Gamer's Month - Planescape: Torment

Developer: Black Isle Studios
Publisher: Interplay
Genre: Role Playing
Release Date: Dec 12th, 1999.
Platforms: PC

Most of us have played a sandbox game or two. You’re often plopped down into a half-formed world with vaguely defined goals, the feeling that the designer had no idea what they wanted to make, and then expected to create your own fun. I lead with this thought, not because Planescape is a sandbox, or that it feels directionless, but simply because there is a such a dearth of information and choices available that it often feels like freedom within the guides of structure.

This game is like the how-to guide for alternate forms of conflict resolution and cause-and-effect . Pissed off at that douchebag angel who’s been lying through his teeth to you all game? Grab a pyro wizard, a walking suit of armor, and a backstabbing skulk and go kill some shit. Of course, you can’t learn too much from a feathery corpse, and when all of his associates find out how you handled him, all their dialogue options will change. Then again, you could try redeeming him, and showing him the error of his ways, using logic to lead him back to the path. But he’s just such an ass, and even months after his apparent reform, you’ll never quite be sure that he’s telling you straight. Hmm, how about tempting and binding him with the wiles of your succubi friend? That may get what you want, but since she’s just such a nice lady, the amoralness of what you’ve used her to do will weigh on her good soul. Damn. Alright, maybe the fast talking, floating skull can trick something useful out of him, and then we can kill some shit. Except he’s such a tricky bastard he might just trick you right back.

Nearly every major obstacle in Planescape has at least a couple unique ways you can attack the problem, often with many sub-variations and permutations to those. Plus, when you do make a choice, those actions will propagate through to all the later portions of the game. People react to how you dealt with the rage of the Lady, to the fact that you freed the crazy wizard from the bar, or the fact that you’ve got a messed up spider robot as a party member. There’s a reason that the game boasts nearly a million words of dialogue, and its not because you’re attacked by walls of text a la Xenogears. Its because there are just so many ways to do everything that the length is inevitable. On any given playthough, unless you spend all of your time reloading, and exploring the trees, its unlikely that you’ll experience even half of what the designers wrote.


Of course, that range of selection wouldn’t matter much if all the writing were shit – a million variations of See Dick Run or, even worse, your standard D&D fare. Thankfully, about the only connection this has to those sweaty basement horrors is that there happen to be some fantasy creatures. But even those that do exist don’t devolve to clichés. Instead, they all feel like real people, with human level motivations, who just happen to be birthed with scaly skin, spikey tails, or bodies of living fire. Its telling that the suspension of disbelief is often so strong you forget a villain is a literal devil, and not just an incredibly crafty person. Plus, the game does a good job of sticking to what it is throughout – a tragic story of exploration and self-discovery.

The focus of the game, and your playable hero, is a fellow with the moniker of the “Nameless One”. Amnesiac from the start, you’re rarely sure of who is friend or foe, including your own party members, until nearly the climax of the game, and unless you explore all of the dialogue options, as well as interparty gab sessions, you may never really be certain. This mystery of who you are, and what is true among the web of lies is the driving motivation of the game, and allows for a lot of the most interesting revelations of the plot. The Nameless One has been around in some form or another for a long time (did I mention you are apparently immortal?) and has left a lot of friends, enemies, and problems in his memoryless wake. You wake on the slab of a crypt, greeting by the smiling face of your friendly floating skull, and from there on out it’s a dangerous romp through the minefields of your past lives. A search for the answer to the nature of immortality, which rarely leads to conclusions, and even less often to actual understanding.


Planescape is for me the best current representation of what can be achieved with games as art. Where most efforts are satisfied with simply producing a light romp that leads to a few hours of fun, Planescape is like a good novel that leaves you questioning actions and the choices made well after the experience is done. It attacks moral and ethical questions not with the easily resolved and satisfying approach of black and white choices, but with endless shades of grey, where few options are obviously right, and correctness of the final outcome is in the eye of the beholder. This isn't to say its dull or a constant slog of moral quandries. They exist, and they're definitely a focal point of the story, but its all mixed in with a hefty dose of absurdist comedy and dry, dry sarcasm. I have yet to play another game that achieves this feat, and its a unfortunate state that even the later efforts of the Black Isle team have never bettered the attempt.

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