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All About...
Planescape: Torment
Review

Would it be a compliment to call Planescape: Torment the heroin of RPG games? I mean it in the nicest way.
Spells, like Adder's Kiss here, are animated with appealing glitz.
This game should not be considered "software": it is an addictive substance and we need another fix right now. Planescape: Torment is easily the best RPG title to emerge since Baldur's Gate, and its plot surpasses that of most adventure titles. The intriguing story will hook gamers from the opening movie, and they'll be lost: the game will envelope players like a cozy blanket, inspiring them to forego sleep, miss meals, painfully postpone trips to the bathroom and call in sick to work just to experience a few more minutes.





Planescape: Torment

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Torment is built upon the Baldur's Gate engine, but it's important to note that this is neither a sequel nor a typical RPG. Basic similarities are inevitable: the commendable interface is intact; the graphics and animations are correspondingly flawless; the character management screens are as intuitive as they are pretty and so on. Veterans of Baldur's Gate will need no introduction to the mechanics of Torment, but the setting, the storyline and the characters are so refreshingly original, the other title will be forgotten in the first act.

Unlike most RPGs, players don't get to generate a character. Instead, they're thrust headlong into the role of, well, someone who can't remember his name. He starts off as a fighter, but players will have opportunities to change his class by training with NPCs. A player's actions, coupled with choices in the various dialog trees, determine the character's alignment.

The Nameless One awakens on a cold slab in a mortuary with no recollection of how he arrived there. The only clues lie with his companion, a floating skull named Morte, and a message tattooed onto Nameless' back urging him to seek out both his missing journal and someone called Pharod. With only that to go on, it's up to the player to find out who he is, how he ended up being mistaken for a stiff, and what he was trying to accomplish when he lost his memory. To tell much more about the plot would spoil precious moments of discovery that players are better off experiencing in this masterful work than reading about here. Suffice it to say the narrative tale of Torment's main quest would be top-notch fantasy fiction in any form. In the realm of computer gaming, it ranks among the best: Half-Life, Outcast, Gabriel Knight and other such engaging works have a new peer.

The game world itself is different from anything we've experienced in a PC RPG. Set in AD&D;'s recently developed Planescape universe, its ambience is quite different from Forgotten Realms or any other Earthly theater. Fantastic and unfamiliar creatures roam the portal town of Sigil and its various wards. Many of these creatures are traveling to and from the outer planes of existence. There's no sign of the usual goblins, orcs and ogres, and there's not a one quaint medieval village to be found. The setting looks more like a post-apocalyptic world, a primitive take on Fallout, than a typical fantasy realm.

Character interaction is top-notch. A player can walk up to any NPC and initiate a conversation, and the resulting dialog trees are varied enough to reflect personality. Conversations with key characters seem more intuitive and logical than they were in Baldur's Gate, and we didn't encounter any legacy glitches from that title (we remember when characters who were supposed to be seeking an audience with us would just ignore us, even if we tried to start a conversation?)

Torment is packed with wonderful, intangible playability, enough to keep this reviewer playing all day and into the night for days in a row. The developers deftly skirt the need to reload frequently though Nameless' own nature. Not only does he start as a third level fighter, so players don't have to deal with the inherent weakness of first level characters, but he's also immortal. If he's killed in the course of a game, there's no need to panic: he'll usually awaken back in the morgue, his companions by his side and all of his possessions still on his person. If that sounds like a contrived device, rest assured it isn't: the very cause and nature of Nameless' immortality is a central point of the narrative, and there are even puzzles that require him to die in order to solve them!

The tedium of level climbing is further muffled by the games' generosity with experience points. It's never more than a few hours for a raise in level and, therefore, in hit points and ability. Torment rewards the successful and peaceful completion of subquests with far more experience points than those gained through combat, and almost every major milestone can be solved in the main through nonviolent means.

There's still plenty of combat with wandering baddies, and the combat system is so graceful that fights never become tedious. A right-click interface allows the player to grab weapons, spells, general items or special abilities from quick-select inventory slots, and targets are designated by left clicking on the offender. The spell graphics are tasty, full of flashy lighting effects and thundering crackles and booms.

Speaking of audio, everything in Torment is done right. From the crunching footsteps of party members or the thud of a well-aimed club to the subdued ambience of bustling markets or creepy crypts, the effects are appropriate and convincing. It's the musical score, however, that truly makes Torment an audio spectacular. The interactive score winds its way through the game with appropriate swells and fades, carpeting every situation with appropriate mood. In-game music has never been better.

With the sheer number of subquests (all of which are kept straight in the handy journal) and the ability to sample the four key character classes (fighter, mage, thief and cleric), the replay value of Planescape: Torment is high, but it's still dulled by the fact that once a player experiences the enchanting storyline to its climactic conclusion, it won't have the same impact a second time through.

So is there anything not so good about Torment? Only three factors come to mind. One concerns the subquests, a majority of which are nothing more than courier errand-running. The game world is made up of many, interconnected, smallish maps, and travel from one to the next requires a player to endure a modest break as the new scenery loads. Subquests that require running back and forth through more than a few locales are aggravating.

The other complaint is Torment's lack of a multiplayer element. This is a very minor grievance. One of Baldur's Gate's only flaws was its unsatisfying multiplayer, and Torment's character intensive narrative doesn't lend itself to multiplayer gaming. Chances are, players won't miss it.

Lastly, the potential of thieving skills is never really fulfilled. There's little need for most of them and few opportunities to use them. For example, there's no need to pick locks because most locked doors and chests can be easily forced, and those that can't are usually critical to a quest and can only be cracked by solving a puzzle.

A word of warning to parents and weak-stomached gamers: despite its rewards for nonviolent solutions, Torment may be thematically inappropriate for preteens. One of the narrative themes centers on death and dying, and there's a major faction within the game world that encourages characters to let go of their will to survive. What's more, scenes within the mortuary and other locales are sometimes quite gruesome, showing dissected and dismembered bodies. Even Nameless is subject to serious gore (though it's thankfully described rather than shown); his frequently-dead body is full of replaceable parts. For instance, in one side quest, Nameless can actually buy one of his eyes back from a bartender, and in another squeamish scene, a player can ask a woman who works with corpses to dig around inside his body to see if she can find any valuable goodies.

Planescape: Torment has to be experienced to be believed. The narrative alone is worth the price of admission; that we can participate in it is a privilege. Don't miss this one: it'll be a long time before we'll see another game as engaging as this one is.

- Joel Durham Jr.

User Reviews

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Screens
Awesome Cut Scenes
Type No More
Clean Interface
Starting on the Slab


Screens

When combat gets too hairy, you can pause the action to get your bearings.

Put the kids to bed. Torment pulls no punches with its depictions and descriptions of gore.

Nameless is more than just a pretty face. Though Torment takes a few liberties, character stats follow the basic AD&D; model.

Stats
Developer Black Isle (Interplay)
Publisher Interplay
Genre Role-playing
Requirements
Win9x, P200 MMX, 32MB RAM, 8X CD-ROM drive, 650MB hard drive space, DirectX compatible video and sound cards.
Recommended
P2-266, 64MB RAM, 800MB hard drive space, 8MB video card


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