PlayingBaldur’s Gate 3has revived in me a desire to revisit the classics. While I’ve only just arrived at the titular city itself in Larian’s triumphant modern classic, my duty to my partner—with whom I’m playing a co-op campaign—has meant that in the downtime between sessions I’ve been looking for a deep RPG experience that I can enjoy in solitude, and play at my own pace. And no RPGs lend themselves as well to a slow-paced solitary experience than cRPGs either built on or inspired by the Infinity Engine—so the likes ofBaldur’s Gate 2,Tyranny,Pillars of Eternity, and so on.
This very particular subsect of RPG is visually beautiful, rigidly isometric, and often very text-heavy, brimming with wonderful writing that makes the experience of playing them akin to reading a novel. And none of those cRPGs feel quite so literary or otherworldly asPlanescape: Torment, the game which directly inspired the also-brilliantDisco Elysium, and which I’ve just begun properly playing for the first time. I say ‘properly,’ because I tried a couple of times when I was younger, and in hindsight see why perhaps I wasn’t ready for the esoteric, mature, and mind-bending experience that it confronted me with.
Planar Party
Set in the D&D Planescape setting, the game casts you as the Nameless One, an amnesiac humanoid with markings and scars giving precious clues as to who he is, and doomed to not die a ‘True Death,’ with each of his deaths resulting in him awakening back in the Mortuary in the city of Sigil. Sigil itself acts as a hub for different Planes, ranging from the chaotic realm of Limbo to the cool clockwork dimension of Mechanus.
Now, I’ve only begun chipping away at the surface of this fascinating multiverse, but to me it’s already proving to be the most unique RPG setting I’ve ever seen in a video game. Where most RPGs so comfortably fall into pretty safe and generic tropes on either the ‘fantasy’ or ‘sci-fi’ side of the fence (both Baldur’s Gate 3 andStarfieldare cases in point), Torment went full-frickingweird(or ‘Weird,’ which I’ll expand on later).
I’d pick out Torment as the best—maybe only—representation of New Weird in gaming.
This is a world in which corpses are a currency of sorts for a group known as the Collectors; where there’s a brothel specialising specifically in “Intellectual Pleasures,” where the workers stimulate the minds rather than the bodies of clientele; it’s a world where your very first companion is a floating wise-cracking skull with a distinctly old-school US East Coast accent.
It’s a stunning world to behold too, again totally defying expectations of what yer typical RPG world looks. Look at the screenshots below, and you can’t readily place these stoney, rusting, interdimensional places into the comfortable categories of sci-fi, or fantasy, or steampunk, much though our category-loving brains might try.
As a recent convert into ‘New Weird’ fiction (see: Jeff Vandermeer, or China Mieville’s Bas-Lag trilogy), which can best be described as fantasy-esque fiction that deconstructs and subverts the tropes we’ve become so comfortable with through more conventional fantasy and sci-fi genres. It’s a genre that’s often unsettling, enigmatic, a bit gross, and philosophically challenging, and I’d probably pick out Torment as the best—maybe only—representation of New Weird in gaming.
Going into a game even as good as Baldur’s Gate 3, you kind of ‘get’ the rules that govern that world pretty quickly; you know your Wizards from your Thieves, you get the gist of Mind Flayers (who have been popularised through Stranger Things), the order of the universe is pretty straightforward, much as you’d expect from the most classic of D&D settings. In Torment, on the other hand, the rules and aesthetics that define it are a complete mystery, and slowly uncovering them through the rich writing of the masterful Chris Avellone is an absolute joy.
My Kind Of Weird
So far, on the streets of Sigil—a city floating in a ring above a mount in the middle of a wasteland—I’ve encountered Dabus’, horned beings which float around Sigil doing construction around the city and communicating only through symbols they draw in the air; I’ve discovered a Buried Village underneath Sigil, where an underclass of people with hindlimb-like legs live; beneaththatstill is a catacomb realm where a faction of sentient undead and a hive-mind of sentient rats are engaged in a constant war for supremacy. I’m only several hours in, and already my Weird stores feel well and truly topped up after the unquestionably excellent but far more conventional RPGs I’ve been playing in recent times.
There are archaic elements to work through with Planescape: Torment, and you’d probably do well to look up some online discussions around worthwhile stats to invest in and so on, but the game looks and plays wonderfully on modern machines thanks to the relatively recent Enhanced Edition. If you fancy a mature RPG that’s utterly different to anything that’s come out in the 25 years since its release, and feels as nourishing to the psyche and intellect like a good novel, then there really is nothing quite like this.
Planescape: Torment
WHERE TO PLAY
13 Best Isometric RPGs
From Planescape Torment to Disco Elysium, here are some of the most immersive isometric RPG experiences ever created.
