Some games stay with you forever, but unfortunately time doesn’t stand still, even for our favorites. The chances are – nostalgia aside – that a beloved 1990s classic has aged horribly in the eyes of new players. It’s hard to recommend something wholeheartedly on the basis of “it’s amazing, just like this game you like, but it looks and runs a whole lot worse!” People can’t see its genius when they’re fighting for their life in an outdated UI, and now you just feel old.
Our only hope is a remake or a remaster. This isn’t foolproof, they might have removed all the things you loved about the game. Or sales figures might be abysmal. Or it just doesn’t hit like it used to. To avoid this fate, the remake needs the right timing and conditions – enough older fans to make it worthwhile, a developer who can do it justice, and finally, a zeitgeist shift that limbers up the general population for a game of this type. Which brings me to my point: we’re ready for a Planescape: Torment remake; right here, right now, right after its 25th anniversary.
Planescape: Torment is a lot of things. On the surface, it’s a single-player RPG based on the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons campaign setting, Planescape. The setting differs from the usual high fantasy – it’s not all tall-spired castles and elven princesses – and presents a world of complex philosophies and moral alignments, with plenty of grit and class-consciousness thrown in.
The player awakes in the Mortuary as a scarred body on a stone slab, having risen, it seems, from the dead. They immediately meet Morte, a flying, wise-cracking skull and their first companion, who reads from the tattoos across the player’s back. They don’t give too much away, only that you’re immortal, you need to track down a specific guy, and that you should find your journal. None of this makes sense to you. You are The Nameless One, and you’ve got to find out what the hell is going on.
From here you explore the city of Sigil, a bustling hive of activity, much of it criminal. You’re free to join factions, make allies, or piss everyone off and clean house. The morality system is far more complex than the traditional good option / bad option, though – often there are multiple ways to solve a problem, some self-serving, some kind, some cautious. Every time The Nameless One dies, he wakes up in the Mortuary with memories of the last playthrough intact. Death is very much not the end, and may reveal more than if you’d have powered through and stayed healthy.
Planescape: Torment has won a host of awards, from three best games in 1999 (RPG of the Year from both Computer World Gaming and Gamespot, and Game of the Year from IGN), to claiming the title of PC Gamer’s Best RPG of All Time in 2015. People can’t stop playing in the Planes; the game gained more than 250 Steam reviews in the last 12 months alone, with many of them claiming to be first-timers falling in love.
This slow burn of steady interest combined with recent gaming trends have confirmed what I had hoped would be the case for a while now: we’re ready for a proper Planescape: Torment remake. It’s safe to say that people went wild for Baldur’s Gate 3, and although Planescape: Torment is a different bag of skulls entirely, it still has the same basic feel. You collect companions, you explore an open(ish) world with heaps of sidequests, there’s a morality system, some classic D&D lore, and you interact with the world in a very similar way. The two games have an intertwined history, with early Baldur’s Gate games being made by Black Isle Studios in BioWare’s Infinity Engine alongside Planescape: Torment.
We’ve also seen the enduring legacy and unquenchable heart’s fire of Disco Elysium, a wordy, lore-heavy RPG that twists away from the classic D&D accouterments and plunges players deep into the protagonist’s story. In terms of plot and style, Disco Elysium is perhaps a cousin to Planescape: Torment. Both games champion wit and esoteric sociological comment, creative problem solving, and redemption of the irredeemable. They both veer wildly between comical pastiche and hard-hitting emotional sledgehammer, leaving the player feeling bereft once the damn thing is over.
Between these two games, people clearly have an appetite for more. Forums across the web are packed with “what should I play next” questions as players complete yet another BG3 playthrough. The answers inevitably direct these lost souls to play Planescape: Torment in effusive paragraphs riddled with apologies and excuses, lamenting the jankiness of the game when experienced by a modern gamer.
And Larian, the developers of Baldur’s Gate 3, would be well-suited for the remake in my opinion. They translated Baldur’s Gate beautifully, adding dimension and heft where needed, fleshing out the world and its people, but keeping the core values and feel of the earlier games. Obsidian Entertainment would also be a top contender, with most of the original Planescape: Torment team having moved over from Black Isle some years ago.
Whoever develops this game, they’d have to know what made Planescape: Torment such a staple classic for so many people. People who weren’t even necessarily D&D or CRPG fans. Aside from the D&D setting and basic engine, the game runs a lot more like Disco Elysium than it does Baldur’s Gate, and would need to be treated as a narrative game first and foremost.
In BG3, your character is almost the least of your worries. It’s the relationships with your party, your impact on the world, and the struggle between forces greater than yourself that truly matters. Planescape: Torment is different. You wake up completely ignorant of yourself and your surroundings and spend the game grappling with your identity and the things you’ve already personally done but forgotten (Harry DuBois, anyone?). People remember you, they follow you, they may even hate you, but they don’t have the same gravitas that you do as The Nameless One.
That’s not to say the companions or citizens of Sigil feel one-dimensional. Quite the opposite. The travelers who join you have detailed character models, backstories and beliefs, not to mention endless quips and quirks. Each of the people (or creatures) on the map has their own path around the city, some of them will tell you unique stories or clues, and many of them are individually named and carry a sidequest. Sigil feels like what it is – a disjointed and constantly reshuffling city that acts as both a prison and a gateway for its downtrodden inhabitants.
Politics and philosophy are the order of the day in Planescape: Torment’s dialogue and worldbuilding. Alongside the usual D&D morality alignments, The Nameless One also has the chance to join political factions within Sigil, making his mark on the world as an individual of note. With a bit of modern magic, these interactions and choices could go so much deeper, satisfying the complex needs of a whole new generation of gamers. All the brilliance and fine detail of Planescape: Torment was created in 1999, imagine what we could do with it 25 years later.
The closest we ever got was Torment: Tides of Numenera, which is a great game but doesn’t quite scratch the same itch. Quite rightly, the team avoided a Planescape: Torment sequel, as by the closing credits, The Nameless One’s journey is well and truly finished. But a remake would allow us to dive back into a game that deserves so much more love than it gets, without compromising the integrity of the story.
Admittedly, combat would need a great deal of attention. It’s not a combat-focused game in the way BG3 is, and many brawls can be avoided in favor of a more diplomatic option, but Planescape: Torment still has its fair share of fights. Whether back-alley thugs are chasing you down outside a bar, or you accidentally start to throw hands with a demon, you’ll need to know how to land a punch. This part of the game was famously clunky, and savvy players would often spam Morte’s Litany of Curses ability to draw fire and attack from behind. A way to reward players for thoughtful combat engagement would only serve to enhance the game’s playability.
Even though parts of it felt tricky to handle, for its time, Planescape: Torment was gorgeous. Black Isle pushed the Infinity Engine to its limits, creating moving backgrounds and hyper-detailed spaces that deserve to see a second chance at life. Many of the creatures in the game were assigned full ecologies, skeletal structures, and diets – we never see it in-game but it makes them all the more realistic, and potentially easier to recreate.
Environments were worked and reworked, then touched up by hand. Updated and remade for modern graphics, even diehard fans would find more in the Planes than they ever had before. It would be a treat to see different characters and races rendered to modern standards, to walk around the familiar streets of Sigil and feel the ambiance without relying on your imagination to do 60% of the work.
A timely remake of Planescape: Torment would pull in the old crowd, sure, but would also delight fans of Baldur’s Gate 3 who wanted a bit more nuance and story, and give Disco Elysium fans something to quench their thirst for amnesiac ‘I can fix him’-type men stumbling around in hostile worlds. It’s a lot of reading, a lot of thinking, a lot of puzzle-solving, and philosophical quandaries. There’s nothing quite like it, and it’s ripe for a comeback in the 2020s.