Planescape: Torment: Enhanced Edition (2017) [PC] critique

What can change the nature of a man?

– Ravel Puzzlewell

This is the question that animates Planescape: Torment, a strange, macabre, and deeply philosophical RPG from Black Isle Studios. Released in 1999 (and remastered by Beamdog in 2017), Torment was built on the Infinity Engine of Baldur’s Gate fame, and takes its cues from second-edition Dungeons & Dragons, from its setting to its mechanics. Unlike the more traditional epic fantasy of Baldur’s Gate or the combat-heavy challenges of Icewind Dale, however, Torment tells a more personal tale. One with world-shattering implications, yes, but while it’s a journey with consequences and complications that span the planes, ultimately, it’s simply a story of one man trying to make sense of his own nature.

It’s a story with a banger of a start, too. The opening involves a corpse carried into a mortuary on a slab, covered in countless scars. It’s a slow haul, but in contrast to the finality such an image might imply, once left on its own, the corpse sits up and carefully slides himself off the slab. This is Torment’s protagonist, known only as the Nameless One. And he’s not some sort of living dead or the like, a zombie rising from the grave – there’s several of those hanging around the mortuary as assistants, and he’s clearly very different from them. More cohesive, more articulate, and more… well, not-decayed.

The Nameless One quickly comes to the conclusion that he’s missing a couple things. His mortality, for one thing, as death clearly has no hold on him, but his memories for a second, as he has no recollection of how he came to be here, or even his own name. (You see why he’s the Nameless One? Yeah, it’s all coming together!) So it’s up to a floating, fast-talking skull named Morte to provide the exposition – to a degree. Perhaps I’ll just let the game speak for itself here:

Both player and protagonist get their bearings as they explore the Mortuary for a way to leave it – this serves as the game’s “tutorial” level, and sets the tone for exactly what sort of game this is going to be in spectacular fashion. Strange conversations with strange characters, puzzles and portals, portents from ghostly figures – all contribute to providing the necessary scene-setting for the tale. In the process of finding a way out, it’s swiftly surmised that this is far from the first time this has happened to the Nameless One, as interactions with the Mortuary’s denizens make it clear he’s rolled in here as a body before.

Thus begins the attempt to unravel the riddle. Escaping the Mortuary and thrust into Sigil, the City of Doors, where any archway or loop or opening could be a portal to anywhere in the multiverse, with an object or a thought or an emotion its proper key, the Nameless One sets out for the who-knows-whicheth-time to fill in the gaps and understand what has happened to his own mortality – and the scars it has left on him, body, mind, and soul.

Yes, it’s an amnesia plot, in no small part. I know I probably lost some of you there, but stay with me. There’s a reason it’s one of my Big Three games, and it wouldn’t be if that was all there was to it. It may begin with a premise that seems cliche, and I won’t deny that it can take time for the game to get its hooks into a player (it certainly did for me)! But the further one digs into it, the more the game reveals its own nature – the more the player puts into it, the more the game will reciprocate in kind. It may take digging, but peel back its layers and there’s an absolute gem to be found, gleaming and glorious. It’s unique, it’s meaningful, and I’ve never seen its like either before or since.

But there’ll be time enough to expound on all that. Let’s get down to brass tacks, shall we?

The 8-bit Review

Visuals: 8/10

It may not be what sets video games apart from other forms of media, but it’s still part of what makes a game a game, and it’s the first impression a game can leave. (Well, apart from the box art. Don’t go by that here. Eesh!) And right away, Torment establishes itself as something distinct. There is, of course, a certain similarity to other Infinity Engine games, by nature of being built from the same foundation, but it more than makes up the difference in aesthetic. “Strange” is a word I’ve already used several times in regard to Torment, but that’s because it’s so dang fitting, and the visuals are no exception – it’s quirky, it’s macabre, it’s occasionally grotesque, but never quite tilting into graphic or gory. I’ll admit individual mileage may vary on that last front, but for what it’s worth, I don’t have much of a stomach for that myself in visuals and I don’t find it debilitatingly off-putting, just a bit schlocky in a pixely 90’s sort of way. This may be a game where one of your potential pieces of equipment is a bangle made from a section of your own intestines, but it’s largely relegated to the prose rather than the visuals, and never feels gratuitous or shock-for-shock’s-sake.

It’s in the small touches that a game really defines its aesthetic, and Torment is no different. Character portraits on the main screen will animate a little for occasional movement, but it’s when they start taking damage that Torment’s macabre vibe really evidences itself. Low-damage characters will show signs of weariness and fatigue – and dead party members even have a skeletal image that is, unmistakably, them. Annah’s still has her shock of red hair, Dak’kon’s his long ears, even Morte has a unique skeletal death portrait, which is a feat considering he’s already a skull.

Torment can look a little drab at times, but it feels more purposeful, rather than a misguided attempt at “realism.” It’s a means of setting a tone, a la something like its contemporary in the original Fallout, or the more modern Elden Ring. It’s what comes of setting large portions of the game in city slums, underground burial chambers, and barren wastelands – there are certainly brighter, more colorful spots to be found where it’s appropriate, like in the more opulent upper-class sections of Sigil. This drabness can make sprites and such a bit muddy to discern, but that’s one of the little extra bits of polish the Enhanced Edition provides: sprites have sharper outlines that are easier to distinguish.

One last thing to mention on this subject is the cutscenes. There aren’t many – one for the opening, a few variants for the ending, and a few more for sweeping glimpses of new locations – but they’re there, and their scarcity is probably for the best. It’s competent enough for its time, though it’s of that sort of 90’s blocky 3D style that definitely looks dated by today’s standards. Rare as they are, though, it hardly detracts from the overall tone and feel of the visuals, and are serviceable where they show up.

Audio: 8/10

Torment’s soundtrack is best described in a single word: haunting. Sometimes beautifully, sometimes eerily, sometimes ominously, but its strains tend to have a way of leaving little prickles at the back of your neck. It’s numinous in the best possible ways, invoking that sense of the otherworldly not just in the landscape, but in the soundscape. It’s not always the most memorable – Sigil’s score is heard so often it tends to just become so much background noise, another note in the blend of shouts from vendors or ne’er-do-wells, for instance – but like so much of the rest of the game, it’s still distinct.

Each of the game’s central characters has their own musical theme to accompany their key moments and conversations. Githzerai warrior-mage Dak’kon’s is as subdued, steadfast, and firm as the man himself, though occasionally punctuated with a percussive beat as sharp as his karach blade. You can almost feel the heat in the sizzle behind the notes of the fire-obsessed Ignus’ leitmotif. Perhaps the most striking of all is Deionarra, the ghost of a woman in love with one of the Nameless One’s past incarnations – and appropriately enough, her theme is a slower, more somber version of the Nameless One’s own, wistful and chillingly ethereal.

As was common for the era, dialogue is only partially voiced, with a couple extra vocal stings here and there. An opening line, perhaps another important one somewhere in the middle, an occasional one-liner while traveling, that sort of thing. There’s so much dialogue in Torment that it’s probably the approach that makes the most sense. But what voices they are! Jennifer Hale, Rob Paulsen, Dan Castellaneta, Keith David, Charlie Adler – it’s a star-studded cast that know how to make even just the occasional voiced line pack a punch.

Even the sound effects are nice and punchy. The swing of a weapon, the sting of a critical hit, the zap of a spell – it helps make combat feel visceral without making it graphic, which suits the overall tone of the game quite well. The game is long enough that it might make some of the sound effects or ambient dialogue lines feel a little overplayed (get used to hearing the Nameless One’s deep rasp saying “updated my journal” a lot), but they are, at least, well done.

Gameplay: 6/10

There’s advantages and disadvantages to basing gameplay on a tried-and-true system like Dungeons & Dragons. On the one hand, it’s familiar. If you’ve played any other Infinity Engine game, you probably know what you can expect from Torment in this department. If you’ve played second-edition D&D, then you also probably know what to expect here. It doesn’t do anything particularly revolutionary, but its issues aren’t particularly glaring either. It’s functional, it’s competent, and while it doesn’t really do a lot new with it (though it does do some things different, as will be discussed in a moment), it allows a player to carry over understanding from similar games.

That’s also a bit of its disadvantage, though – if you don’t have that understanding of things like THAC0 and saving throws, the game doesn’t go that far out of its way to explain it to you, unless you read the somewhat dense portion of the manual that goes over mechanics. If this is your first exposure to the system, then it’s a bit of a steep learning curve.

Some of that is due to the idiosyncrasies of trying to translate tabletop D&D to a faster-paced medium like video games. The game is “real-time with pause,” doing away with things like initiative and instead rolling everything in a combat round behind the scenes at once, while allowing the player to pause to consider strategy and issue orders accordingly. As a result, combat feels a bit crunchy, to borrow a term, even if the large part of the dice-rolling and calculation isn’t really something the player has to worry about. So too can it feel odd watching the party whiff for a while from a series of bad dice rolls in the background. I’ve never felt the spell-slot system of D&D translates well to video games, either – it’s terrible on a resource-cautious player (like myself) when a character’s main capability in a fight is a potentially very small, discrete number of spells that need to be refreshed in a very specific way (as in, resting in a safe spot, which can be few and far between in certain places). The weapon restrictions on most of the party members (some can’t even wield weapons at all!) makes a lot of equipment feel useless if you’re not playing the Nameless One as a fighter himself.

The engine, too, provides some of its own minor aggravations. Inventory is a bit clunky to manage: everything takes up a slot, only consumables stack, each character has a limited number of inventory slots and needs to be physically close enough to other characters to trade things around, and so on and so forth. This can be even more of a frustration in the early game, as party members are slow to arrive. Pathfinding can be fiddly over long distances, even after the improvements made by the Enhanced Edition.

So why does Torment get a slightly-above-average score in this category? Well, as a certain mage with a fancy hat has been known to say, it’s the differences that are the meaningful portion. Were Torment a game where combat was a constant, those idiosyncrasies might add up to something aggravating. But actual forced combat is few and far between, thanks to how the game handles character-building.

For one thing, unlike other D&D-based games, you’re not stuck into a particular playstyle based on what class you choose during character creation – in fact, character creation is pretty bare-bones by D&D standards, only allowing you to choose how you distribute your stats. Instead, the Nameless One starts the game as a fighter, and can find NPCs later on to change to either a mage or a thief. Though he can only possess the skills of one class at a time, the Nameless One can juggle between them at will simply by having a quick chat with the appropriate characters, which can even include party members. Each class levels independently, and there are some stat bonuses depending on which class hits specific level thresholds first, but it allows for more flexibility in playstyle. A player can unlock a door as a thief, change to a fighter to smack around the enemies on the other side, then switch to a mage to identify the magic equipment they just dropped. It even dovetails nicely with the game’s central conceit – as the Nameless One has lived countless lifetimes, the skills of all three professions are all in there somewhere, it’s just a matter of having enough experience to remember the know-how of it.

For another, as mentioned before, combat isn’t all that mandatory in Torment – diplomatic builds are quite viable. There’s as much experience to be gained through logic, insight, or persuasion as there is in just barreling into everything with metaphorical guns blazing, if not more. It’s even arguable that a high Wisdom is the most important stat in the game, as it both increases experience gained and is necessary for the more insightful dialogue options that can lead to recovered memories (and with them, a fuller understanding of the game’s narrative). It’s entirely possible to treat Torment as something of a visual novel punctuated by occasional fights. Without delving too much into the territory of spoilers, even the final encounter – with the right combinations of stats and knowledge obtained over the course of the game – can be overcome without coming to direct blows. It’s one of the RPGs that’s most conducive to genuine roleplay, tying it very closely to its development of the game’s narrative – and as such, perhaps it’s best to move on to that subject.

Narrative: 9/10

If there’s one thing Planescape: Torment has a thing for, it’s words. There are lots of them. It’s a very wordy game. And as the length of this critique thus far might suggest, that’s not something I find particularly detrimental, though some people definitely will find it off-puttingly verbose. Whatever one’s opinion on the volume of words, however, they all weave together into what I’d call one of the best game stories I’ve ever experienced.

I can’t deny that part of this stems from the prose itself. There may be a lot of words, but they’re very good words. The writing is atmospheric and evocative. Characters feel distinct even in their turns of phrase and cadence – party members in particular, the small cast there leads to very strong characterization, but even NPCs are memorable and unique in the ways they’re presented. Torment leans heavily on the power of its writing, and for those who don’t mind a lot of non-voiced reading in their games, it hits brilliantly.

Let me give an example – the one that made me lean back in my chair, let out a breath, and run my hands through my hair as I processed the full scene.

One of the in-game factions is known as the Sensates, a group that believes the best way to understand the planes is to experience them. To that end, they collect memories of sensations and experiences in special stones, kept in a central location for others to partake of in both a public venue and a private, members-only collection.

There’s a stone among the collection that’s held as a prime example of the experience of longing, and the Nameless One has an opportunity to make use of this stone to effectively “live” the experience held within and all the sensations that accompany it. It’s from the perspective of a woman on the eve of a last night with her lover, and all the sorts of longing farewells that entails.

Except as the memory progresses, said lover is revealed to be one of the Nameless One’s past incarnations, a ruthlessly practical one. And it’s then that the writing shifts.

This is no longer just a memory of the woman involved here. The Nameless One’s own memory of this moment starts to intrude, with all the sensations that entails. The writing disjointedly shifts from the woman’s perspective to the past incarnation’s perspective to the Nameless One’s present thoughts, flitting between a very stark contrast in emotions – the woman’s longing, the past incarnation’s irritation at what he has to go through for the sake of whatever it is he’s planning, the current incarnation’s knowledge of how this is going to end (and spoilers: it’s “not well”). It’s a confused, almost manic jumble as everything runs together, culminating in a dreadfully desperate-but-futile effort to make this memory go differently, until one the Nameless One’s party members pulls him out of the memory. It’s breathtaking in its wild pacing, delicate and deft as it rapidly shuffles between three sides of a single moment, layering them all on top of each other at once.

And the game is rife with moments like this.

Yet it’s not just the writing in these moments that lends strength to the narrative – indeed, its real power comes from the ways it allows the player to characterize the Nameless One.

“Meaningful choices” is a term thrown around a lot, and it’s understandable that it is. Players want assurance that the choices they make in a game have palpable impact in some way or another. But I think there’s ways to go about it that’s more than just a matter of how the plot unfolds, or which characters live or die, or that sort of thing. A story is not just its plot – it’s also how that plot unfolds, what it means to the characters that are a part of it. I said before that Torment is ultimately a very personal sort of story, and that’s reflected in the type of choices it presents the player with. Torment’s choices don’t really dictate much in the way of plot and what events happen, at least in the broad strokes. But they do dictate a lot in what the plot means to the Nameless One.

Let me dig into that a little deeper. Dialogue choices in a lot of games – especially ones with alignment systems, like, say, ones based on D&D – boil down to three broad options, typically. The unequivocally “good” option, the unequivocally “evil” option, and an ambivalent “neutral” option. Here in Torment, however, the distinctions are finer. Many times throughout the game, some of the dialogue options presented are identical save for a single modifier that indicates the Nameless One’s intent behind it. For example, he might threaten to rip someone’s arm off if he doesn’t get the information he needs – Torment’s dialogue system allows a player to distinguish between if this is merely a bluff he doesn’t intend to follow through on, or if he actually means it. If an NPC asks for a favor from the Nameless One, sometimes he can simply reply that he’ll do it, or he can more strongly vow that he’ll do it.

There’s often little consequence to these sorts of distinctions, aside from the way it can sway the Nameless One’s alignment, but they go a long way toward defining him as a character. Sometimes in a philosophical exchange, the Nameless One can make some statement of belief, and has the option to distinguish whether it’s the truth – something he really believes – or a lie – something he’s simply saying to get in good with someone else. They often both result in the same thing, but merely presenting that difference is enough to get the player to consider how they’re playing the Nameless One. It’s possibly the purest means I’ve seen of letting a player define who their character is: not just what they’re capable of or how they fight, but how they see the world around them, how they choose to move through it. It makes the Nameless One an exceptionally strong character, all the more so because he’s one of the player’s own design in that respect – and it’s hard to pull off a personal story without a strongly defined protagonist. It’s perhaps the game’s biggest strength, and it has an impact on far more than just the narrative itself.

Themes: 10/10

What can change the nature of a man?

As the driving question behind the narrative – one that’s even posed directly to the player on at least two pivotal occasions, with a myriad of possible responses – it’s perhaps expected that exploring an answer is a running theme of the game. As the Nameless One learns more of his past selves, he discovers their personalities run the gamut, from compassionately altruistic to brutally manipulative to obsessive paranoia. What, then, shapes the nature of this particular iteration? What’s the catalyst that defines him? What, as the journal entry of a past incarnation asks, separates the “me” from the “we”?

It’s not just a question that can be applied to the protagonist, either. Characters that push against their expected nature are all over the place in the game. Take potential party member Fall-from-Grace: succubus though she may be, she maintains a position of chastity. The “brothel” she runs is strictly for satiating intellectual lusts – the desire for riveting conversation and debate, the matching of wits, mental stimulation. Even a glimpse at her character sheet displays her Lawful Neutral outlook, despite the typical Chaotic Evil nature of her kind.

But though this is what the game itself would tell you it’s about, it’s arguable that the way belief can shape the world around us is just as central to its tale. Throughout the Nameless One’s exploration of the Planes, it shows up time and time again. Nameless One though he may be, that doesn’t mean he’s stopped from giving a false name – do so often enough, and players may stumble across a look-alike NPC bearing that name, having been literally believed into existence. Another NPC is demonstrated to have believed himself out of existence, succumbing to what he perceives as an infallible argument that he can’t logically exist. Locations can shift, portals can be opened, even the game’s factions are defined not by what they do or what they’re hoping to accomplish, but by what they believe. It lends further weight to the finer distinctions Torment’s dialogue options present.

And it’s here that the strength of the game’s chosen themes come to light, as it explores them by taking full advantage of the unique angles its chosen medium offers. What distinguishes this particular incarnation from all the others, the countless lives with a myriad of different perspectives and outlooks?

It’s a simple answer, really: the player.

As is learned throughout, the Nameless One’s incarnations run the gamut from saintly to manipulative to mad, but it’s up to the player to decide the course of this current version of himself – and in so doing, sway the course of his nature. Alignment may be one of D&D’s core tenets in crafting a character and their philosophy, but in its many iterations in video games, this is perhaps the one where it’s explored most thoroughly, to the point where you can’t even choose it directly. Instead, the Nameless One starts off True Neutral, and is swayed toward good or evil, law or chaos based on actions taken and words chosen – vows kept or promises broken, flippant snark or heartfelt empathy. Alignment has little impact on the game itself – only whether the Nameless One can equip a few specific items or not – but it remains an indicator of the character’s overall perspective. 

In a very real sense, the answer to the question of “what can change the nature of a man” is “whatever the player decides.” Those decisions – however frivolous the basis for them may be to the player – in turn shape the beliefs of the Nameless One, which in turn affect how both he and the player understand the story as it unfolds. It’s simplicity itself in how well the mechanics, and indeed the very conceit of an RPG, reflects and accentuates the themes explored, the likes of which I don’t think I’ve ever seen matched.

Replayability: 8/10

As mentioned in the section discussing the game’s themes, the player’s decisions about how to play the Nameless One and his character shapes a good deal of the meaning and significance behind the plot. This has the side effect of giving subsequent playthroughs the potential not just for a different style of gameplay, but a different perspective, a new lens through which to view the questions the game invites the player to consider. A brute force, act-now, ask-questions-later approach leads to a very different take on the tale compared to the diplomatic approach.

More than this, though, it’s the type of story that’s just asking to be chewed on. It was more than a decade or so that I first played through Torment in its entirety, and it was a recent replay – the first since that initial experience – that inspired me to write a critique of it. Both times, I approached the game in a similar style, as a Lawful Good-leaning mage, favoring an intellectual, diplomatic tack. Yet while both playthroughs were similar in style, it hits differently in my mid-thirties than it did in my early twenties. I remembered the broad strokes of the plot, if not all the details (there was a lot of “oh yeeeeah, this part” during my recent replays), but even if the twists and turns of it weren’t particularly surprising, I almost think I appreciated it more this time around.

There’s a C. S. Lewis passage that, roughly paraphrased, suggests one gets more out of a second reading of a story than the first, and I think there’s a lot of truth to that idea. Familiarity with the “what” of a story allows for more room to examine the “how” and “why” behind it – and it’s exactly those hows and whys that Torment’s story wants to emphasize and explore. It’s not just the potential of variety that increases its replay value, but the nature of the story itself that gives worth to a second look, however far down the road that may be.

Uniqueness: 9/10

I mentioned that Torment’s visual style may not be cutting-edge but is, at least, distinct, and that’s a sentiment that can be extended to the game as a whole. Its gameplay may be little different from its siblings cut from the same Infinity Engine cloth, it may borrow heavily from the Planescape setting and D&D mechanics, it even starts with what’s effectively an amnesia plot. Yet the way in which it combines all of these leads to a concoction that is unmistakably its own thing – it’s hard not to recognize the game from a screenshot, audio clip, or snippet or video. Where else in the world of video games can you create a new passageway through helping a talking alleyway birth it? Invite a man who became a living portal to the Plane of Fire and lived to tell the tale to join your party? Converse with a sentient letter of a divine alphabet? Uncover memories via a journal written in a long-dead tongue engraved on the facets of a trapped, twelve-side Rubik’s Cube (Rubik’s Dodecahedron?) Listen to a woman speak in third person, narrating as if she were the main character of her own story, and not just watch, but feel the inclination as she ends a conversation by narrating you walking away? Perhaps that’s why time has come to consider it something of a cult classic – it is, for everything else it may be, uniquely and unmistakably itself.

Personal: 10/10

Let me tell you a story.

It begins with a young man, about five months out of college, looking for a job and trying to figure out what the heck to do with the degree he’s just earned – a different one than he’d planned on getting. He’s back living with his parents in the meantime, tapping away at a project for National Novel Writing Month on this particular day.

And then the call comes. The news that his grandmother has just passed away, suddenly and unexpectedly.

It’s a bit of a blur afterward. It’s not the first death in the family this young man has known, far from it, but this one hits much closer to home. He was close to this grandmother. It hadn’t even been that long since he’d last seen her, her birthday had only been a week or two prior. There’s a lot of family around, a lot of memories shared. They help. But perhaps not enough.

So it’s to story he turns to, seeking out another world he can bury himself in for a little bit. Eventually he settles on Planescape: Torment. It’s a game he’s tried once or twice before, but never really clicked with. Now, however, he devours it. He spends a few days tearing through the game, exploring as many of its edges as he can. And through it, finds himself starting to feel a little better.

This story is, of course, my own: the tale of the first time I played the game in its entirety. I don’t know exactly what it was that led me to poke at Torment right at that point, but I do know that in the end, it was exactly what I needed at the time. The game, after all, revolves around a man that’s had his mortality excised from him, and wrestles with the repercussions of disrupting the natural order in such a dramatic fashion. In some senses, the game was asking the same sorts of questions I was at the time – and in so doing, offered some reassurances that maybe being willing to seek out answers to them was just as valuable as the answers themselves, if they ever came. Perhaps odd, upon reflection, in dealing with a death via the story of an attempt to resolve the situation of a man that can’t die, but it was catharsis, in a way, the reminder that it is a natural part of life.

Maybe it changed the nature of a man, or maybe it only drew out something that was there all along. But whichever it was, Torment was the game that changed my perspective on just what video games could do. That the stories they could tell were just as powerful and personal as those of any other medium, that they could wrestle with the big, tough, maybe-unanswerable questions in thought-provoking ways, ways that could leave a palpable impression.

It was, in short, the game that first made me think of games as an art. And replaying it now, a dozen years later, it’s doing so all over again.

It won’t land for everybody, it must be said. Some may even find it downright pretentious. But whatever one makes of it, Torment invites the player to consider the big questions, struggle to make sense of them alongside the Nameless One. That’s the thing about it, though. Regardless of whether its audience is looking to do so or not, it beckons. To meet the game on its own terms, to engage with its ideas, to explore what it means to live, to die, to change. To consider, to reflect, to maybe find answers and maybe not, but to at least find some meaning in the attempt.

And when it comes down to it, isn’t that just the nature of any truly impactful work of art?

Aggregate Score: 8.5

Linguistic Dragon works in translation by day and nerds out about language, video games, and storytelling by night… and nearly all other hours, really. You can find him on Twitter as @DragonKetea.