the center of the multiverse itself. The narrative, however, makes Sigil a claustrophobic and restrictive place. The first you hear about these doors, it is from an NPC's paranoid ramblings about being trapped, unable to return to her true home after decades of wandering the city, fearful that any door or archway will open up and devour her as it sends her someplace worse. The city rearranges itself around its occupants, constant construction making the streets feel almost sentient as they shift themselves, even the most experienced explorers of the planes unsure of what form it will take next.

Torment is not for everyone, and much like most of my other favorite games it doesn't care for being traditionally "fun" or action-packed like its contemporaries in the Baldur's Gate series, rather reveling in its subversions of the medium as an art form rather than a plaything. Its real game starts in understanding its philosophy. Listed among the most profound games of all time by academics and essayists, its mechanical choices inform its main themes on human nature and what immortality really means as we're forced to face our past choices and repeat an endless cycle. Is it better to leave behind a life full of memories, content with the limits of mortality, or live forever but inevitably forget yourself in the cycle of searching for some deeper meaning to it all?

My journey across The Planes has taken me to places that most men believe exist only in the realm of thought. These places I travelled to, the people I met, and the conversations I had fundamentally changed me as a person. I don’t fully know how, but regardless, I know some sort of change occurred. Perhaps writing about my experience with Planescape will help me better understand these changes and the person I am today.

When I was 14, I discovered Planescape: Torment, and while I thought the game was awesome, I could never really engage with the questions the game posed to me. I mean, how could I? What would the question “What can change the nature of a man?” mean to a 14-year-old who was only beginning to grapple with the concept of its own being? Looking back, it meant nothing to me. Now that I am an adult, however, the question means much more to me. Part of me is ashamed to admit I haven’t always been a ‘good’ person. Learning to be kind, understanding, mature, and responsible took me many years of struggling and hardship to achieve. Even today, I still struggle with this, but through that struggle, I came to learn more about myself and my nature. I can’t fully codify into words what my “nature” or “self” are because they are concepts that exist beyond language. Language can at times be limiting, so I look to art to help me look inward and better conceptualise these thoughts and feelings. I feel as though Planescape stirred the part of my soul that sought these answers, and despite it not giving me concrete answers, I feel satisfied with the new questions it posed to me. To me, good art never seeks to speak for the reader but instead provides them with the tools necessary to create subjective meaning from the experience they have with it. I believe Planescape does this quite well; I’d even go so far as to argue that it fully agrees with me here. When The Nameless One is posed the question, “What can change the nature of a man?” the game does not have him provide a concrete answer to the player. Instead, we are left with the game giving us the tools necessary to begin constructing our own answer to that question as the credits roll. Currently, I don't have an answer to that question, and I'm not sure if I will even have one a decade from now, but I'm okay with that. Part of growing up meant that I had to learn to be content with not always having an answer for everything; perhaps not every question needed an answer.

There’s more I could write, but perhaps it’s best that some things remain unwritten. I would love to endlessly navel-gaze, but that wouldn’t do me or you, the reader, any good. I apologise to anyone here who expected a formal review and was met instead by my self-indulgent introspection. There's really not much I can say about Planescape that hasn't already been said; it's an awesome ass game, and it deserves the reputation it has made for itself, enough said.

Anyways, I’d like to end this short write-up by saying that if you haven’t already played Planescape: Torment, you owe it to yourself to take that journey across The Planes. Sigil is known as the ‘City of Doors’, after all, so why don’t you look inside and see where one of them takes you?

Doubt the industry will ever see something like this again. Combat sucks but outside a few tunnels it's not a big issue, thankfully the gameplay of questing, dialogue, companionship, and even puzzle-solving is genius. All of the companions' questline are thoroughly interesting and complex character studies that ultimately reflect on the TNO, and in general every named character has some meaningful story to tell that connects' back to the games' theme of regret. Even some of the seemingly innocuous items, like the language puzzles, get huge payoffs towards the conclusion of the game. Also has some of the coolest lore out of all the CRPGs; the Alphabets are personified through multidimensional beings (one of the first characters you meet is the letter 'O' inside a tavern), the locations are reflections of a variety of religious and mythical understandings of the afterlife, and without spoiling anything, the late-game stuff you encounter are very out-there as far as CRPGs go. Also goodness gracious, the prose here is super good at the really emotional moments, even if it makes some other mundane encounters unnecessarily windy and flowery. When you finally open the bronze sphere...next level stuff man.

one of the most beautiful, resonant, and stirring passages i've ever read occurs in this, but i had to use console commands to access it because the inventory system meant i had lost an item 12 hours prior without knowing. i wish i could force a copy of tokimeki memorial into the hands of everybody at black isle in 1998 and tell them that it's okay to make stats only matter for dialogue and short, scripted sequences. very cool to see what CRPGs could look like if they weren't, spiritually, set in the forgotten realms for the rest of time.

NOTE: Although I played this game through the enhanced edition, I wanted to log it as the original game.

There is pretty much no way of me being able to start this review without saying that Planescape: Torment is the greatest game I’ve ever played. Even before I beat the game, I knew that was the case. In the past, I’ve considered a few games to be my favorites of all time, like Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater and Fallout: New Vegas, and while I do love those games to death, neither of them have impacted me as much as Planescape: Torment.

Before I actually played the game or even knew what it was about, I heard that Planescape: Torment was a landmark in video game writing, and I can definitely see why, because this has some of the best writing I’ve ever seen in a video game. The plot and characters are fascinating, and even the small side quests are incredibly memorable with how well written they are. The game is also incredibly philosophical, and I’ve found myself making choices based on what I actually believed in rather than what I felt the game wanted me to choose. I also loved the Planescape setting. Many pieces of fantasy media retread familiar waters by having the same elves, orcs, goblins and so on, but the Planescape setting’s lore, creatures, and locations are all incredibly unique.

I could go on and on about just how incredible this game is, but I’ll end my review with this note: If there was one game that I believe everyone should play from start to finish, even people who don’t play video games, I believe that game should be Planescape: Torment. It’s not only my favorite game of all time, but it’s also one of my favorite pieces of art in general.

As a 'videogame' it's far from flawless, there are a lot of boring fetch quests that damages the pacing a lot, combat doesn't really go far from mindlessly clicking enemies and healing when it's necessary, there are some important content that are easy to miss(like most of the companions).And dungeon designs are very linear. But stuff the game does right are so good, it makes up for it. World is really detailed and unique(especially first areas)most of the NPC's has something worthwhile to say,and visual design of areas are varied and memorable.Story is one of the best i've ever seen in a game.It's engaging from beggining to the end with a lot of philosophical concepts,heavily supported by an incredibly quality writing.It's easily the best part of the game
My biggest problem aren't any of the gameplay or design issues i mentioned, it's the characters, they actually have fleshed out personalities, but only if you choose to talk to them.They aren't interacting with each other at all,and because most of them are optional, they have zero effect on the main story
Even with the flaws, i think this is an excellent game, and something everyone should experince

10/10 writing in a 3/10 game.
And "enhanced" my ass, it is LITTERED with game-breaking bugs. You literally have to skip an entire AREA (modron maze) to not completely fuck over the game. The combat is atrocious, and the alignment system is fucking bullshit.

One time, after trying my absolute best to uncover every dialogue option while speaking to one character, and then finding out I had somehow fucking missed a line of dialogue that allowed to leave the depths of hell itself, I was kind of getting sick of this game. What's that? Want to get the good ending? Wanted to use one of the items you've had since the start of the game and unlock more dialogue? I hope you have precognition, because if you don't you can enjoy reloading your save and enjoy doing the final area all over again. The ending more than makes up for it, but of course I still had to suffer through making myself invincible with console commands so I would stop getting killed during an unskippable cutscene.

The game will punish you for speaking certain dialogue choices, but also punish you for not exhausting every last one. It is impossible to know what dialogue choice will result in what, and whether you will lose out on something, change your alignment, or get blocked from speaking to the character in question any further entirely. You can miss out on entire characters and moments in the story just by doing something slightly out of order.

It's the first game to well up my eyes in a long time though. Twice. I cannot bring myself to give it any less than 4 stars. I recommend, reading, listening and looking at this game. But playing it? No.

Fully convinced that the conception of this game was similar to that of Thief: The Dark Project, where deep down so much of the juice of this game revolves around moral decisions, conversation trees and so forth - sort of like if you merged a point and click adventure game with an RPG game, and the RPG mechanics are incredibly solid and precise in this one. The flipside to this is that it also exists as this streamlined version of Baldur's Gate (both this and that game revolve around the Dungeons & Dragons universe), featuring a bunch of mechanics (most notably the combat) where it's not necessarily bad, but you get the strong impression they were added into the game because the designers weren't fully convinced that they could carry a game purely on conversation trees and so forth.

Really, so much of why this game works comes from how it does so much to immerse you in these environments - and all the little subversions to gameplay mechanics and how it twists out the concept of an RPG game. For instance, your character is immortal - meaning your character can literally not stay dead, and it interestingly renders death into this really cheap and meaningless thing - something that can be equally exploited to your advantage, but also where I got the strong suspicion from the get-go that something was up. The writing is the strongest aspect of this game, and I like how so much of it has this sense of unfolding to it - both where everything you do builds up these pieces to discovering what seems to be very tragic circumstances, and how this game probes themes of regret and characters coming to terms with either do bad things or wind up making terrible perspectives. This can all be approached from either a good, evil or neutral perspective - all of which manages to oddly fit the backstory. The Nameless One is a really well-written character, both where he has enough texture and character on his own accord - but ultimately where there's a lot of room for you to apply your own perspective of the character - and where you have to weigh all the moral consequences of the decisions you make throughout.

Could probably go on about this game. Really, a must-play for anyone into RPG games.