5/5 ★ – jake84's review of Planescape: Torment - Enhanced Edition.

"Updated my journal." It seems like you're supposed to start a review of "Planescape: Torment" with a quote, but the obligatory quote seems to be that other one, so let me go with that instead: "What can change the nature of a man?" It took me 23 years to complete "Planescape: Torment". I bought the box back in '99 because my favorite game at the time was Baldur's Gate (and still is one of them). Planescape came out a year after BG; it was from the same studio, same perspective, same graphic engine, Infinity, another CRPG. Initially, I remember being thrown off by the game time and time again; it was too brainy, too wordy, too surreal, too weird, too steeped in mythology for me - a 15 year old boy at the time. When I play it again now, I understand why I felt that way. Because the game IS brainy, it IS wordy, it demands a lot of the player, and it is very difficult to complete, comprehend and even grasp. The game feels like an enigma, in a weird way perfectly emulating what trials and tribulations The Nameless One is going through. I was simply too young to understand it at the time, and there's no shame in that. Please note, that this is not some pretentious, gate-keeper rant about age fascism, something inane about me having to be taught "the school of life" or some shit like that, or even that I was "too young and dumb to understand this cult masterpiece". No, for me, this is just to contextualize and underline that me being 15 years old and and coming from action-oriented isometric role-playing games like Diablo and Baldur's Gate, where you had to click most things to death, this played and hit differently. Planescape was like a reading novel. And in '99, of course I understood and spoke most English words, but English is and was a second language. So I shelved the game. During the following years, I started it up numerous times, because the opening at the Mortuary is so strong, and, for me, at least that part had a clear goal that I understood: Escape. But when the game opens up and you run around Sigil, I lost my bearings and I skipped most dialogue. I remember hitting a wall back then (mostly figuratively) in the Alley of Lingering Sighs, stopping after 15-20 hours of playtime or so, just shy of meeting Ravel. Now, I understand why I did so; this game is still difficult as hell, something that I don't think we make that clear enough for newcomers. But I'll come back to that. Also, the "simple" task of getting to Ravel is extremely tough and complicated. When I played Disco Elysium last year, I felt right at home, because DE - another masterpiece - is easily the game that borrows the most from Planescape, and it wears it on its sleeve. Yup. It's not at all like DE is trying to hide it. It, too, is a brainy, wordy, surreal and weird game, steeped in mythology. Having played both Planescape and Elysium now, the only thing I might have changed about Planescape (retrospectively if I had a say) is the combat. If it was remade today, I would drastically tone it down, perhaps even remove it completely, like in Disco Elysium where there's no combat. And don't nitpick, I know Robert Kurvitz, writer of DE, says there is indeed action in DE, but he's talking about two short action sequences during a 20 hour game. It's nowhere near an action game, and it's all the better for it, and I think Planescape would be so, too, because here, combat is easily the most repetitive thing, and the focus here is the plot, world-building and atmosphere. The prose is beautiful, if a bit long-winded at times. And I know you could adjust combat's difficulty levels, but that doesn't take away enemies, it just makes it done with more quickly. As I've mentioned numerous (Numenera? Ah?) times already, Planescape is a complicated, esoteric puzzle of a game where you aren't distinctly told what to do most of the time, and you can hit dead ends. When I came back to Sigil at the end my quest log featured NO quests. Not even a main goal. It feels like the game's puzzles and missions are bordering on moon logic on several occasions. Therefore, it reminds me of old point and click-games, where you have to exhaust EVERY branch of the dialogue tree, and even experiment and interact with items way more than in Baldur's Gate. You might miss important XP dumps if you don't carry the most seemingly worthless, specific, ridiculous object that suddenly proves useful after 20 hours of game-time. Don't feel bad about consulting a guide more than once. This game practically demands one. The Enhanced Edition is a labour of love and dedication to the original game way more than Beamdog's work on the first Baldur's Gate game, where I think some of the "improvements" actually worsened the experience. In Planescape, they've kept the original cutscenes, added no new, disjointed characters, and they've generally just focused on cool, quality-of-life improvements in the menus and gameplay. The only thing still lacking is the path-finding. It's weird how it is so hard to perfect this feature, let alone function. It's not a deal-breaker, mind you, it's just often that your characters are confused as fuck by the simplest commands in the sometimes slightly labyrinthine environments. The only thing that really fucked me up about Enhanced Edition is also something that nearly broke my heart... And it comes with a huge warning, so listen up, fellow Nameless Ones: Don't. Go. To. Modron. Maze. This cannot be emphasized enough. The game is bugged. That quest is botched. Let me set the scene: So I bought "Planescape: Torment - Enhanced Edition" and finally decided that, after 23 years, I should complete this game that I've praised so much for so many years for its originality and great writing. I needed to see THIS THROUGH. It became a personal goal of mine. So I'm playing. During my summer holiday where I finally have the time. I'm absorbed. My crippling summer depression is being kept at bay. I play 28 hours. And then The Thing That Should Not Be happens... I do a quest that I haven't done before: The Modron Maze. I speak to a character and tell him that I want to try the maze on a harder difficulty (which you have to do in order to complete the quest), and the game suddenly crashes. What's worse: My save files are gone. All of them. I panic. I start it up again: It's for real. They are gone. Vanished. I was devastated. It felt like a kick in the nuts. At this time, I feel like my playthrough of the game is cursed. Like I should never complete this game. Then I call up my brother, who's a programmer, and together we found the damn save files, hidden away at some weird corner of my Mac, so they ARE there! I uninstall the game, fiddle with the folders and file names, and after one hour - an emotional roller-coaster I have to say - we got one save file working, only one hour before the game crashed. So I powered through the game's final hours to the finale, not leaving anything to chance, with no more jackass errands. No more dillydallying. To quote the great Tim Heidecker: NO MORE BULLSHIT. So I completed the game. I completed one of my favourite games of all time. After 23 years. A lifetime. It's funny how it never left me after all these years; the thought of the tension growing in Sigil, of Morte and Fall-from-Grace, Annah, Ignus and Dak'kon. The fate of The Nameless One and the secret behind his mortality and his true name. The gnawing sensation about something incomplete in my gaming upbringing and backlog, because I'm a completionist at heart. And the trials and tribulations leading up to the conclusion made the game's payoff perhaps even more rewarding; the game's ending made me tear up. It felt very satisfying. It feels impossible that there could ever be a sequel. At least a sequel in the traditional sense, because I'm well aware there's a spiritual successor called "Torment: Tides of Numenera" that I will get around to shortly. After 23 years I'd one it. After 31 hours of total playtime. Just imagine if I had to start all over for the final 3 hours of the game. And yes, even despite this glaring error in an "enhanced edition" of a classic game, I still give it the highest praise. And it does speak volumes about its qualities. Even despite the crash, the heartache and the hardship I had to endure, I still give this game the highest honor - a 10/10. Hell, it might even be BECAUSE of the crash, the heartache and the hardship I had to overcome. In a weird way, it seemed to add the mythology, the mystique and the alluring enigma, not to mention the pain and suffering that is so intrinsically interwoven into Planescape: Torment's scar tissue. In a bizarre way, it all felt so fitting. Like Planescape's very nature, like something it had orchestrated all this time, like a part of Ravel's scheme. It felt like like a fitting, final obstacle. But seriously, please promise me that you won't go near Modron Maze if you're playing the game on Mac or Xbox, where the game-breaking bug apparently is - at least that's what Google tells me. I'm being serious. I might be romanticizing the whole incident now because of survivorship bias, because it definitely wasn't fun at the time. What can change the nature of a man? A game crash, apparently. It made me into fucking Mr. Robot. Never felt so Rami Malek... Updated my journal.