Review: Planescape: Torment

So I recently finished playing through all four of the old D&D Infinity Engine games, after starting Baldur's Gate something like 15 months ago. Needless to say, they were all fun, or else I wouldn't have put up with dedicating all my game-playing time to games I already invested hundreds of hours into during my childhood while my Steam and GOG queues keep getting longer and longer and longer.

Playing all those Infinity Engine games was so fun, in fact, that immediately after finishing Icewind Dale 2 I started playing goddamn Planescape: Torment. I'd never played it before, it was cheap on GOG, and I'd been getting sick of over a decade of being stared at like I was a leper every time I confessed to a cRPG fan that I'd never played it before.

That said, I'm actually glad I didn't play it until now. It has an amazing story, just like everyone says it does, but it's also a deep and mature story, not just in terms of subject matter, but in terms of symbolism, metaphor, and all that fun English major stuff, and I honestly don't think I would have appreciated it nearly as much at 18 as I did at 31. With the mods recommended on GOG's page installed, the game actually looks better to my eyes that the Baldur's Gate series: the sprites are better animated and the environments are more lovingly crafted. Everything is a bit dull and dark palette-wise, but that suits the story of a guy's quest through the planes of hell to figure out how he can finally die.

So, did I like it? If I was going to sum up my review in three sentences, I'd say this:

1. If you care at all about RPGs or games-as-art, you must play this game at least once in your life.
2. The degree to which your role-playing actually effects the world around you makes me want to play it over again right away, but some of its more "gamey" elements got annoying and I'm not sure I want to deal with them again.
3. How the hell has someone, anyone not made another game like this in the last decade?

But this is a blog, so I'm going to sum up my review in a billion sentences.

It's difficult to talk about this game without comparing it to the other Infinity Engine games, but I'll try my best. First off, rarely have I seen a game that so successfully melds its story and its gameplay such that the combination benefits both rather than hindering them. You begin the game by waking up in a mortuary after being killed, realize you have amnesia, and then progress from there. That your avatar starts at square one, then, in terms of abilities and you as the player start at square one in terms of understanding the ins and outs of the planescape around you makes sense. It's a subtle thing, frequently, how well the gameplay and the story cohere in P:T, but it's not a small thing.

The gameplay itself centers around the usual Infinity Engine (and cRPG) activities: talking, exploring, inventory-managing, and fighting. The emphasis is a lot more on exploring and talking than on fighting, though, than I've ever really experienced playing a cRPG. One friend of mine described it as a "chat simulator," and in some respects that's not too far off the mark. If you winced at that last sentence, this game's not for you. In this game, you read. A LOT.

One of the frequent boasts made about Planescape: Torment is that it has 800,000 words of dialogue. I believe it. On nights when I'm not working or socializing late into the night, I frequently will play a video game until bedtime and then go to bed and read for 30-45 minutes until I fall asleep. Playing P:T long into the night, I found that when I quit playing, I had no interest in continuing to read and just went straight to sleep.

That's a good thing. The game requires you to read through reams and reams of text, but it's all (and I mean all) well-written text. The dialogue and exposition is often of a higher quality than I find in much printed fiction, and on top of that, knowing what's going on around you, paying attention to other characters' reactions, and comprehensively reading your dialogue options is essential to playing the game as the character that you'd like to be. Again, if expressing your role-playing desires by choosing dialogue tree branches for hours sounds boring to you, this might not be your game. I'll say, though, that usually that doesn't sound like my game, but the great writing in P:T and the gravity your choices hold in the gameworld keeps the reading and own-adventure-choosing from becoming a chore. It's an old cliche, and one that I generally try to avoid indulging (because usually it's inaccurate and reductive), but P:T is a bit like an excellently realized, beautifully imagined graphic novel in which you get to make all the choices for the main character.

There's combat, for sure, but it's not nearly as complex as even the Icewind Dale or Baldur's Gate series are. I made a point of seeking out companions early, and we generally overwhelmed our enemies in battle with numbers by just clicking like it was Diablo. From a ludic point of view, that's actually one of the downsides of the game; it's so open-ended that the mandatory combat parts can be hideously unbalanced, based on how you play. You always have a few major, overriding quests and the usual spate of smaller, secondary quests to deal with; however, you have to actually go out and collect these quests, and how you do that, when you do that, and even if you do that is mostly up to you. Even BG2 seems linear to me by comparison. In some ways this is great, and accentuates the sense of "being yourself" that the game cultivates so well in other ways.

On the other hand, though, it can lead to imbalance issues which end up unsubtly slapping you upside the head and screaming "YOU'RE PLAYING A GAME!" at really inconvenient times. For example, I spent a lot of time walking around each and every town, talking to each and every townsperson, and following up on each and every quest that they gave me. As talking-quests, debating-quests, and fetch quests are where most of your experience points come from, you'll want to do this. I probably had 50 or so decently long conversations every time I came to a new location. I'd guess maybe 70% of my overall game-time was spent in the dialogue window. There are a lot of NPCs, and a lot of them don't just have canned dialogue, and the only way to find out which ones will want you to do something that will a) shed light on your main quest and b) give you necessary experience points is to talk to them all. I did this, and it took a really long time, and according to the walkthrough I skimmed after I finished the game, I still missed a ton of sidequests. If I replay this game, I'll love having those conversations again and taking a different tack, but I won't love having to walk through each location clicking on everyone like some weird, conversation-based version of level grinding.

It seemed to me that I overplayed this chatty part of the game, that I engaged in more conversations than was absolutely necessary. As a result, I was a bit overleveled for much of the game. I imagine if someone came into playing the game and only talked to the clearly obvious "quest-giving" characters and nobody else (which would still involve a lot of talking), they would likely be unable to defeat a lot of the monsters they have to fight during the ramp-up to the endgame. That doesn't seem right to me. I like the idea that learning something about a major character or yourself through dialogue gets you the same amount of experience as slaying a minotaur does; that's a cool idea. However, when you can't progress through a late-game dungeon and all the minor enemies are slaughtering you because you didn't bother to talk to the stableboy five towns ago and get his 120,000 experience point quest, it just seems silly. When the only way to rectify this "mistake" of not engaging enough with the game's brilliant story is to grind for hours by killing the same enemies over and over again, it's even sillier.

This is why I say I loved the game, but I probably won't replay it. I came out pretty well by playing a high-intelligence, high-wisdom character and had fun talking and dealing my way toward high-level abilities because when do you ever get to do that in a game (as opposed to just slaughtering lots of bad guys)? I saw a lot of opportunities throughout, though, where it became clear that had I played the game a bit differently, the result might have been an experience that was 30% awesome conversation, 70% boring grinding. The content is there, for sure, and its high-quality content, but you've got to be willing to play the game primarily as a chat simulator (for want of a better term) for it to be the brilliant, unique game that everyone keeps telling you it is.

Buoyed by my enjoyment of P:T I started playing the original Fallout for the first time at like 10pm last night. I think I went to bed at...oh, 3am. Fallout's battle system is AMAZING. GOG is going to brutally murder my summer productivity.