Reflections on the legacy of Planescape Torment, 25 years later

The greatest trick that Planescape Torment has pulled off is disguising its verbosity (a gripping 800,000 word script) by using conventions and then quickly breaking them. As an immortal known as the Nameless One, you wake up on a morgue slab with no memory of how you got there. This is usually an opportunity for revelation, the perfect moment to explain their circumstances to the player through the characters while still allowing them to project their personality onto the blank slate. But then a talking floating skull reveals that your body is heavily scarred, including one tattoo on your back with instructions to discover your past lives. And it turns out that Planescape Torment’s story is more personal. We are talking about unraveling the life story of the Nameless One, echoing memories, and not about an altruistic heroic odyssey to correct cosmic injustice.

And this is just one example. The tricks are a clever sleight of hand as developer Black Isle Studios reforms somewhat established structures in RPGs with Planescape Torment. Take character creation for example; you start by assigning points to your stats, but you won’t have the option to choose a character class. This is because by default you are a fighter, and only by meeting certain characters or completing certain quests will you be able to embody the thief or mage class. According to the game’s design document, this was a conscious decision by the game’s developers, who wanted the player’s actions to define their character rather than allowing them to choose a class from a drop-down list.

At the same time, Wisdom and Charisma were among the most important attributes, considering how ridiculous and confusing the combat encounters were. Instead of bashing skulls together, negotiating and even manipulating your enemies (and friends) can earn you more experience points instead. The trappings of what makes a power fantasy have been destroyed; expelling lower beings with a simple movement of a finger is unlikely to happen. So while you may occasionally come across a combat buff or a crudely drawn tattoo (the equivalent of stat-boosting equipment in Planescape Torment), the game undermines the importance of accumulating such supplies. What seems more appealing instead is the ability to unlock more dialogue options and narrative paths. Why gut a zombie when you can talk to it instead? Planescape Torment was the anti-Diablo of the 90s.

However, even among the pantheon of role-playing games of the era such as Baldur’s Gate, Fallout, Chrono Trigger and the Elder Scrolls series, Planescape Torment remains an oddity: it is largely described as a “commercial disappointment”, too unusual, edgy and self-indulgent. condescendingly appealed to RPG enthusiasts upon its release. In contrast to the adrenaline and strategy of those games, Planescape Torment eschewed fluid, exciting combat in favor of describing each scenario with almost imposing walls of text and dialogue. Understanding the latter would be tedious if not for the ability of its authors to capture the details of each interaction in great detail. One inhabitant of Sigil is depicted as having an overwhelming sense of eternity, “almost as if this person were a shell surrounding limitless space.” Another was the strange story of the Githzerai Ah’ali, who is said to have asked so many “useless and aimless questions” that “her island of matter dissolved around her and she drowned.” Luckily, Planescape Torment never gets any less weird.

And given that the game is set in the obscure Planescape campaign from Dungeons & Dragons, Planescape Torment does not feature any of Tolkien’s races, such as elves, dwarves, or goblins, that so often appear in other high fantasy RPGs. Instead, various races of humanoids live in squalor, with zombies, wererats and demons roaming the underbelly and outskirts of the city of Sigil, and where beliefs can change worlds and distort reality.

The Sigil in particular is deliberately disorienting and unusual. The ever-changing streets change at the whim of an inscrutable ruler, the ominously named Lady of Pain. Here the alleys whisper secrets and tremble with agony. Hidden in plain sight here are myriads of interplanar portals leading to multiple realities. Anecdotes abound here of unwary residents of other planes being trapped in Sigil against their will when they accidentally stumbled upon the city through nameless portals.

The streets are a mixture of musky trash and abandoned buildings, hastily built on top of each other, with tall spikes and jagged architecture lining their boundaries. So while Sigil is a completely inhospitable city, it is also surprisingly charming. Each landmark carries a personality that reminds you of the miserable lives of its inhabitants you meet along the way. Even decades later, there has been no other RPG quite like Planescape Torment, where even the depravity is etched into the grounds and walls itself, and the spaces are filled with a growing sense of misery.

But we’d be remiss to discuss the game’s grotesque appeal without mentioning the Nameless One’s companions. They are a group of persuasive but eternally unlucky individuals whose greatest folly was to encounter the Nameless One. Morte, the chattering floating skull you first met in the morgue, yaks so hard that his insults (“Flies won’t even land on your body!”) can enrage enemies and cause them to suffer penalties to the damage they deal. But you soon learn that his offer to guide you on your journey with amnesia is not generous, but out of guilt.

There’s also Fall-Out-Grace, which is a mixture of contradictions: a chaste succubus who so enjoys engaging in intellectual conversation that she became the owner of a brothel that specializes in stimulating, intellectual experiences rather than physical pleasures. There is Dak’kon, a fiercely loyal Githzerai who is sworn to protect the Nameless One his entire life but also agonizes over his immortality. There’s Ignus, a pyromaniac mage who is the centerpiece of a small establishment known as the Smoldering Corpse Bar, who you can recruit if you can put out his eternal flame. And then there’s the walking suit of armor, Vailor, who is dedicated to bringing justice even after her death. All of them are somehow connected with the ill-fated fate of the Nameless One, and their backstory, in fact, is a chronicle of magnificent catastrophes. Especially if you decide to direct the current incarnation of the Nameless One to commit unspeakable evils.

And then there’s the matter of death: the one device for which Planescape Torment is perhaps most remembered. The ability to live forever—to be killed without being killed—struck the Nameless One with the inability to retain any memories, and this has consequences beyond what was immediately obvious. Your death as a player does not mean the end of the game: you simply materialize in the morgue if you receive fatal injuries. This can sometimes be one of the ways to help you get out of sticky situations, such as re-entering certain areas of the game (fun fact: only the dead can gain access to the morgue). But more than that, it changed the purpose of death as a mechanic. Your death is mentioned and remembered by others, who sometimes discuss the nature of your immortality. Death is no longer a state of failure; it became another means of interaction with the Universe and its endless dangers.

Planescape Torment defines the genre not only through its gripping scenes, but also through its horrifying revelations conveyed through text and narrative devices: that past incarnations of the Nameless One may have been cruel in the name of pragmatism, that your deaths doomed more than just the village of souls, and that the unforgivable nature of your crimes may , ironically doomed you to immortality. Its legacy is reflected in the passionate community discussions that continue decades after its release, as well as the influence it continues to have on modern games such as the critically acclaimed Disco Elysium, which drew on Planescape Torment’s love of the written word. also fill their world with paragraphs of velvety text.

However, Planescape Torment hasn’t aged that badly; after all, this is a 25-year-old game that has resolution issues, an unintuitive user interface, and tedious, repetitive combat. But these are more technical issues—issues that are bound to surface as technology advances—and they’ve been largely polished off with the release of the Enhanced Edition in 2017. Despite the years, the game’s tragic story of torment, violence and mortality remains the same. bright and invigorating as always. I imagine that in another 25 years, these are the traits that will remain untarnished by the passage of time.