Grimbeard - Planescape: Torment - Enhanced Edition (PC) - Review
it's just you and me tonight ken what kind of hell are we gonna raise barbarian magician thief cavalier and acrobat if some wizard was handing out magic rolls and i got stuck with acrobat i'd be so pissed what am i gonna do with that jump off a bridge oh what the god damn come to the planes are you bored of walking outside into a meaningless uncaring world full of traffic and making eye contact with people come to the planes rid yourself of earthly possessions and take a plane ride to the flames that's right get in a plane fly through a portal and come out nowhere could this be the start of your epic swords and sorcery adventure or the start of a lifetime of enslavement at the hands of space goblins i don't know nobody does that's why you gotta come to the plains and find out wipe the cheese dust off your disgusting fingers get out of your gamer chair and come where the flames you want excitement we got it you want romance we got it you want combat we'll see what we can do but one thing's for sure you gotta come come i thought it was over planescape torment is an isometric avant-garde multiverse crpg and journal updater it was developed by black isle studios and published by interplay entertainment for pc in 1999 and in the years following it has since found its way to playstation 4 xbox one nintendo switch and mobile devices if that's how you choose to live your life planescape torments setting existed as a dungeons and dragons campaign setting created by zeb cook a world he sought to create based on the vagueness of the outer planes of dungeons and dragons the mishmash of religious and mythological odds and ends that lampshade the game's alignment system tired of as he put it big muscled swordsmen rescuing princesses and clearing out dungeons he found the idea of making these cosmic planes that supposedly no one would have any reason in their right mind to visit explorable and thus creating a hub in which all the worlds of d would be linked to be an inventive new direction taking all these elements that are illogically crammed together and have it make sense that they are in an era when the crpg had found a sort of comfortable rhythm a string of games torment included would emit a discordant shriek that would disrupt and shake up the format pulling attention away from whichever ultimate game you had installed saying that ain't nothing you little nerd your little [ __ ] it was real confrontational i know i was scared at every step torment would attempt to subvert the expectation of the average crpg enjoyer turn the established tropes on their head right from the opening cut scene one which depicts the player character's death though not as an end state death would instead be used to advance the plot torment would also leap over the expected paperwork of rpgs you wouldn't preemptively draft out the particulars of your character's stats class alignment and personality type you just begin as a blank state that doesn't even know who he is and piece it together through experience and the company you keep around you well met traveler uh i'm jumping backwards in time from the future here and firstly i'd like to preemptively say i'm sorry i [ __ ] up a future where i realized that i used the term crpg a lot and i don't know how commonly that term is still used some games continued to tag themselves as crpg despite not fitting my definition of one as i knew it it was a term used to describe a game that either began as a tabletop rpg and has now been rendered in computer game format or a game that invents its own variation of this type of rule set a dnd like a gurps-like something like fallout's special system which behaves similar to a tabletop game despite not beginning as one not too deep within me i'm sure that really the only requirement for me to describe something as a crpg is that it be isometric and that at some point i have to fight big big rats never commit to anything be changeable keep moving this is how you survive in 1996 black isle was gearing up to start several projects using the world of planescape ready to ring this ip of all its worth at first inner play had black isles attention split on other projects and eventually the planned rise of planescape was hastily forgotten joining the dark universe in whatever plane of abandoned dreams i imagine they dwell in the first of these was to be a proper crpg titled simply planescape this project led by zeb cook himself was to be the sort of flagship planescape game planescape's answer to boulder's gate much like what boulder's gate was to boulder's gate on account of its name being just planescape so it was like the boulder's gate of planescape planescape the computer game if you will you gotta keep up i'm a good words holder the second project was led by another person who worked on the tabletop setting colin mccomb which would have amounted to a playstation game set in planescape but inspired by the gameplay of from software's king's field series where you'd play as a harmonium guard a lawful good faction that is confronted with a conspiracy involving the blood war an eternal conflict between law and chaos that simmers beneath most planescape narratives six months of work went into plotting out and creating a design document for this game but at some point word came down from interplay management that the idea of three planescape games in production was redundant to remedy this the playstation game was cancelled colin mccomb zeb cook and zeb's work on the main planescape game were transferred over to another project led by chris avalon and utilizing bioware's infinity engine then called planescape last rights to further spit on the grave of mccombs work everything made for the ps1 planescape game plus a shitload of money was funneled into development for a game called stonekeep 2 a sequel to 1995's stone keep and i gotta say i think they made the right call because stone keep two after five years in development turned out to be one of the best most groundbreaking rpgs ever made in the universe where it wasn't cancelled behind the scenes in 1997 black isle produced a 47-page design document a vision statement for planescape last rites to pitch to interplay what's still impressive reading this now is just how clear this vision was just about everything in it saved for some plot details came to be more or less as laid out here and it is interesting to see some of the game design philosophies devised from the beginning the dev team was told things like if you've seen it done before do it better than you've ever seen or don't do it reiterating that planescape isn't high fantasy it's avant-garde fantasy so no object or location within it should be easily recognizable as a real life thing if there's a little caesars on the corner it's built into the desiccated ribcage of a dead interdimensional lizard and a hot reddy is magically compressed into a single shimmering bite-sized cube hey but you know what i bet it's still only five dollars some things you just don't change no matter how hard to fart your game is i'll tell you what man i'll tell you what anywho an odd side effect of reading this is getting a glimpse at how a game as complex and cerebral as this needed to be distilled and summarized into corporate manchild speak as to be better understood by the gamer council amongst its [ __ ] and shit-laden nerd bait it promises tons of total babes this game will have lots of babes that make the player go wow there will be fiendish babes human babes angelic babes asian babes which are their own category and even undead babes these babes will be present without nipplage and will all regrettably behave within the tsr code of ethics i actually had to look up this code of ethics because i had never heard of it before as it's a part of the creation of materials and not really something you'd observe at home as you may know back in the 1980s tsr dnd's original publisher was the cause of a moral panic from right-wing christian groups like bad or bothered about dungeons and dragons for promoting satanism sexual deviancy and basement dwelling via role playing games it is important to remember that the source of all magic is the life force of the user this is the teaching of the occult this is exactly what we were introduced into in star wars and e.t this was in some part due to some murders suicides and murder suicides of young people where i'm assuming distraught parents eager for an explanation blamed a funny make-em-up game to explain their grief battles maiming killing hey it's all imagination is it yeah also to blame was some artwork included in early editions of the player's handbook that got them so horny it was infuriating in response to this tsr wrote up a list of things that could not be included in any dnd branded material whether it be novels campaign handbooks what have you and unsurprisingly the guidelines are very strict and sound as though they were hastily scribbled at gunpoint made up of most things you'd immediately think to put in your dnd campaign like profanity promoting distrust in law enforcement depicting religious figures as villains glamorizing crime excessive gore and most intriguingly sexual abnormalities by the time planescape was announced the rights to dnd had been handed over to wizards of the coast so maybe they softened some of these because there are certainly a few of those things in there torment's dev team or last rites set out to immediately break one of these guidelines number one across two different iterations of this code is that good must no matter what triumph over evil in the end and those who stoop to evil will be rightly punished for it moral flexibility was important to their vision finding the idea of the morally correct answer being the only correct answer simply boring and on the creation of the game's storyline inspiration was drawn from other rpgs like shadow run and video game rpgs like final fantasy vii despite boasting a script of 800 000 words there was still a good deal of content that had to be cut in order to meet interplay's deadline something which seemed to have left a chip on the shoulder of producer guido henkel along with the fact that his name isn't as synonymous with planescape as others like chris avalon to be fair though avalon's name is now associated with a lot of things by complete happenstance thanks to a scheduling conflict henkel wound up leaving a very important mark on this game however as it is his corpse-like and erroneously blue face emblazoned on the game's very recognizable cover art it's iconic and recognizable not only because of his face but for the insane decision to make this the cover of the game a cover that shouts i don't care if you play me or not i see you eyeballing boulder's gate instead buy that you think i give a [ __ ] after self-exposed idiot on release the game was met with substantial acclaim vacuuming awards up like an eldritch kirby and being placed on a number of lists of not only best rpgs but best pc gamer would write when it comes right down to it this game is a masterpiece of role-playing the dialogue is some of the most well-written of any rpg the environments are varied and downright enthralling the spell effects are mind-blowing and the story contains some of the most inventive unique characters players will ever have in a party though certainly enough time has passed that a new generation of gamers have picked up the game and had their own idiotic opinion on it or some have walked back their once glowing review it's hard to find many mainstream critic reviews of the era that express anything critical beyond a mild indifference eurogamer went i guess as close to the throat as you could by saying it's far from perfect and the casual way it treats death was something of a turn off for me but it's still about as good as they come if nothing else it should keep you busy until boulder's gate 2 is released oh look at me i like elves and goblins that's me i genuinely do i don't know why i'm doing this voice praise aside like most good games planescape torment was ultimately a commercial failure one of many side effects of the gamer curse you just can't get them to play good games though over the next few years after word of mouth spread this niche within a niche within a niche of the game eventually made profit this is the part where i feel like i should say and planescape torment went on to inspire a bunch of copycat games and its legacy left ripples resounding throughout all of gaming its influence seeping noticeably into many other enjoyable games but i don't think that would entirely be appropriate to say as very few games have really attempted as arduous and risky a task as torment did skillfully introducing and having fun with a bizarre and novel fantasy setting breaking the comfortable conventions of the rpg and including a phone book's worth of text in it and having that remain consistently interesting enough to carry you throughout hours of reading i mean gameplay not to say there were no games that stepped up to attempt just that certainly disco elysium and torment's spiritual successor but not many more over the years torment would be re-released a handful of times most substantially for its enhanced edition from beamdog in 2017 which is the version featured in this video which adds a number of improvements accessibility options and restore some incomplete content i think if i were revising this game i would have amended the glaring typo concerning the brothel for slating intellectual lusts which should have been saiding or slaking but you don't want to give me any power like that you grant me that one thing pretty soon just fire everywhere burning death devastation darkness though it refrains from indulging in that too much making this version more of a preservational effort than an attempt to make it better maybe hot take but i like when older games are preserved kept up to date and easily available unless it's a nintendo game too long have i known them simply as free games i'll take a moment to introduce planescape as a location and honestly another one of the characters in the story to borrow the parlance of someone who did not accept video games as an artistic medium what the planescape setting sought to do was sort of make explorable all the campaign settings devised by tsr i'm going to assume excluding like licensed properties turned modules but every setting put within a shared multiverse where each world is its own universe or plane on a spinning ring in the cosmos called the great wheel many of these worlds were until planescape merely suggested or used to wave away some aspect of character creation but now all these places would be real locations a level one elf rogue could visit each with its own rules torment is set in the outlands a neutral plane at the center of the great wheel composed of a giant seemingly infinite spire at the top of which floats a city where most of your time will be spent the name of this city is sigel kind of like you're saying seagull really fast a name that i instinctively read as sigil but it is in fact sigil zeb cook decided on this pronunciation as a result of his own mispronunciation of sigil which he just doubled down on like most fantasy jargon in an rpg if the players know what you're talking about there's no use being pedantic about how it's said so i wouldn't worry about it too much all this to say i'm going to turn zeb's logic right back on him and refer to it as sigil and if you've got a problem with that go ahead and roll a d12 to see how successfully you go [ __ ] yourself this is a floating city on top of a spire on the inner ring of a land mass shaped like a taurus where there is no sky only a light that sometimes goes on and off so you know when to close up your potion shop or whatever the other thing about sigil is that it is also known as the city of doors this is because it acts as an ever shifting and morphing hub world in between the planes full of countless portals to other planes not organized and labeled in a facility mind you just all over the place hidden from view each requiring their own key almost none of which are just a regular key but some kind of offering a phrase a gesture a thought could be anything there are some that people know about and many more that they don't leading to many people just winding up in sigil by accident they were off adventuring in greyhawk when they stopped at the entrance to a cave and then remembered what their aunt's apple pie tasted like or they fell into a well while screaming their biggest regret and that launched them over deciduel with no idea of how to return because of this sigil is a melting pot of every kind of person demon deity or robot from all the planes it's like the cantina in star wars but as a whole city and has yet to be milked of anything initially interesting about it sigil is overseen by a being named the lady of pain a powerful entity that maintains balance in the city using rather strict methods nobody's actually really seen her or communicated with her and anything anybody knows is relayed by a race of speechless creatures called dabus her servants that float around fixing or breaking things to suit the lady's desires they communicate using floating symbols that materialize over their heads if someone were to threaten the balance of sigil the lady of pain would have them killed or worse mazed meaning they are banished to wander a maze of her own design for all eternity despite being clearly omnipotent and all-powerful she refuses to be worshiped as a god if you even try to pray to her she'll amaze you if you try to mock her she'll maze you if you attack her goons maze kill too many people maze try to worship the previous guy in charge maybe you might be a guy that got me you gotta work to not end up in that maze and yeah i'm sure that's bad like there's gotta be something about being made that is objectively unpleasant but it's hard for me to not see it as just free housing if this already sounds like a lot to retain it's a good thing we're given control of a character as clueless as you our protagonist is a nameless human man covered in scars and tattoos to the point of appearing like a corpse he wakes up on a slab in a mortuary within sigil with no memory of how he came to be there for much of the game he is referred to as the nameless one but you have several opportunities to just lie and say your name is adam we also meet the first of several traveling companions we can collect along the way mort a floating talking skull that helps guide the nameless one around and provides some insight to the culture and goings on in sigel i was going to correct myself but it is the correct thing but i guess it's harder to commit to that bit than i thought this is ideally what he does a lot of the time he just kind of hides ulterior motives and uh tries to [ __ ] zombies i want to be buried with her your coffin or mine mort lets the nameless one know that he has a full paragraph of instructions tattooed on his back that tell him to find his journal and a man named ferid what they lean into pretty immediately and is hard to ignore is the unique vocabulary found in sigil that you'll start to pick up on mort immediately hits you left and right with several slang terms some of which have a basis in existing dialects but others are a bit more creative hey chief you okay you playing corpse you're putting the blinds in the dusties i thought you were a debtor for sure things like saying chant in place of rumor or news as in what's the chant what's new you'll come across many characters that refer to you as a cutter which you could think of as a replacement for boss or chief it's like a respectful but casual term that implies you're a resourceful and cool guy there's a ton more that you can learn just by context but if you want to be sure there is usually a dialogue option that's like wait you just said barmy what does that mean there's a very specific limit to my memory i know like how to eat i know how to dress myself in bones i know how to raise the dead but i can't remember any of these funny makeup words in keeping with the rest of torment it would be diminishing to say this building is just a mortuary it's the mortuary home to a faction of sigil named the dust men one of 15 factions groups of differently flavored weirdos that have banded together behind some spiritual interpretation of the world they're all stuck in this is something that was included in the tabletop game mostly as a response to the popularity of vampire the masquerade and its clans everybody's doing clans now so we gotta have them too because the very idea of this wasn't complex enough so sigil has these factions which you can join to gain a variety of benefits and resources though that is limited to only a few in this video game version the dust men are a universally disliked group of black-pilled monks that believe life in sigil is a shadow not true life and ultimately the best thing for all of us would be to just die where we would achieve what they call true death things like love passion hobbies a funko pop collection these are all worldly anchors keeping us stuck in a half-life without peace they run this massive mortuary where they pay a few coins to anyone that hauls in a body some in sigil have found loopholes to make good money doing that dead bodies are catalogued embalmed stored or cremated and aside from meditating on how rad it would be to die that's pretty much all they do this is a pretty ironic group for the nameless one to wake up to as he soon learns that this isn't the first time he's been wheeled into the mortuary in a pile of corpses far from it in fact the scribe tasked with notating all the dead brought in is frankly sick of seeing you slink out of here and especially of seeing others die because of the nameless one's influence he's not the only one to refer to your condition as a curse and a blessing it appears he simply cannot die preventing him from achieving the dustman's ultimate goal well more accurately he is immortal so he can die but it never seems to take for whatever reason upon waking up this time your memories have all but completely vanished but some of these memories will come trickling back hinting that this is likely not the first hard reset the nameless one has endured meaning for who knows how long he's lived numerous varied lives all over the plains you'll come across many characters that have had vastly different interactions or even relationships with some incarnation of him the scribe mentions a woman that died following him that is now memorialized here while he and mort are trying to make their way out of the mortuary the nameless one finds this memorial and is visited by the ghost of a woman named dionara he enters some kind of fugue state where only he can converse with her and she is struck with a range of strong emotions upon seeing our hero she's angry bitter sad but clearly still deeply in love with him whatever he did pre-memory wipe must have really hurt and ultimately killed her and despite this she still helps you regain some of your memories very importantly the memory about how to raise the dead should you wish for it she can also provide a cryptic glibs into the future where apparently the nameless one will be confronted by a fortress made of regret and be forced to make a sacrifice that will end his immortality one of the wildest things about torment is how many variables exist within it even in the first area you wake up in which does act a bit like a tutorial area there are a number of ways you can make your way through it secrets to find or even just inconsequential world building things that change based on your skills or your temperament also because i'm a complete [ __ ] during the first playthrough for this video i had foolishly tried to attack the dustmen which triggered an alarm that made all of them hostile to me so i had to kill several of them and also because i was just in a hurry to get the [ __ ] out i didn't talk to dianara and played the whole game to the end without the ability to revive my followers wonder what this is well guess who is nothing and this is a good thing though you can rest assured that your own idiocy that may have kept you from unlocking a basic function of the game did not prevent me from having a complete and fulfilling gaming experience also it's surprisingly forgiving about severing threads of prophecy because in my rush to the front door i killed a dude named soigo who is sort of significant in a later quest but you meet him later as if nothing happened and you can ask him didn't i kill you and he's just like oh yeah i mean i don't know sigil is weird like that you got that right brother in subsequent playthroughs there were countless ways i could differ from the path taken before and things i didn't even notice the first time whether you get dnr's help or enlist the aid of a zombie spy the nameless one and mort make it outside to the streets of sigil and upon leaving we are shown a bunch of shadowy creatures looming over the slab where you rose from the dead almost as if they were expecting you to be there but just missed you looking for ferret is the main objective but of course there are several things you can get mixed up in some amount to fetch quests others to substantial side content leading to interesting items or experience but the most impressive thing for me is that no matter how significant they are most of the time written with as much detail and consideration as the main storyline there's a quest that's quite literally a lady at a cafe wants you to go tell her friend to meet her at that cafe and i didn't really think about the simplicity of it because it also worked in a fascinating bit of world building where they both turn out to be asamar from the forgotten realms and can communicate by sort of manipulating reality with their thoughts and feelings depending on how much you pry you can even learn that one of them intimately knew one of your previous incarnations and killed another in self-defense or rather affected his mind such that he did it himself but i use this example just to instill that even when the task is sort of mundane or contrived it's not a squandered opportunity it is almost always used to do something other than tick a box in your journal and toss some xp your way there's always some kind of narrative reward that could be genuinely insightful concerning the mystery of the nameless one or just some surreal darkly comedic scenario that only the planes could produce a rich socialite that wants to pay you to allow her to kill you just to know what it feels like a man that summons a zombie to tolerate his overly talkative friend in his stead but it still has enough cognitive function to beg you to put it out of its misery a woman that's been hopelessly wandering from portal to portal trying to find her way home and somehow wound up with sentient teeth there's several of these little stories packed into every area in between doing main quest stuff you'll be bouncing back and forth between a number of locations in sigil and crossing paths with many different factions and groups that produce their own amusing quests and interactions like the sensates members of the society of sensation a bunch of live for today types that believe you can only really be a part of the multiverse if you live to experience every bit of it they do this mostly by collecting and touching things called sensory stones objects with recorded experiences in them that temporarily immerse you in the thoughts and emotional state of another it's kind of like vr you know a pointless luxury that just makes you sick get wrecked vr owners uh by the way how is half-life alex i can't afford it but it looks cool they are also associated with a building called the brothel for sliding intellectual lusts where aspiring sensates are paid to spend time intellectually stimulating patrons through debate storytelling or games this place is run by a reformed succubus a tanari named fall from grace that could be one of your allies should you wish it pretty early on you start collecting followers which is an important piece of the game aside from helping you in combat you can converse with them or hear them chime in during conversations and all of them have really well-defined personalities if you give them the time you really grow to enjoy their company and if you don't like one you can always just abandon them at the mall uh yeah vaylor could you just hang out here i'll be right back yeah i'm just gonna stop by anchor blue and buy a plastic shirt i'll be right back oh [ __ ] the [ __ ] within the first quest or so you'll likely pick up dakon a gethseri warrior coming from the plane of limbo a place where only those who know themselves achieve flesh he wields a karak blade one that only followers of xerthamon are worthy enough to handle that changes shape with his thoughts like a mood ring that also cuts people in half it might be a little jarring how he winds up joining you like you just bump into him at a bar and as though he's been through this whole rigamarole too many times he's just like yeah yeah you're looking for an extra sword right all right let's just get this over with so i can get back to drinking whatever fantasy beverage they serve here ink squeezed from a space octopus or pepsi blue that's the second one of those in a row i guess i'm just i guess i'm just really feeling 2002 right now but in my defense it was the mix the damn thing's cursed which there is a reason for but that is discussed later down the line the other early follower that you're likely to keep around is anna of the shadows or just anna a tiefling rogue with a rat's tail and an easily irritated attitude ready and willing to dispense some kind of insult or threat of bodily harm that grudgingly joins your party to accomplish a job but winds up sticking around because though she'd never admit it in a million years she kind of likes the nameless one and wants him to find the answers he's after through much wandering around and question asking we eventually hone in on this ferret guy turns out he's the leader of a group of collectors those working the cash for corpses racket turning in anything dead to the dustman for a few coins they dislike him on account of the sheer volume of bodies he regularly dumps at their doorstep making it plainly obvious that he's got some kind of secret corpse honey hole that rival groups of collectors want access to i kind of like ferret as a character he's like a bad guy doing his best to atone trying to do good with the only skill set he knows evil from the first exchange you get the impression that he's just a liar down to his core even though ferret greets you like an old friend when he notices the nameless one doesn't remember him he immediately capitalizes on that do i know you i mean yeah wait no okay yes no unless perhaps i might be able to scrounge up some information on you if you help me out with something as fair begins to describe the trifle trinket he needs help collecting they do this thing that i love about torment's writing where they interject the thought process of the protagonist and what he seems to find significant about someone's words or actions it doesn't even have to be particularly helpful it's just really interesting how it hints at events down the line or implies that there's something important happening here whether you really know it or not the nameless one fixates on the description of the object farad wants in return for answers a bronze sphere he's heard this same speech before because he remembers saying it at some point over the decades he's lived multiple divergent lives but not the context in which he did he can even finish describing it before ferret can which throws him off guard i think it's really fun how many people in single this sigil [ __ ] [ __ ] it it's sigel now i'm saying it right now how many people sort of know who you are quick to point out that well you don't quite act like that guy or you look like you've gained a few more scars have different dummies lined up behind you because of this some remember a thing you told them a deal you made or just some kind of instruction if you ever came knocking again and often people will just inadvertently point you in the right direction for the main quest remembering some tidbit of where you were going some of them respond kind of awkwardly feeling it strange that you don't remember meeting so they're clearly withholding things like is this a bit are we doing a bit where we don't remember each other not that i would know because we've never met unless this is not a bit in which case we didn't not not the bronze sphere is somewhere in the network of catacombs and tunnels beneath sigil which happens to be the secret to farrod's success as a collector he's been grifting the dust men by digging up long dead corpses and reselling them back this is hinted at in some documents you can find in the mortuary dust men kept receiving corpses that had already been properly prepared for burial and they couldn't figure out why i'd imagine the frequent appearance of one corpse getting up and wandering around asking what literally anything in the world was and why anything was anything probably roused some suspicion as well why am i blue on the box art i don't know buddy because making games is complicated and sometimes you end up as a blue man i think this is as good a place as any to break for spoilers this is a game that plays like a heavy tome a compendium of stories replete with histories and bestiaries where even an inconsequential item a ring you found in a puddle of piss in a back alley is accompanied by a retelling of its lifespan and properties over the course of several paragraphs anything i've said is barely scratching the surface but if none of that has intrigued you in the slightest this might not be your kind of game torment kinda lives or dies by how interested in it you are i don't know what i'm saying it's a it's a 20 year old game if you haven't played it yet probably never will that's fine good don't play it is it working do you feel like you want to play please come starting this week i'll travel to the outer plains is half off that's right are you struggling to keep the lights on your landlord regrettably still alive escape to the planes 50 off not including the fees we need to cover the cost of summoning the portal i can't believe we're offering this i went up to management and said are you serious we're practically giving away this life-changing opportunity for half the price he looks me dead in the eyes and said just read the script there's a whole room full of dum-dums willing to do it if you can't and i said hang on bill i really need this i burned the bridge at my last job when i got hired here i pissed in the fryer they'll arrest me if i step foot in there and he said and no you can't do this i have rights call now you know i don't think i'm quite convinced yet also upset i'd imagine about farad's scheme of selling the already buried dead is the dead nation deep in the catacombs under sigil is a society of reanimated dead ruled by an entity called the silent king while searching for the bronze sphere you are forced to enter their territory and thus agree to enslavement there forever unable to talk to the silent king directly you ask through his intermediary for some kind of trade this is easier if you help a dead woman remember her name which due to the deteriorating state of her mind and body had been lost to her in return for assisting her she teaches you stories bones tell the ability to speak the language of the dead which disappointingly is not a series of death metal growls and guttural moans but more of a telepathic understanding you sort of interface with what is left of their spirit this opens up a number of opportunities and different dialogue options throughout the rest of the game as well the main thing to be done here is assisting the dead nation with their rad problem both literal and figurative and then like both at the same time there are actual rats in the form of cranium rats that gain a hive mind intelligence as they gain numbers those need to be killed as they feed off the zombies they also have a spy in their midst but that spy is also a wear rat working for the other rats i'd prefer to not kill rats or rat folk or rats and x people but also i'm usually just pleased by seeing rat representation in gaming i think that is ultimately the most important takeaway satisfying the silent king allows you to leave and continue looking for the sphere which is sort of unceremoniously laying with the belongings of a dead adventurer but on the precipice of some kind of trap-laden puzzle room that one of your previous incarnations left for you inside you find various carvings documenting the thoughts of what may be several different versions of yourself they hopelessly ponder what your immortality means is it a punishment is there a divine reason and how do you end it they also cover the morality of it all if a different version of me committed some kind of terrible crime while another led an altruistic life aligned with good will i be judged as one instead of many some are more paranoid and vengeful blaming this condition on the nameless one's first killer one that may still be hunting him and aware of his ability to cheat death this persona is likely why out of all the pertinent clues that could have been tattooed on your back your name wasn't among them a past self insists on the importance of remaining nameless names are only the means by which you can be tracked across the plains why put your clues on your back though where you need it to be read to you by someone else ah yeah let's see don't forget your journal look for fared and i'm a stupid [ __ ] with an ugly face and a big butt and my butt smells and i like to kiss my own butt huh weird when ferret gets his sphere he reveals that many years ago a very different nameless one approached him to cut a deal where if any of his collectors found his corpse they would prevent the dust men from cremating it he doesn't know the location of your journal but suggests you ask the one who found your body last his adopted daughter anna he instructs her to show you where you were found a place he calls the haunted alley and maybe pick up on the trail of your lost belongings the path to this alley is through a gang hideout magically concealed with a painted on door as you make your way through it we see that ferret is attacked by the shadow creatures from earlier once again just missing you arriving at a place actually called the alley of lingering size anna leads you to the very spot where she initially mistook the nameless one for a corpse where a face made of stone appears from a nearby wall it speaks to them recalling that it saw you die here suddenly the nameless one unlocks a memory of being surrounded by the shadows and they tear him apart anna then finds him already somewhat intact it becomes apparent that this voice is not just a face and a wall in an alley it is the alley for whatever reason this alley and every ruined building and path within it is a single living being that wishes to divide to spread itself further this would open up new areas of sigil that have been cut off the only thing preventing it is the dabus the lady of payne's drones they mindlessly busy themselves with fixing parts of the alley which halts it from essentially birthing new bits of alley so in order to help out the alley you gotta help it get rid of the dabbas in the area and essentially undo all their repairs i remember this plot point being where things sort of solidified for me i found myself grinning at how delightfully bizarre this detail was this ultimately unimportant little aside that is in its own way a whole game's worth of an idea all on its own there's a lot of things in games that can elicit joy within me a well-written character with an emotional core a grid inventory a lead pipe as a weapon and one kind of joy that so rarely gets appeased is just appreciating a really creative idea this is a big ideas game it's overflowing with them are all of them amazing yes is that an exaggeration yes am i lying yes am i a liar yes even though there is technically a lawful and chaotic solution to this the outcome is equally [ __ ] up you get a better sense of it if you have the ability to talk to the dead but you essentially just have to box it in like a sims character where it circles a room with no exit desperately hammering away to no avail until it withers and dies and then the grim reaper rides in on a skateboard and poofs him into a tombstone i don't know i've never played the sims the alley begins to change shape and the gang heads through to the next area right at the gate they are distracted while two wear rats kidnap mort so you start doing what the nameless one does best asking questions much like the last stretch of sigil there are plenty of activities to get mixed up in if you don't want to sprint to the conclusion you could help a harmonium guard find love help cure a man who's been cursed to piss and [ __ ] himself for all eternity or ping pong back and forth between the sensates at the brothel addressing a web of little fetch quests some of which are actually quite involved apparently there's a local guy named lothar master of the bones which sounds like as good a place as any to start looking lothar turns out to be a powerful wizard with an impressive collection of skulls and he refuses to let go of mort unless you find a more interesting skull to replace him with there are actually seven instances where you can collect a suitably interesting skull i wound up giving him the head of the whererat spy from the dead nations pleased with the replacement he is willing to entertain some questions the nameless one learns that the reason he is immortal is that his mortality has been magically stripped from him by someone named ravel puzzlewell a nighthag a woman lothar claims was so evil that the lady of payne had her amazed she now dwells in a pocket dimension out of reach unless you know the portal and key i really appreciate the lead up to ravel because look you talk to a lot of people in this game that's kind of the main thing you do in it and everyone has something to say about ravel and they'll usually add an interesting tidbit about her history or they'll simply be too afraid to discuss her though she may be rotting in an extra dimensional prison she's left her mark on sigil as one of few brazen enough to earn the contempt of the lady of pain and it makes the confrontation with her and the realization of what kind of person she really is very impactful they essentially sell her as a disney movie villain but the truth is actually really well presented the woman who runs sigil's art gallery expands that she's from an order of evil hags from the plain of hades and had come to sigil as a result of her obsession with puzzles the one that plagued her the most being torment's sort of recurring motif question what can change the nature of a man though you don't need to commit to any of the factions for life joining them can reveal a lot of interesting information and unlock new memories along with the dustiman you got the godsman or believers of the source a faction that kinda reads the closest to christianity they believe there is a purpose to the multiverse it isn't as random and uncaring as you'd think also when you die depending on the life you've lived you'll either ascend to some kind of celestial divinity or be reincarnated as a lower being mobile gamers perhaps the revolutionary league is a group of anarchists that wish to see all the other factions dismantled believing one should seek the truth of the multiverse and decide for themselves what it all means the chaosthetics or chaosmen are a group of barking wraffled random weirdos that embrace their chaotic alignment and believe there is no order in the universe only randomness holds up spork joining these guys requires you to go complete joker mode but it does result in some amusing exchanges you get some xp for joining them and if you simply ask to join again whereupon the recruiter replies you're already a member you get another hit of xp if you respond with exactly one of the most significant memories is unlocked when you gain access to the society of sensations private sensorium joining them grants you the ability to use sensory stones to experience the sensations of those who recorded memories and experiences on them one of these stones happens to have been recorded by the ghost we met in the mortuary dionara there are a lot of revelations in this game that you can learn about in different ways like if you don't touch her sensory stone and experience this the information within will be relayed to you eventually in some way but this particular moment did stay with me long after the first playthrough thanks to the quality of writing and my ability to be emotionally affected by almost anything set here as a monument to the feeling of longing this experience recounts through dionera's eyes a moment in which the nameless one has returned from some journey and asks her for help but it's written in such a way that our nameless one is forced to experience both ends of this brutal conversation being placed in the body and thoughts of dionara this woman that loves him endlessly would literally and probably did die for him and yet also regaining the hazy memory of this other hymn a nameless one he knows to be a heartless monster that is manipulating her because he at one point was that person knowing both sides he knows that he's essentially watching this woman sign her death warrant by trusting him with her life this extreme clashing of emotions winds up being too much for him and he screams with bloody tears shooting out of his eyes when he comes back to reality something only fall from grace seemed to give a [ __ ] about in this public setting i guess if this is the kind of thing people regularly get off on then they'd probably just side-eye you mid-conversation like oh what he's having pain misery i think the added weight of unlocking the memory of this event and at the same time reliving it created a sort of gazing into a mirror within a mirror effect a being john malkovich nightmare where he was the abused and the abuser updated my journal updated my journal one of the other stones surprisingly seems to put you in contact with ravel for a brief period though these are meant to be a record you seem to be able to exchange words through some bit of trickery she must have devised she urges him to find her giving some cryptic hints and referring to him as her precious man amidst the asking of numerous questions we learned that the key to ravel's maze lies in the blood of her daughter a sensate student at the brothel that simply refuses to acknowledge her relation to a notorious monster inside ravel's maze you finally meet the legend the myth the tiny plump bean that is ravel puzzle well a not too threatening classic halloween witch one you'd no doubt see riding a broom with a black cat in tow or waving their hands over a bubbling cauldron exclaiming i'm a little witch she at first seems pleased to see you but upon inspecting the damage done to your body laments that the nameless one is no longer the one she knew i guess there are a couple moments that the game's title could come from but i'd wager a lot of it is this scene when she equates the misery that the various versions of the nameless one have caused and endured as endless torment attracting others in torment to follow him into oblivion the next bit is important especially if you've kept up correspondence with your followers you can talk at length with each of your followers learning about their history their motivations or their opinions of the other followers pretty much all of them have these sort of dead ends you hit though things they don't want to discuss no matter how much you pry it's here that ravel sort of calls out each of them one by one and hints at the torment that attracted them to the nameless one like he's some kind of anguish magnet all of these can be dug out of them now through your conversations what's immediately clear in ravel's rambling is that despite looking like an unlovable cartoon hag she clearly held a deep fondness for the original nameless one she still refers to him as beautiful her precious man and her pretty thing and recounting the moment he lost his mortality and thus she lost the person she cared about does seem rather difficult for her she can't recall why the original wanted immortality other than he desperately sought to prolong his life but she knows that she certainly regrets giving it to him i'd imagine her affection for him was so strong she didn't really care why he wanted it she just wanted to appease him even though the nameless one can shake off death innumerable times there is a hidden cost with every death he steals the life of another to continue the shadows that pursue him are the result of this vengeful shades of stolen life that exist only to destroy their creator after she had performed the ritual to remove his mortality she killed him to test if it had worked only to realize that with his mortality left his memories leaving only a shell of the one she loved a truth anna is able to read from her words ravel is unable to undo the ritual return the nameless one's mortality to a shell but she suggests consulting a deva an angel in the classic sense a guy with wings that once dwelled in the seven heavens but is now stuck down here in the astral styx for me this whole sequence is probably the game's peak so part of me wishes it took more time to get here i mean really there is so much you can actually do before this point that saying that is a little absurd i feel like you could actually do maybe 80 percent of the game's content if you really took the time to chat up everyone in single but there is something so final and satisfying about the confrontation with ravel it feels like the culmination of so much and yet really you're just given another name to wander the planes asking around for and while i like everything that comes after this point it does begin to feel like a different experience altogether it feels faster more linear and eventually it narrows into a straight road to the finish line in looking around online it doesn't seem like anyone has a clear answer on why this is could be budget could be time could be the manner in which the workload was split between its creators could be cut content so it would fit on a reasonable number of disks none of these would surprise me i've learned to accept that all good games come out of the oven a little lumpy and burnt like an intellectual philosophical dino nugget even though she gives you a new lead when it's time to say goodbye ravel becomes enraged and insists that you stay in her maze with her that it's their home and he will love her as he'd promised to it's such an interesting subversion that you hear so many horror stories about this mythic monster but in your final interaction you just kind of pity her the original nameless one must have lied and manipulated her in much the same way he did dianara had her throw her life away trying to appease him even as her words become threats of violence he's just like i don't want to do this there's no need i'll i'll just go hey maybe i'll come back but she's just been stewing in this regret and pain for what she did that all those words carry a venom to them they fight and ravel appears to die as the gang leaves ravel's maze we see that she had only been playing dead but she's approached by a giant being called the transcendent one they speak with some familiarity and she implies that this incarnation is particularly powerful and is ultimately killed by this transcendent one as if this wasn't enough of a bummer a detail not entirely put under a microscope but that really affected me was the fate of ravel's other fragments other divergent forms of ravel that led similar but not identical lives in sigel one of these being a sweet old mage named mebeth that can teach you the arts if you like who upon realizing that ravel was killed just kinda accepts that she's gotta go now like she just got the letter in the mail and using language not dissimilar to ravel says there's nothing keeping her here anymore no don't go out of here quick well guess i better mosey on out of here a portal leads the gang to a place in the outlands named cursed this place is interesting because it's what's called a gate town that sits at the border of another plane in this case a prison plane called carcerai every plane in the great wheel is influenced by some kind of alignment varying shades of chaos or law but the outlands specifically sigil at its center is true neutral the places at the edges of the outlands are not so much and over time could change alignment and whole towns could slip into other planes so if a place like cursed were to become chaotic enough by i don't know cutting all the labels off their mattresses it could quite literally poof into carcerai a chaotic evil hell dimension the nameless one learns of a deva named trius that is said to be held prisoner beneath the town but reaching that requires entering a portal the key to which is a phrase that nobody knows the full version of instead pieces of it are held by a handful of trusted people meaning you're gonna have to do tasks for each of them to piece it together even if you're trying to be mostly good all these tasks seem to be a bit chaotic especially the one where i let a demon trapped in a pentagram free that was one that had me like hang on this is usually something too cool to be good right and i know this place is teetering on the brink of chaos would freeing a big scary demon like adversely you know what [ __ ] it let's go beneath cursed the nameless one finds a burnt and chained up trius who is not quite as friendly as one would imagine an angel to be i'm feeling so gosh dang chaotic right now dude let's just mess stuff up let's disrespect our surroundings oh you have lost a source of information vital to your quest oh [ __ ] hey on the bright side we all leveled up and we still have each other oh the game's over i mean as endings go that's kind of metal all right it's over i'll move on next game the gang finds a way to free him in exchange for another lead on our rogue mortality he suggests visiting and i don't know how to pronounce this name so i'm gonna make an attempt with visual forked tongue a cornugon fiend that is essentially cursed to live a charitable life because of trios at the crater figil has been banished to he explains that he used to be a well-respected military leader of sorts until trius was able to trap him and force him to feel pain upon refusing help to those who ask so now he just kind of hangs out under some bones and makes his flaccid bongs i'm sorry dude it's uh it's good to have an outlet interestingly trius was able to do this by doing something the lawful evil demon never even considered he lied to him vigil wishes he could kill trius calls him a betrayer but doesn't know anything about the nameless one however he does say that he's heard of a place that may be what he's looking for called the fortress of regret not to look ahead into the future but unless i'm mistaken and i could easily fix this in my own head canon it doesn't make a whole lot of sense why he'd know about the fortress of regret even in this dialogue he doesn't say why it's related to the topic of the nameless one's mortality he's just like well i've heard of a place even as i'm saying it i'm realizing just how small an infraction it is but when you've got so many moving parts in a story and so many of them just work seamlessly the moment something feels a little off it's like there's a beacon placed on it oh not so perfect now are we oh how the mighty have fallen you thought nobody noticed how you i you know what i don't even remember what you did are you sure nobody's listening at the door he doesn't know how to get to the fortress of regret but he'd wager a stack of heads in the plane of bayator would be able to give you directions sure enough over in hell there is a disgusting pillar of chattering skulls that collects the heads of those whose lying led to the deaths of others before approaching it it's possible to get mort to come clean about his origins all the way he's be
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