Review

Torment doesn't quite fit the mold, and that's fine. It's like a frontage road running alongside the freeway of Computer Role-playing Games. You're still going in the same direction, but the experience is just a little different. And slower. Torment's circus trick, when you get down to it, is how it deals with death. Your avatar is (mostly) immortal, and getting killed doesn't equate to 'game over'. Unfortunately, this sounds more interesting on paper than it really is. For being the game's highly-touted claim to uniqueness, I didn't feel that death was integrated into the gameplay very strongly. You could almost as easily take any other RPG, have it autoload whenever you die, and you'd get close to the same effect. Sure, there are a handful of setpiece events where your immortality gets leveraged in more interesting ways, outside of combat, but not enough to really set the game apart the way I expected. (Aside: I think this is largely due to the fact that while your character is immortal, he's still in a party of creatures that aren't... and consequently the adventure never really strays that far from the beaten path.) In fact, that holds true for the game as a whole, the sense of normalcy masquerading under a thin veneer of eccentricism. Torment has this great premise: Sigil, the "City of Doors", as an inter-planar hub, hosting your immortal, Memento-esque persona. And yet the game never really takes these ideas and runs with them. Sigil is this supposedly portal-riddled "watering hole for races across the multiverse" , and yet it ends up feeling like a cramped, overly scripted sandbox. And I don't mean 'sandbox' in the 'open ended freeform I can go anywhere' sense, but rather the 'small rigidly enclosed sit still and play quietly' sense.

This sense of restriction is exacerbated by the fact that everything is staged. By that I mean that there isn't really anything to do outside the context of the story arc. Granted, I also feel like the only thing that holds the game together is the story arc, so maybe this is a blessing in disguise. Put simply, though, the game is a progression from NPC encounter to NPC encounter, where your responsibility as a player is relegated to choosing how to navigate dialogue trees. But consider as a counter-example, from the same folks, mind you, Fallout. In Fallout, you're free to just wander the wastelands anytime you like, leveling your character and collecting items. They even threw in some cool unique encounters as an incentive. Does the ability to just veer off and level your character outside of the story ruin the game? No, absolutely not. Quite the opposite in fact. That I had some control over how my character acquired experience points made me feel more engaged in the game. It made me feel like I was "playing", instead of just reenacting. Sure, if I'd wanted I could have spent an inordinate amount of time leveling, and then just cake-walked through the quests. So what? If that's how I want to spend my time, it's my business. For some reason, game designers occasionally treat that as an insult, and feel some compulsive need to prevent you from doing anything other than what they explicitly want you to do, in the way they want you to do it. That's called Catholic School, not gaming. Torment suffered from this. I'm aware of only a single opportunity to level uninhibitedly, and that was via the Modron Cube, which was fun for about 5 minutes.

Torment is really more of a conversation puzzle game than anything else. Success in Torment comes from navigating NPC conversation trees. Sure, along the way you end up killing things, and there's a bunch of d20 rolls happening under the hood, but basically the flow of the game is dictated by conversation. Lots and lots of it. I'm not saying this is either good or bad, just being objective. Personally, I recognized this pretty early and had fun experiencing the story. Note I said "experiencing the story" rather than "playing the game". Torment is as close to an interactive novella as anything I've seen. And when the dust settled, I think I'd rather have had Torment in book form, and just sat down and read it.

In fact, I took a fairly long hiatus from Torment about 1/3 of the way through. This was due explicitly to the combination of two things: how little entertainment I was getting from the combat, and how meager the story progression is initially. But after a few months off, I got an itch one night to play something slow-paced, remembered that I had shelved Torment, and fired it back up. Two days later, I had finished it. The difference, I think, was that the story progression picked up significantly, and I also realized that I could basically talk my way through the game fairly quickly, treating the requisite combat as just a means to an end.

Summary

Is Planescape Torment fun? As always, it depends on you. It was just fun enough to pull me to the end, but only once I'd come to terms with the fact that I was in it for the story, and could afford to be apathetic towards the combat. Whenever I look back at a game and find myself thinking that I tolerated the gameplay for the sake of the story, I can't help but think I've wasted my gaming time and should have played something else. Make no mistake, I don't mean to imply that good story-telling doesn't have a place in gaming. Rather, I mean that I play games because I like to play them, and if the gameplay has to be "tolerated", then that particular story is probably better off without the game. It's like saying you tolerated watching a movie just so you could eat some popcorn. The purpose of a movie is the movie. The purpose of a game is its gameplay. There needs to be a solid justification for the entertainment to manifest as a computer game and not as something else. If the only thing good about a game is its story, then that justification isn't present. Unfortunately, I find myself unable to recommend Torment for anything other than its story, and therefore unable to recommend it as a game. The odd thing is, there are thousands and thousands of books I'll never read, and I don't feel bad about that. But take a mediocre game that has an above-average story, and for some bizarre Freudian reason I feel bad saying "don't play it". But there it is. Don't play Torment unless your gaming diet consists solely of D&D based RPGs, and that's the way you like it. If you have a broader gaming palette, then your time is almost assuredly better spent elsewhere. If you still feel guilty about not playing it, go read a good book.