the game barely works half the time and the amount of fiddling and fuckery i found required in my run which at one point saw all my companions getting duplicated and fucking up a quest didn't detract from one of the best meditations on mortality and how funny skulls are ever.

fuck the rat

Edit: Nordom is my son

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 The whole game is outdated but it’s also one of the best written pieces of fiction I’ve ever had the pleasure of reading.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.

To review Planescape: Torment... would be condescendent. Hands down the best written novel in existence. One can spend hours and hours writing about it, reviewing it, and it would be simply not enough: you have to experience it. It's best to just say that, this game will change your life.
Simply hearing about it still sends shivers down my spine, after all these years. And i played it a ton, i know everything about it... Yet, it still makes my whole being tremble by just looking at the artwork on the cover even if i've seen it a million times.
This game is like a father to me.

Edit: editing this review, backloggd did the most hylarious thing it could. A pop-up, saying "You've updated your journal".
This game is everything.

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.

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?

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.