Even the plot of Planescape sounded like another famous gaming cliché–honestly, how many times have we seen the amnesiac protagonist who slowly has memories return to him through the course of the game scenario? Yet after only an hour or two of gameplay, I quickly learned to expect better from the makers of the famed Fallout and Baldur’s Gate. Torment has its few flaws, but if you’re a role-playing game fan, you can’t go wrong with this epic of the grandest scale. This is a game that performs well in every area, and then goes beyond to distinguish itself as a truly memorable role-playing game experience.

The setting of Torment is one of the more bizarre and lesser-known worlds of Dungeons and Dragons known as Planescape. Don’t expect to see the generic Wal-Mart orcs, dragons and elves in Planescape; you’re far more likely to see a wisecracking floating skull or a talking armoire than a perturbed dwarf asking you to rescue his daughter. The variety is highly refreshing in the sometimes stale world of fantasy RPGs. For those unfamiliar with Planescape in general, it is best described as a campaign from the original pen-and-paper game Dungeons and Dragons that elaborates on the various realms and planes of existence in company TSR’s multiverse. The true potential of the Planescape universe as applied to games is that it simply has no limits — anything imagined can exist, any place dreamed of can be visited, and there are no boundaries to the adventures that can take place in a world shaped by belief itself.

I’d have to write volumes to explain all the planar properties of the multiverse, and I won’t because a few authors out there already have in the form of novels, but fear not: If you’re completely new to the Planescape setting or Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, the game does an unbelievably excellent job of making sure you understand every concept of the world around you. Black Isle has not designed this game only for a AD&D enthusiast, or a reader of the Planescape novels; the sheer gaming enjoyment it provides for the 30+ hours of gameplay that can be enjoyed by any RPG fan.

The majority of Torment takes place in Sigil, a city in the center of the planes. Sigil is the urban populated crossroads of existence, and hidden doors lying within its shadows open to any plane in the entire multiverse. It is a city shaped by belief, and dominated by more than a dozen factions based around separate philosophies. Some of these factions can be joined within the course of the game, though many sadly cannot. While Sigil is a highly interesting and complex metropolis with a hint of the atmospheric post-apocalyptic grimness seen in Fallout, I found it disappointing that more of the game wasn’t spent exploring the full range of potential bizarre and imaginative worlds that the Planescape setting would allow; nevertheless, other worlds can be unlocked later in the game, and the City of Doors is not without its interesting spectacles, from cavernous underground crypts to the Brothel of Slating Intellectual Lusts (I am NOT making this up). And while the setting may not tap the full potential of infinite planes and worlds, the diversity in non-player characters to interact with makes up for it fully. Literally hundreds of NPCs wander around the city, each with their own agenda that may or may not involve you.

Torment manages to accomplish a depth in NPCs that makes them nearly as memorable and lovable (or unlovable) as your own party members, a rare feat that many RPG designers could learn from. Aside from the few generic faces in the crowd seen in some of the more crowded parts of the city, you won’t see the standard RPG townsperson that seems to ramble ambiguously on about nothing and have no reaction to anything. Characters remember, they change and if you steal or attack them, they fight back, flee or call the guards. Decisions made with NPCs, while not necessarily impacting the end of the game, will greatly impact the time you have in Sigil and the options available to you. Sigil even has a definitive culture and attitude, as do all the game’s locations. Torment has a unique dialect of slang and expressions as thick as Clockwork Orange’s street-speak.

On the surface, the plot of Planescape: Torment seems to be simplistic and overdone — you wake up, know nothing and have to discover your past — but the Nameless One, as your character is appropriately titled, is an endlessly original main character that serves as the driving force behind the plotline and the avatar for your actions, be they good or evil. The Nameless One isn’t your average soul-searcher; soon after waking up in a Mortuary, where the game begins, you discover he cannot die. Sure, his hit points can reach zero and then death visits your character, but something quickly sends it packing again as your character awakes "feeling like he’s just been strained through someone’s bowels," as Nameless explains so eloquently. Being immortal adds a whole new side to strategies within the game, as death does not bring Game Over but merely a change in your party’s immediate location to a designated spot nearby. And while immortality stirs up the gameplay a little, it serves even more to further the plot and intrigue the game creates.

Since you’ve lived countless lives, and since all those lives evade your memory, you’ll often have people without your amnesia problem walking up to you and cursing you for things you’ve done but cannot recall, or strangers speaking to you as life-long friends. Torment’s plot is essentially a quest to find out first and foremost who you, the Nameless One, are, and along the way, many allies, ranging from the useful to the simply bizarre, get drawn into the struggle. The characters in the game seem to have been designed with the objective of breaking and twisting every RPG convention and cliché. By the end of the game, the ranks of your party can be filled with a talking suit of armor, a floating skull or a celibate succubus, and a secret character or two add incentive to explore for an extra hour or 10. There are no characters in Torment without a long and interesting history to tell, none without secrets or a personality all there own, and each player-character comes alive to a degree not always reached in PC RPGs.

A warning to those who delight in the hack and slash: The balance of Torment tilts more in the direction of character development and side quests than it does dungeon crawling. Dialog is frequent, conversation trees branch in many directions, and you’ll often feel like you’re reading a novel with some of the more excessive interactions — but thankfully, the writing of the game is incredible. Not only were typos not to be found, but some NPCs offer to share tales of lands and heroes almost as interesting as the main plot itself. The hundreds of thousands of words of text and manner of "Get this item for this person" quests give Planescape a sort of adventure game tint to it, but it maintains enough personality and interest to make the depth of the game less of a trial and more of a treat. Many puzzles can be solved easier through quick wit rather than a swift blade, although you’re still free to gut someone now and then to take out your frustrations. Along that same line, experience points can be gained as readily from running errands for someone as for killing a group of dark underworld beasties, and the game will inevitably demand much of both.

Though early in the game it can feel like there are a hundred quests to complete at once for a hundred different people, this does not perpetuate throughout Torment’s four discs. Plus, a journal conveniently keeps track of assigned quests, important plot developments and NPCs met along the way for easy reference. A lack of any true overworld or wilderness also makes running from spot to spot a less arduous task, as quests are generally discovered close to their objectives. The interesting thing about the adventure game aspect of Torment is its almost limitless flexibility to allow you to solve things according to your beliefs and your alignment. Just as you can pick up a few extra coins of a fresh corpse you just murdered, so can you learn of information equally valuable if you keep them alive and take the time to save that person’s daughter from thugs — at which point you can always go back and kill them for the money anyway. Linearity never plagues Planescape, and amazingly enough, nonlinearity never impairs the plot or richness of characters and dialog.

The graphics of Planescape: Torment are at once beautiful and well…not-so-beautiful. For the most part, the game creates a consistent dark atmosphere, yet the graphics at times seem to suffer from a lack of color completely. This problem is compounded in the low light of nightfall, and oddly enough, it seems the great mages of Sigil that can bend the planes themselves to their will are unable to conceive something as practical as streetlights. To put it simply, the city at night seems to be a colorless blue blob. Character designs in the game, while few in number, look fairly good. Expression and action is absent and text is relied on to convey and sort of emotion or subtle movement, but the overall look of monsters and characters is not bad considering the minute scale of NPCs and PCs alike.

While spell effects shine with bright flames and exaggerated lightning effects, should more than one spell go off on the screen at the same time (which will happen often due to the usefulness of spells), the graphics slow and sputter erratically, leaving the vivid spell animations often wasted. The graphic performance is harsh even with a high-end machine, as large non-polygonal detailed environments and entire crowds of NPCs tax even the most costly of CPUs. While the game can be sped up slightly by copying the CDs to one’s harddrive and tweaking the config file, not everyone is able to sacrifice over two gigabytes of space when the game only technically requires 650 MB. At least the in-game movies look excellent, with little of that compressed look and no slowdown of any sort, but those are too short-lived to rectify the in-game graphical problems. If not for the slowdown and if the cityscape simply looked a little better and the areas visited later on a bit more surreal, I would think higher of the graphics of Torment, but I’m sadly only able to lament that the graphics could have been excellent, and almost were.

Sound on Torment is overall very well done. Walk through the streets of a city and you’ll hear entire conversations in the crowd, spoken in both normal and alien tongues; enter a bar and a soft but appropriate droning music accompanies a room full of talking akin to the famous cantina scene in Star Wars. The actual voice acting in the game done by characters is very sparse, which is unfortunate because it is also all very good. To voice all the lines of text in the game would seem an impossible task, but the recent game Outcast stands as an example that it not only can be done, but it can be done well. Still, for the voice that takes place in dialog and the background voices heard in much of the world, Black Isle did a commendable job in adding more atmosphere and life to the world of Planescape. Sound effects are all adequate and not particularly outstanding as either good or bad. A few of the musical tracks in the game are outright annoying in their repetitiveness, like the main theme heard in Sigil and the first battle theme, but those are in the minority as multiple scores are of very high quality and composed excellently, like those heard in important plot points of the game where mood music matters most.

Character creation in Torment may inspire mixed feelings in gamers, as it is simple and not based on dice rolls as a plus, but gamers are only able to adjust stats as a negative point. To those seeking the complex character creation of AD&D, the screen of assigning skill points before getting into the game will be a letdown, but I found it perfect as the Nameless One is not the average character anyway; he begins the game as a level 3 fighter, a level 1 mage and a level 1 thief. Leveling up is based around the traditional experience points system. At a level up, saving throws, max hit point, and occasionally the fighting, magic or thieving skills of a character increase. The leveling up system is essentially the same for the three-class Nameless One, based upon what class he is at the time. Class can be changed by training with someone who specializes in either weapons, thievery or the Art, and additonal disciplines in the specific class can also be picked up by finding a skilled enough mentor, which sometimes can even be one of your own party members. The actual number of skills in the game are few, but at least every available skill has a definite and practical use and there are enough to provide for many ways to solve a puzzle or win a fight. It does seem that too many useless spells wind up in the spellbook, but there are enough highly spectacular and equally devastating spells to make magic a worthwhile practice. Like all Dungeons & Dragons games, there are no magic points. Spells are copied into a spellbook and then memorized, and all memorized spells can be used once each. Resting replenishes spells and allows for further use.

Actual combat is similar to that of the recent hit Baldur’s Gate, in that it is real-time action but able to be paused at any time to set up attacks. When the attack command is chosen, the characters rush forward and begin attacking the enemy with their basic melee or missile attacks. Spells and items are accessed by right-clicking at any time to bring up an unintrusive ring menu that pauses the fight and lists available spells and items, and from that screen, characters can be assigned any action to perform for when the combat resumes. Although the combat is excellent for its quick pace and options at the gamer’s disposable, I found the earlier skirmishes felt more like a real-time strategy game along the lines of Warcraft than a traditional RPG, yet the saving grace of combat in Torment is its ability to be as spontaneous or as planned out as the gamer so desires.

Make no mistake — Planescape: Torment is NOT a Baldur’s Gate remix or a sequel in any way shape or form. It is a masterpiece on its own, far worthy on the shelves of any role-playing game lover. Keep in mind this game is not for the hack-and-slash enthusiast, but that in no way detracts from its high level of gaming enjoyment. With solid gameplay, unforgettable characters, and a storyline and dialog that ranks on par with many acclaimed novels, Torment is an excellent game, but a certain uniqueness in the general feeling, atmosphere and sheer depth of the game world causes it to transcend the many "good games" out there to reach a pinnacle of RPG excellence that future games should definitely strive for.