PLANESCAPE: TORMENT is a role-playing game, built using the same game engine as the excellent Baldur’s Gate. Instead of adventuring around the usual fantasy world, filled with elves, dwarves, and so on, in Torment you play a scarred immortal, who has awoken in a mortuary, in the centre of Sigil, the city at the centre of the Planes.
Sigil is the “City of Doors”. From here you can travel the Planes, which are like alternate dimensions. In these planes, things are often back-to-front from what you might expect: Dying can be good for you, talking with the living dead can be most enlightening, your best friend turns out to be a floating skull (with a penchant for female corpses), and getting stitched up by a fiendish mortuary attendant can actually make you stronger.
You have no memory of how you came to be in the Mortuary, and only a few clues as to who and what you are.
Torment is more of a story-driven game than Baldur’s Gate was. There is still lots of combat, complete with all sorts of weapons, spells, and a veritable horde of monsters, but your main quest is to find out just who you are, and what is going on. As the story progresses, you start to get the distinct feeling that things aren’t going to end well . . .
There are loads of mini-quests within the story. You may be asked to revenge a murder, talk someone out of dying, find a magic item and so on.
The quests differ depending on your alignment. If you are evil expect more hack-and-slay type quests. One of the unusual aspects of Torment is that you don’t decide your alignment: it is determined by your gameplay within the game. Slaughter a few innocents, steal items, and you’ll certainly be thought of as an evil guy. This means that you can play through Torment in different ways.
You design your character; The Nameless One, at the beginning of the game. You assign statistics to strength, wisdom, intelligence, dexterity, constitution, and charisma, which all give different abilities.
If you are an intelligent character you will have more dialogue options with game characters, as well as recovering memories faster, being better at spells, and so on. As a strong but thick type you’ll excel at bashing people over the head, and won’t bother too much with the thinking side of things.
As you progress through the game you’ll come across trainers, who can increase your proficiency with certain weapons or skills. There are hundreds of items to use, sell, or steal. You can change character class too, depending on who you talk to, going from Fighter to Wizard, Thief, or Cleric.
You’ll find characters willing to join your party, and each has their own agenda, as well as skills and items. Just don’t turn your back on anyone!
The graphics in Torment are similar to those in Baldur’s Gate. Each area is hand-drawn, in amazing detail. The characters and monsters have excellent animation, and the spell and other special effects are superb. There is a lot of speech in the game, and the music is quite compelling.
The humour in Torment is very dark, with lots of references to death, torture, murder, and more. Torment wouldn’t be a great game for the kids, but if you can cope with the occasional necrophilic joke you’ll find the story in Torment really grabs your attention.
Torment is Black Isle. It requires a Pentium 200MMX processor, eight-speed CD-Rom drive, four-megabyte graphics card, and recommends a Pentium 266MMX processor, 64Mb of Ram, and 12-speed CD-Rom drive.
Torment is easily the best role-playing game around at the moment. With Baldur’s Gate 2 and Icewind Dale still a long way off, I’ll be making do with Torment quite happily.
