There are other games in the genre I’m going to talk about that came first. The choice in skipping order a bit comes from the name I gave my little piece of the tubes. That game is Planescape: Torment. This game with an off-putting name was released in 1999 using a modified infinity engine. Like SCUMM, the infinity engine was a popular older engine that was made to accommodate multiple games. This time the engine was made to create games that tended to the role playing genre. The games also had a common element of using a Dungeons and Dragons toolset. Yep, these games were made to emulate the same sort of thing you might play on a tabletop with a drawn map and dice! Some other Infinity Engine games were the Baldur’s Gate series (1998-2001) and Icewind Dale (2000-2002).
The first part of the game’s name, Planescape, refers to the world that the story takes place in. When the non-meganerd hears dungeons and dragons they like to think about the traditional Tokien-derived fantasy setting. Planescape is not that. Instead of going into painstaking details that even I don’t know, I’ll just go ahead and link to Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planescape). Generally speaking, it is a world that consists of many different worlds that, as my understanding follows, exist simply because someone has decided to believe it exists.
Planescape is a unique game. It’s presented in the form of a game where combat present around every corner, but it is not a game about fighting. This is a game about talking, and learning. Don’t misunderstand me, you will fight monsters, but that’s not why you keep playing. The point of this game is to discover yourself. You take on the persona of The Nameless One. You are nameless because you did someone, long ago, to prevent you from dying. Every time you do die, your memories reset themselves and you wake up a few days later. This process has repeated itself over such a significant amount of time that nobody knows you by name, also explaining the fact that your entire body is essentially a giant scar. When you wake up at the start of the game, this is the last time you will forget. The rest of the game is about figuring out who you are, and why your identity (and mortality) is so important. The party members and people you meet in this game all have some connection to you, and it’s up to you to discover what this past is. Maybe you were friends with this person in a previous “incarnation,” maybe you manipulated someone, maybe someone loved you. The previous incarnations were not necessarily the person you want to be now.
HOLY SHIT IS THAT A TALKING SKULL? YOU BETTER TRUST IT!
Planescape has its flaws. If you hate lots of reading (it’s OK if you do), you won’t enjoy this game. When I mentioned earlier the combat wasn’t the focus of this game, I was not kidding. Its point-and-click boredom most of the time and maybe a little strategy of picking the right spell at best. On the plus side, the combat is easy, it’s only a short time before you’re talking to someone again. If you like stories of discovery, this is a great game. If you want an example of doing amnesia right, this is a great example. If you love choose your own adventure books, you are doing yourself a disservice by avoiding this game.
Again I’ll focus in on one aspect of the game that had really shown out to me early on. In the case of this game, it was the first example where I could be the most evil thing to ever live. There are games today that gloat about their moral choices which amount to “Jesus” or “Wow you’re just an asshole.” In Torment, you can manipulate others into slavery, strip a commoner of their belongings and kill them on the street, or doom a friend to an eternal prison for no really good reason. Now I said you can do those things, but you don’t have to. You have the option to be equally good, roleplaying a man looking the right the wrongs committed in the past. This is what makes the game so great. Either choice is “right” for the game, neither really grants more reward than the other in the long run, but those choices define your character and how the game plays out.
OK. It’s time to slow down a bit. The next article is going to be a megapost on the shareware days of old.
Again I’ll focus in on one aspect of the game that had really shown out to me early on. In the case of this game, it was the first example where I could be the most evil thing to ever live. There are games today that gloat about their moral choices which amount to “Jesus” or “Wow you’re just an asshole.” In Torment, you can manipulate others into slavery, strip a commoner of their belongings and kill them on the street, or doom a friend to an eternal prison for no really good reason. Now I said you can do those things, but you don’t have to. You have the option to be equally good, roleplaying a man looking the right the wrongs committed in the past. This is what makes the game so great. Either choice is “right” for the game, neither really grants more reward than the other in the long run, but those choices define your character and how the game plays out.
OK. It’s time to slow down a bit. The next article is going to be a megapost on the shareware days of old.
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