Another trip across the planes
Hi,
For a month or so now I’ve been wanting to write a review of Planescape Torment. It was that long ago that I finished it for what must be the fourth or fifth time. It’s striking that even though it wasn’t the first time I’d finished Planescape, and even though it’s a very old game (about five years old at least I think) I came away from it thinking that it was the best game I’ve ever played!
That’s quite something really, considering that I would usually have said that Deus Ex was my favourite game ever, and before that Half-Life. Both veritable titans of gaming. On reflection though, I wouldn’t want to pick one out of these three games as my favourite, both because I think they’re better judged as equally marvellous, and because I’m sure there are other games which are equally good that I’m not thinking of.
The finale of Planescape is superbly put-together. It concludes a narrative rife with philosophical themes. It’s all about a man who has forgotten himself, and discovers that he is immortal - in the sense that whenever he dies he wakes up again. Information is revealed to you at just the right rate. You begin with almost none, other than what Morte - a floating skull - tells you from reading the mysterious tattoos on your back. But by the end, everything about you and you’re previous lives has been revealed to you.
All of the dialogue is well written, and a lot of it is magnificent. It’s rarely accompanied by speech (audio), but if you’re a serious RPG gamer you shouldn’t mind that. The characters - both potential party-members and non-player characters - are delightfully complex. Morte is a perfect example. He joins you at the very beginning. On the one hand, he always has something to say, and adds some great comedy relief to otherwise serious moments. But as the story progresses, it becomes clear that Morte is perhaps the most mysterious character you’ve met, and that he might not be telling you everything that he knows about you and your past.
The atmospheric qualities of the game are tuned to perfection as well. The soundtrack, created by Mark Morgan, is superbly varied in its emotional content. the main theme is dramatic, and Morgan varies it across the game. When you meet Deionarra - your supposed lover in a previous life - a soft but moving choral piece comes in, conveying loss, regret, and ghostliness. And in the Festhall - a kind of cultural centre of Sigil (the game’s central setting) - Vivaldi’s lively Bassoon Concerto in A minor plays on repeat.
This time around, I had graphical glitches appearing any time I cast a spell, or a spell was cast on me. I found a fix for this: you just turn down your graphical acceleration until the problem goes away. It has something to do with either Direct3d or DirectDraw. Unfortunately, this fix involved a trade-off. The glitching vanished, but was replaced with some new glitching on the menu screens. You just have to decide, as I did, whether you prefer the one glitch over the other!
On a percentage scoring system, I give Planescape 96%. And that’s 96% held up against all the games of today. Yes, its that good! Its few faults (lack of speech in dialogue being one; the fact that its a third-person game in the style of Baldur’s Gate - which, though charming, lacks the immersive qualities of a FPS - being another) prevent me from giving it a 100% score.
- Chris
