Planescape: Torment [Enhanced Edition]

I think with this I have finally played through all of the original Infinity Engine RPG games. Icewind Dale I & II are still my favorites of the bunch. Those were about building up characters and skillfully fighting though areas. Torment is all about story, story, story. Normally that’s a good thing, but when that story is told via an endless scroll of text and dialogue trees is gets really tedious. I may have been able to deal with all the text with a more adventure game style interface where you get animations of who’s speaking and some visual cues as to their emotions. Why can’t dialogue be fun or gamified somehow? Instead I sat in a daze as thousands of lines of text flew by waiting to hit the 1 key until I was out of options.

I guess the story is unique. It’s not your standard “defeat the evil creature” narrative. You must find out about your forgotten past lives and solve the mystery of your identity… eventually, by defeating the, um, evil creature.

Your character is immortal and can’t be killed. Instead you are respawned every time you die without consequence. I’m not complaining too much. I don’t long for the good old days when games were hard to beat, but there has to be some motivation for improving your character and doing well in combat. Eventually, you run out of immortality. In fact, at that point in the game I was in an unwinnable state and wasn’t about to go back to an old save to relive the joys of scrolling through the same text again. I had to revert to a god-mode cheat for that penultimate battle. I don’t know. That just makes a game feel broken to me. I was able to kill the final boss without cheating. So that’s something.