Planescape: Torment Review

Chris Avellone's script runs to roughly eight hundred thousand words and almost none of it is filler, which sounds like marketing until you meet Morte, a floating skull who flirts with corpses and is the least strange member of your party. The Nameless One cannot die, so death becomes a fast travel system and a plot device rather than a fail state, and the whole moral argument is built on that inversion.

What can change the nature of a man is posed as a riddle in the first hour and answered differently by every companion who hears it. Dak'kon's Circle of Zerthimon is a book you read inside a video game and it is better than most books. Fall from Grace is a chaste succubus running a brothel that sells conversation. Sigil itself, a ring hanging over an infinite spire, is the least generic fantasy setting anyone has shipped.

What drags it down is the Infinity Engine underneath. Combat is Baldur's Gate's real time with pause and none of the tuning, the Modron Cube maze is a slog, and the Lower Ward's errands are padding between the good scenes. Put every point into wisdom and charisma, talk your way past what you can, and this remains the high water mark for writing in the form.