Planescape: Torment

Planescape: Torment is a 1999 role-playing video game developed by Black Isle Studios and published by Interplay for Windows, set in the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons campaign world of Planescape.¹² It was the first game to use the Planescape license, and it broke sharply from the conventions of the computer role-playing game by placing a dialogue-driven story ahead of tactical combat.¹³ The game was released on December 16, 1999.¹

The player controls a scarred, tattooed figure known only as the Nameless One, who awakens in a mortuary with no memory of his past or how he came to be there.¹² He is immortal, and dying is generally only a minor inconvenience — he simply wakes elsewhere with his experience and items intact, and dying is essential to solving at least one of the game’s puzzles.²⁵ His first companion is Morte, a sarcastic floating skull who reads the clues tattooed on the Nameless One’s own back.³¹⁰ The story revolves around his quest to discover the cause of his immortality and annul it so he may finally rest, while confronting the deeds of his prior incarnations, some of whom the game reveals to have been deceitful, manipulative cretins who destroyed the lives of innocents and tricked others into sacrificing themselves.⁶ The game opens in a grim mortuary where zombie morticians lurch from slab to slab, a scene evoking horror that the game nonetheless aims to intrigue rather than frighten.⁸

Most of the action takes place in Sigil, the “City of Doors,” a metropolis at the intersection of infinite planes of existence where portals link to multiple worlds and belief can reshape reality.²¹³ Sigil is described as a neutral ground where demons, devas, and races from across the multiverse gather under the watchful shadow of the Lady of Pain, the city’s enigmatic ruler.¹³ The setting deliberately abandons the medieval high-fantasy of elves, goblins, and dragons for a darker, almost science-fiction sensibility of robots, fallen angels, floating skulls, and magical tattoos.⁹¹⁰ In the Planescape multiverse, ideas are often more powerful than actions, and an entire city can move from one plane to another when the beliefs of its inhabitants change.⁶ Up to seven non-player characters may join the party, among them the priestly succubus Fall-from-Grace, a suit of armor animated by a spirit demanding justice, and other grotesque figures, each with a well-developed personality that affects the unfolding plot.³¹³

Gameplay

Character creation is minimal: the player is always the Nameless One, distributing twenty-one ability points among six statistics and beginning as a third-level fighter of neutral alignment.³ With the help of trainers, he can switch between fighter, mage, and thief classes — though he can advance in only one at a time — a change the game justifies as remembering latent, centuries-old talents rather than acquiring new skills.³⁹ Alignment and faction affiliations develop through the player’s actions rather than being chosen outright, and they have a noticeable impact on the game’s course.¹⁹ Dialogue frequently lets the player make promises, bluff, or play dumb, and a sufficiently intelligent, wise, strong, or charismatic character can perceive details, grasp philosophical implications, or intimidate and charm in conversation.⁹

Because the Nameless One is immortal, death at the hands of a monster or trap is generally only a minor inconvenience, and his perverse inability to permanently die discourages frequent reloading and helps maintain the game’s pacing.⁶⁹ Some critics regarded this as a weakness: Eurogamer argued that reviving with full hit points and no loss of experience or items “cheapens death” and undercuts the suspension of disbelief that role-playing games depend on.¹⁰

The game emphasizes text over spectacle, and includes roughly a million words of dialogue, of which only a fraction is seen in any single playthrough because of its multiple branching paths.²⁶ Lead designer Chris Avellone told The New York Times that effects requiring “400 or 500 people to achieve graphically” could be conveyed instead with a paragraph of text, because what a reader recreates in their own mind is more powerful than what a designer can supply.⁶ The single-player game has no multiplayer mode, and its structure is meandering and exploratory — a “rhizome” of scattered quests and sub-quests tracked in an automatically updated journal, rather than a linear maze.⁵⁸ Its low system requirements reflected the emphasis on text: the original ran on Windows with a 200-megahertz processor and 32 megabytes of memory.⁶

Engine and design lineage

Torment runs on a modified version of BioWare’s Infinity Engine, the same technology used for the 1998 Baldur’s Gate, though its top-down isometric view sits much closer to the ground so that characters appear large and highly detailed onscreen.³⁹ It inherited from Baldur’s Gate both the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons rule set and the point-and-click interface, replacing the onscreen menu bars with a pop-up radial menu that frees the screen for a larger game view.⁵¹⁰ That hidden interface was a mixed blessing: reviewers found the pop-up world-screen window, brought up by right-clicking, awkward and cluttered with small unmarked buttons, though the game automatically paused whenever it was active.⁷⁹ Where Baldur’s Gate offered a “reassuringly familiar” world of elves, wands, and healing potions, Torment set itself apart chiefly through its writing and its strange setting.¹⁰ It also followed in the tradition of Black Isle’s earlier Fallout series, which reviewers cited as a precedent for story-rich role-playing valued for its artistic merit.²⁵

According to fan documentation, the game drew on books, comics, and games including Archie Comics, The Chronicles of Amber, The Elementals, and Shadowrun.¹⁹ One account holds that the broader Planescape multiverse was inspired by the works of writer Neil Gaiman.²¹

Reception and legacy

Reviewers praised Torment as one of the best computer role-playing games of its year, with GameSpot calling it “clearly the best traditional computer role-playing game of the year” and an “all-time favorite” for its detailed story and first-rate graphics and sound.⁹ Critics singled out its writing, its likable and bizarre companions, and its willingness to let players resolve situations through conversation rather than combat, while noting technical flaws such as limited screen resolution, poor pathfinding, and an awkward hidden interface.⁹¹¹ The New York Times argued the game “breaks many of the conventions that have distinguished the genre” and could herald a wave of games valued for artistic merit as much as technical brilliance.⁶ Some players reached for literary comparisons, one newsgroup writer claiming it “blows away ‘Lord of The Rings’” as a piece of literature, and another likening Avellone and his team to Christopher Marlowe and Dr. Faustus.⁶ Despite the acclaim, it did not sell well.¹¹ The game won RPG of the Year from multiple outlets for its unconventional story, characters, and soundtrack.¹³

Black Isle Studios closed in 2003, and no direct sequel was made.¹¹ A remaster, Planescape: Torment: Enhanced Edition, was produced by Beamdog and released in 2017, adding a 4K interface, remastered music, and bug fixes while leaving the original intact; it is available in English, French, German, Korean, Polish, and Czech.¹³¹⁵ The game’s approach was carried forward by Torment: Tides of Numenera, a Kickstarter-funded spiritual successor developed by inXile Entertainment and set in the Numenera tabletop world rather than Planescape, which likewise let players complete the game without swinging a weapon.¹²²⁰ Avellone gave his blessing to inXile’s successor.¹⁴ The 2021 role-playing game Disco Elysium is widely regarded as another spiritual heir to Torment.¹⁵