Planescape: Torment Enhanced Edition

I've finished Disco Elysium three times and still found myself floored by how far Planescape: Torment pushes the "story as the actual game" thesis. You play as the Nameless One, an immortal amnesiac who wakes on a mortuary slab with a wisecracking floating skull named Morte as your only companion, and the central mystery is not a dragon or a dark lord, it's you. Every past incarnation of the Nameless One left scars, debts, and enemies scattered across Sigil, the impossibly weird city-at-the-center-of-the-multiverse that serves as the game's main hub. The writing is dense, philosophical, and frequently funny in a pitch-black way. Conversations branch in directions that would make most modern dialogue trees blush, and the game reportedly contains somewhere north of 800,000 words, more than most novels you'll read this year. The class system is deliberately narrow: fighter, mage, or thief, with the game quietly steering you toward the mage path because high Intelligence and Wisdom unlock dialogue options that are mechanically more powerful than any sword swing. The Nameless One can also switch classes mid-run, which gives you some flexibility in build philosophy, though don't come here expecting the build depth of a Pathfinder or a BG3. Your party of companions, including the fiery Annah, the zealot Fall-from-Grace, and the tragic Dak'kon, a githzerai warrior who channels his blade through sheer willpower, are among the most unusual ally rosters in the genre. Each has a personal arc worth completing, though the game front-loads almost all of the most interesting companion content toward its final act, which can feel like the reward came a little late. Combat is the honest weak spot. The Infinity Engine real-time-with-pause system is functional but shallow, and most fights can be resolved by grouping your party and clicking the enemy until they stop moving. Challenging encounter design simply was not the priority here, and Beamdog's Enhanced Edition did not change that calculus. What the Enhanced Edition does deliver is native widescreen and 4K support, a remastered soundtrack, zooming, and enough quality-of-life fixes to make the experience run cleanly on a modern PC without wrestling with.ini files or fan patches. Some critics noted, fairly, that the enhancements are modest and existing owners of the original may feel the upgrade is thin. For first-timers, however, it is the definitive way to play. The real question for 2024 and beyond is one of patience. Torment is more interactive novel than action RPG, closer in spirit to a literary exercise than to anything that has a loot table. If you finished BG3 and immediately wanted more tactical depth, look elsewhere. If you finished BG3 and found yourself replaying the same dialogue trees trying to understand Gale's motivations, Planescape: Torment is the game that was asking those same questions twenty years before Larian was. The pacing through Sigil's early districts can feel aimless for a few hours, the isometric art is demanding on the eyes in its darkness, and the mid-game drags before the multiplanar journey opens up. But the payoff, the narrative convergence in the Negative Material Plane and the game's final sequence, is the kind of ending that sits in your skull long after the credits roll. Some of us have been known to close the game and immediately start a mage build.

Monika · Scout Team

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