caprospace Disclaimer: major spoilers for the 1999 videogame “Planescape: Torment” ahead.
Having recently read the very persuasive negative review of “Planescape: Torment” on The Digital Antiquarian left me wanting to articulate, first and foremost to myself, why I have the unshakable feeling that, despite its shortcomings, PT is one of the few videogames that could be called a classic [1] To get an idea of what a classic even is, I redirect you to the brilliant essay by Italo Calvino “Why Read the Classics?” .
The task, unfortunately, proved harder than anticipated: I spent a long time wrestling with this text and I came out of the encounter utterly defeated. PT is impossible to pin down: no matter your thesis, it will provide examples that both sustain and contradict it. Any general statement about its nature will not be a fair assessment, maybe even the one I am making right now. Therefore, the only possibility I have left is drawing circles around the matter, piling sentence upon sentence in the hope that at some point it will all coalesce into a coherent whole.
I.
The Modron maze is an unfunny mockery of Diablo, which I already know is a pretty shallow game. So, can you please not put one of the most interesting companions at the end of it?
I’ll start by clarifying that everything I have to say is meant to complement, not contradict, Maher’s article with which I agree in every respect, if not for the conclusion it reaches. The “Last Rites” design pitch unmistakably presents the game’s concept as a weird, pulpy D&D-based CRPG for teens. Overall, it is pictured as Giger’s version of Duke Nukem, even though the tone would fortunately end up being midway between myth and dark fable (akin to Neil Gaiman’s Sandman).
It also makes clear that one of the main objectives for the project was to intentionally subvert as many RPG tropes as possible, to deliberately be avant-garde and destructive, in a way so common among young adults, as the developers were at the time. The pitch also emphasizes the value of choices, both as a means of roleplaying and as a measure of the impact of the player’s actions on the game world.
The final result stays true to some of these goals while neglecting others (sometimes for the best, sometimes for the worst) and, being the product of a “large” team working in a chaotic environment subject to multiple external forces, there is no point in treating it as a coherent piece of art executed under an authorial vision: doing so would simply be a mischaracterization.
It is also true that PT is a complete mess of a game. It is full of purposeless appendices and discalibrated systems, with the combat tout court being the greatest offender: both affordances and encounters are poorly designed, making the whole affair extremely frustrating. Between The Nameless One being automatically resurrected and the ability to spam raise dead on allies, the main risk in combat comes from having to pick back up from the ground all of a companion’s inventory, the management of which is troublesome in general, having to juggle quest-specific items together with equipment and random junk across six characters.
Assigning points to characteristics and choosing a class, while canon in a standard RPG setting, here amount to nothing more than a trap: if you are not a mage with all points invested in mental characteristics, you will just be unable to experience a big chunk of the game for no reason whatsoever. While the game could be defined as text-centric, the prose is definitely over-abundant and is best dealt with by skimming text most of the time, re-reading it more slowly if the first pass found it worthy of more attention.
It also boasts the unwillingness to hand-hold players, allowing them to roam free in the city of Sigil. Incidentally, this led me to completely miss the conversation with Deionarra in the Mortuary on my first playthrough: I merrily kept on playing until I met her father half-a-game later, feeling quite puzzled by the encounter.
Notwithstanding everything I have said up until now, I find that PT manages for most of its run time to achieve both depth and harmony, while maintaining the ability to engage many of its players (as suggested by the amount of positive reviews it enjoys to this day). Now, how it actually manages to do it is hard to say: in previous rewritings, I caught myself red-handedly making partially untrue statements about its virtues in an effort to tie it all up together nicely. I’ll try not to do it this time around; we’ll see how it turns out.
II.
Do we want a perfectly polished diamond?
Or are we looking for a punch in the face and a well to fall into?
The idea of PT having harmony sounds puzzling, at least on a surface level, so it seems worth pursuing. Harmony can be defined as a “pleasing combination of parts into a whole”. It is often the case that the pleasure in said combination stems from the elements adhering to a single theme that becomes the implicit center of the composition.
Now, where is the center in this case? First of all, it is worth stating that, being full of incoherent material, PT is easy to criticize, praise or simply misrepresent, even unintentionally, by careful selection of a subset of it. While Jimmy Maher is right in classifying TNO’s arc as a Tragedy in the classical sense, there is really nothing stopping the player from consistently making choices that alter quite a bit, if still not completely, the framing for the events that unfold. Furthermore, PT is full of collateral stories in which TNO is only a tangential figure and that can’t really be tied nicely to the main arc.
When I first read Don Quixote, I was surprised to find that not even half of the first book was dedicated to the titular character; instead, it was full of normal people’s stories, from shepherds to merchants and warriors, that all shared with the main character some disconnect from the reality they lived in, whether for their peculiar beliefs or for their very nature. In the book’s summaries, these stories are often glossed over or brushed off in half a sentence, while in reality they make up quite a big chunk of the original text. If we do not allow ourselves to fall for the same mistake in analyzing PT, what do we see?
I feel that at its core PT is a game about the inter-relation between reality, viewpoints and beliefs and, in particular, about their multiplicity: how our reality is largely shaped by the observer and how a thorough understanding of the world passes through the accumulation of many, often contradictory, points of view; how entertaining one idea or course of action is only a small fragment of a much bigger mirror.
One example of how this stratification of viewpoints is achieved is provided by the Factions: both when evaluated against each other and when examined internally. On one hand, each Faction embodies a single philosophical idea brought to the extreme and Factions antagonize or collaborate with each other based on their affinities and differences; on the other hand, every Faction has many members, each harboring their own personal interpretation of the Faction’s credo, often irreconcilable with one another.
The stratification also appears inside individual characters: many display multifaceted inner motivations, act in ambiguous ways and exhibit apparently contradictory traits. To state just a few examples: the Lady of Pain is cruel and tyrannical but she is able to impose order and a relative tranquility in a city where the immeasurable forces of the planes meet. Her counterpart is Ravel who, depicted as one of the most evil creatures in the entire multiverse by the inhabitants of Sigil, is later found to be an old woman of great intelligence, sincerely loving freedom and its transformative power. Morte is entirely loyal to The Nameless One but he can be caught multiple times lying to him; his joker attitude, although questionable, is a hallmark of the game, but acquires an ambivalent tone in light of the abuses he suffered from past incarnations of the protagonist.
This pattern of counterpoints and stratifications is ever-present throughout the game, even though, to be fair, there are also plenty of people in Sigil that are just evil, weird, silly or boring with no depth whatsoever, set up only to serve their purpose in a quest line or in a comical sketch.
But, where there is complexity, PT refuses to resolve it in unambiguous ways: how much of the Circle of Zerthimon is a fraud perpetrated by the Practical One and how much of it is a legit sacred text? Is Zerthimon himself a pacifist or a traitor? Does Hannah’s attraction to The Nameless One depend on her loveless upbringing or on the supernatural pull of his missing mortality? Under this light, PT could be characterized as a detective game about the world, where you are constantly trying to piece together who you are, your connection to everybody else and their connection to one another.
III.
For some reason, many of PT’s faults, like the ability to miss important characters, have the merit of making it feel more life-like and less gamey.
Up until now, I have scolded PT for its interactive elements and praised it for its narrative; if this essay was to end here, my thesis should be that PT is a terrible game that should have just been made into a novel instead. While novelizations exist and might also be well-liked, I have no interest in them: I sense that interactivity is a core part of the experience here, even if not in the way we usually expect.
Somewhat recklessly, I also want to challenge the notion that PT is primarily a narrative game. While it’s mostly conveyed through text, the purpose of words is akin to the one found in early text adventures: it is not the fulcrum of the activity, just a way to convey its context. Said fulcrum is instead to be found in the tension between the situations presented and the player’s decisions. In its main and side quests alike, PT structures conflicts and relationships among NPCs and then leaves the player a bunch of options to try and extricate them; sometimes the player can choose between alternative routes and sometimes it’s just a matter of giving the same answer but with varying shades of intention.
Staring at a bunch of options while you meditate on which to choose is really the experience at the heart of PT and all the interest one may have in its characters and world is only subordinate to putting yourself in relation to them.
Problem is, the same description may as well apply to tens of other CRPGs in the last 30 years and it’s quite difficult to state what PT does differently from all the rest that makes it feel much more specific and relevant to me. While many contenders can be easily crossed out because their choices are either too binary or lack nuance or gravity, the best example to contrast PT with is Disco Elysium, which on paper is a much slicker game, trying to do something very similar and inspired by PT.
In many respects, DE is a much better game: it knows full well what it wants to do, is better written and able to remain focused and tonally coherent. The main difference is that, while I argued that PT isn’t, DE indeed is a narrative game: everything that happens and all of the player’s actions relate strictly and directly to the game’s story and its branchings.
It is an RPG in the most traditional sense: at the start, you make up your mind about which type of detective you want to impersonate and you are given the freedom to roleplay what you planned quite precisely. The fact that the protagonist is an amnesiac with a not-so-righteous past is framed as part of the context in which the story takes place: one data point among many to take into account.
From then on, the identification of the human player inside the digital character is almost perfect: you will naturally frame your decision-making in terms of what is the most appropriate course of action for this specific character in this specific setting.
By contrast, while in PT dialogue options are linked to the D&D alignment system, many of the situations thrown at the player are wacky and contorted enough to make you easily forget the context and just concentrate fully on what’s the best and most reasonable approach for you, as a person. Its weirdness for weirdness’ sake becomes an alienating factor that prevents you from immersing into the story and, instead, forces you to immerse the story into yourself.
One further reinforcing element is that, in PT, trying to roleplay is a paradoxical experience: while you are free to shape the last incarnation of TNO through your decisions, nothing can hide the fact that you are in control of a zombie puppet covered in scars who has hundreds of past lives. All of these characters are forced upon the player, who is demanded to justify their conducts and pay for the cost of their actions despite having no part in them; under this lens, PT can really be seen as an anti-RPG: one in which you choose nothing but have to take responsability for everything.
Incidentally, while the world of DE has extremely well-defined boundaries (even though implied to be much bigger than what is shown), the world of PT communicates a crushing sense of infinity, both spatially, deriving from its cosmology, and temporally, given TNO’s extensive lifespan. TNO’s appearance also contributes to making him both too much and too little of a character: he is too distinctive to provide an empty avatar and too empty to allow for identification. When I make a choice in his name, I cannot retrace its consequences back to him because he is too insubstantial: I am forced to take them back onto me.
While certainly not intentional on the creators’ part, all of these concordant causes contribute to leaving the player naked in front of the game, inducing them to care much more for their answers than what they normally would. At the same time, bereft of a character to impersonate, the player is not allowed to be anything more than a compassionate ghost who momentarily passes through PT’s world. The jarring combination of involvement and detachment puts the player in a peculiar state of mind that makes them question agency itself.
IV.
It is extremely specific to the point of being unmistakable with any other game: its virtues and flaws sit so tightly together as to be impossible to disentangle.
Every word of praise I have written in this piece I either had to erase or amend at least once, because it always appeared hyperbolic compared to the actual merits of the game. This could be due in part to the fact that I played PT for the first time when coming of age, a time that might be argued to be the most effective in which to experience it, but I also feel that it is in part due to the fact that its messy and open-ended structure configures itself as a springboard for the speculative mind.
Just like the city of Sigil is full of doors that could unexpectedly catapult you to the furthest planes, PT is full of cues and little details that can spark your imagination into wondering what more there is to the situation at hand that the eye is unable to see.
As you may remember from the game’s pitch, PT is deliberately designed to subvert and turn concepts on their head: there is nothing inherently deep in such an endeavor and it can be pulled off without much subtlety, but said practice suspiciously resembles the much nobler one of Zen koans, which can achieve strong effects upon its spectators. If we half-jokingly pick up this framework, PT may be seen as a spiritual exercise in game form, where wrestling with the choices we are presented with becomes an igniter for our personal growth.
Ultimately, for me, “Planescape: Torment” is a piece of extraneous matter that got stuck in my mind many years ago and it has since been impossible to dislodge. Every time I come back to it, I see subtler nuances appearing in its characters and situations, but it might just as well be a hall of mirrors: maybe what I perceive is really the deepening of my own sensibility reflected onto itself.
The evaluation of which percentage of what I have said is veritable and which is straight-up hallucination is left as an exercise for the reader. I have strived to make my claims as specific as possible, so that anyone may pick them apart one by one and weigh them on the scales of their own judgement.
It is not the first time I have tried to write about PT, but I feel I finally managed to pull out a sore tooth and I am now free to move on. I think a few more decades will need to pass before we can ascertain if PT will be remembered as a classic or if it will just be forgotten like so many others. In the meantime, I believe it’s worth our time to struggle with it and quietly ponder.
- To get an idea of what a classic even is, I redirect you to the brilliant essay by Italo Calvino “Why Read the Classics?” ↩