GameSpot Acknowledges Planescape: Torment

GameSpot has added Black Isle Studios’ Planescape: Torment to their ongoing “The Greatest Games of All Time” feature. After putting so many hours into the game and loving every second of it, I’m very glad to see Torment finally made their list. Here’s a bit of what they had to say about the RPG:

To say that the game was unorthodox is an understatement. It’s true that some of the game’s situations and characters (like the Nameless One’s party, which included a floating skull, a clockwork automaton voiced by Homer Simpson actor Dan Castelanetta, a half-demon thief, and a full-on demon committed to being orderly and civilized) seemed intentionally designed just to be contrary to the established high fantasy of Dungeons & Dragons. But a lot of what the game did differently was also handled quite well, like how the Nameless One had three different character professions–fighter, thief, or wizard (which he could freely switch to at any time)–yet the game didn’t force you to hack and slash as most other RPGs did at the time. You could also change your character’s ethical alignment from neutral to good to evil to lawful to chaotic, depending on your actions, whether you lied, stole, killed indiscriminately (or to exact justice), or kept or broke vows. (We should also mention that Planescape: Torment has quite possibly the best implementation of role-playing an evil character ever to appear in a computer or video game to date.) As another example, the denizens of the Planescape universe speak something referred to as “the Chant,” sort of a modified English Cockney dialect with several specific terms. By the end of the game, you’d be fluent in it, no matter how unfamiliar you were with the universe.