(Updated with an afterthought below)

Back to the realms of the CRPG now. In 1998, Bioware released Baldur’s Gate - a game based on the Dungeons and Dragons ruleset and built using the Infinity engine. The Infinity engine would be subsequently used in severeal further D&D games including Baldur’s Gate 2 and the Icewind Dale series of games but first there was Planescape: Torment.

Torment starts out in the fictional city of Sigil, itself part of the D&D Planescape setting, and leads the character through several planes of existence (including a lesser level of hell and a dimension inhabited by walking cubes). Although it’s related to Dungeons and Dragons, the game world bears little to no relation to the usual Tolkien-esque fantasy world of elves and dwarves, goblins and trolls. As Wikipedia describes it, the Planescape setting “crossed Victorian era trappings with a pseudo-steampunk design and attitude.”

The story revolves around the player character known only as the Nameless one. You wake up in a mortuary with an amnesia in and companion called Morte who happens to be a floating skull. He tells you what happened - chiefly that you’ve died and that you’ve come back to life and that this is not the first time. The goal of the game is to regain your memory and uncover the mystery of this repetitive reincarnation.

Planescape: Torment is definitely one of the best games I have ever played. It has a rich and complex storyline that is as deep in its themes and ideas as it is in the emotional impact it can have on you as a player. The characters that you associate with and who make up your adventuring party are wonderfully imaginative and superbly presented. It helps too that the voice actors are not just the developers doing it all themselves but stalwart actors in their own right including Mitch Pileggi (Walter Skinner from the X-Files), John de Lancie (Q from Star Trek), Dan Castellaneta (Homer Simpson) and the tremendous Keith David (who seems to be in every film I’ve watched over the last few weeks).

The story, though, is what really makes this game. It’s rare that you come across a character that’s so convoluted as The Nameless One. It’s not long after the start of the game that you realise that he has lived for aeons and died thousands of times. The mysteries deepen as it becomes apparent that his personality is always changing and that some people he comes across hate him and some love him. The Nameless One has been both good and evil, mad and sane, a wiseman and a fool. In some ways there’s more than a passing comparison with Christopher Nolan’s film Memento. Both protagonists are amnesiacs, both leave clues for themselves in the form of tattoos to help them remember and both are tragic characters with extremely murky and questionable motivations. If you’re only into stories which are black and white and where the hero gets the girl and kills the baddie, Planescape: Torment is not for you. If you can stomach a very outlandish setting full of tormented and conflicted characters and a canvas of morality daubed in shades of grey then this will be right up your dark and dangerous alley.

UPDATE: Rereading this, it strikes me that I’ve painted Torment as a dour, sombre affair when it was anything but. As much as there were some profound and very philosophical issues touched on and explored by the game (yes, that’s right, profound AND philosophical) it was also very fucking funny.

Most of the humour is derived from Morte, your floating skull companion - so extremely sarcastic and abrasive that his body walked off and left him. Not only does he have a special attack which is hurling insults at your foes but he also spends most of his time trying it on with the ladies in the group which is constantly amusing. One of those ladies, a she-devil called Fall-from-grace (”Her eyes were like windows to hell but she had a body that made me want to kick in the door!”), is the madam of the Brothel for Slaking Intellectual Lusts where discourse and dialectic take the place of sexual intercourse. Let’s not forget that another companion is a box on legs voiced by the man who plays Homer Simpson.

The game has a very dry wit and is full of very dark humour, unsurprising given the context. One place that this shows more than any other is in the vision statement that was put together by the developers. Most proposal documents for technical projects that I’ve ever read (admittedly not for gaming projects) are tedious but this is worth a read in its own right and gives a very good sense of how the game was meant to feel which was indeed how it ultimately came across. (Beware spoilers though.) For example, describing the starting city Sigil:

Sigil’s like a big cream doughnut except instead of a cream filling, there’s this city inside. No-one’s really sure how they live like this but whatever. It’s pretty tame compared to most of the shit you find in Planescape.

Morte occasionally appears and interjects with asides like “Sheesh! Can this guy write any more text? I’m already bored and I’m fucking dead!” and “Blah blah blah Planescape blah blah blah It’s so special blah blah blah we’re so pretentious blah blah!”

Any game company that describes the spells you’ll be able to use as “Spells that will make you pity the target” (”Fireballs can go and hide in the fucking corner!”) or equipment you’ll find as “stuff that scares small children” is doing something right. Planescape: Torment is a fucking masterpiece and as close to a literary work in digital form as you’re likely to find.