Planescape: Torment

One of the lamentable truths about the video game industry is that when something is really and truly great, it has a roughly 80% chance of being missed, at least until it's hard to find, and will cost you an arm and a leg on ebay.

From time to time, you're going to see me review a game that is out of print. Often, these are games that could run you upwards of $100 on the speculative market. Now, while there are numerous pathways one could take to acquire pirated versions of these games, and while there is no harm done to the gaming industry if one was to pirate them (especially when the company or branch that made them no longer exists), I'm not about to suggest you run out to your nearest torrent site, grab disc images, download Daemon Tools, and play a stolen game. No sir. I'd vastly prefer that you got the game legitimately. From game scalpers, who are making huge profit margins from us sorry sods who got to the game well into the third inning.

Yep.

But anyways, I digress.

Planescape: Torment is a game from the amazing (and now defunct) Black Isle Studios. Published in 1999, PS:T sold fewer than 400,000 copies, but enjoyed critical praise, and is widely regarded as one of the best games of it's genre ever made.

Imagine you wake up on a slab, and a talking skull reads a tattoo off your back instructing you to find this guy Pharod, read your journal, and be secret about what you are. Except: there're a few promlems with that. You don't remember your own name, let alone this guy Pharod, you don't seem to have a journal, and as previously stated, you don't really remember anything about yourself, so it'll be hard to avoid letting that last bit slip. First things first, though, the skull says that you and he have got to escape this Mortuary...

Thus begins PS:T. It's something of an anomaly in computer video games. I mean, sure, you can hack-and-slash your way through the game, but you'd miss out on most of it. Truth be told, there are only four encounters throughout the game that can't be solved wthout combat. The game mostly shines, however, via it's glorious writing. The plot is thick with philosophy and existential dillemas, touching on such concepts as shared reality, the nature of man, and the very nature of reality itself. Dialogue is incredibly well fleshed out, the characters have interesting and satisfying backstories, and the entire thing just comes across as one of the most subtle, intelligent, and beautiful approaches to adventure design I've personally ever seen.

PS:T is set largely in the city of Sigil, The City of Doors at the center of the Dungeons & Dragons Planescape Universe (Planescape is also defunct, being one of the many settings which was culled when Wizards of the Coast bought TSR, the company which owned D&D and Planescape). The "Doors" in question can be found in any structure closed on two sides and open in the middle; an archway, for instance, or between the legs of a statue. All such doors require a Key, which could be anything from a memory of the smell of pastries, to a whistled tune, to a shard of glass held in your right hand, and can lead anywhere. The city of Sigil is covered with such doors, and much of the fun of the game comes in discovering where they are, and how one goes about opening them.

I can't heap enough praise on this game, but it's not for the weekend gamer. Start this game, and you're looking at 100-plus hours of gameplay, over .8 million words of dialogue, and an in-depth experience that puts most of the rest of the industry to shame.

One downside, however, is that it's buggy as all hell, and Interplay, who owned Black Isle, stopped support of the game before releasing patches that addressed the vast majority of them. Luckily, as so often happens with abandoned and well-loved properties, the fanbase has released a few mods and fixes which address just about any of the problems they could find. A link to these has been included at the end of this article.

Speaking of...

If you want to buy a copy of the game, it can be found at Amazon, with prices ranging upwards from $58.00

Once you've got a copy, you'll most likely want to get the unoffical fixpack.

You can also look at a fan-created archive of the old Official Site.