Planescape: Torment: Enhanced Edition - 3/20 hours

I remember now why I never finished this game. It is entirely less than helpful about guiding you from place to place. Often, you will get a sidequest that gives you no direction whatsoever. The key to those is invariably to wander around aimlessly and hover your mouse over every single one of the more or less interchangeable NPCs until you find one with a non-generic name. Then you harass them for information. If that doesn't work, repeat the process until you find the NPC that does have the information you need. It's not terrible, because a lot of these NPCs are pretty interesting, but it does seem like a mechanic that has been calculated to annoy me specifically.

Which is a shame because Planescape: Torment is actually kind of a great game. The central mystery is compelling - you wake up in a morgue with no memories and quickly learn that you cannot be killed at all and as you progress through the game, you are constantly finding little hints of your past lives and indications that you were kind of a dick in most of them. And the companions you meet are all quirky and interesting - your first party member is a floating skull that may well be a bottomless repository of arcane knowledge, but doesn't let that stop him from being a sarcastic, wise-cracking pervert (though, I will admit, I may have outgrown the necrophilia jokes - now I just think they're gross).

And, of course, there's the city of Sigil itself. It's like one half art deco, one half victorian slum, and one half fever dream of a mad alchemist. And yes, I know that adds up to three halves, but that's Sigil for you - overstuffed with daring fantasy ideas (like the faction that believes all of known existence is just a crappy afterlife for some better world and wishes to achieve the spiritual detachment to find oblivion in "True Death" - and they're not the villains), even if the novelty can make it sometimes overwhelming.

I wish more video games did that. A lot of fantasy games seem to want to stick to a medieval-Europe analogue, and those that don't will usually only stray geographically - medieval east Asia or medieval north Africa, but rarely, say stone age Australia or colonial Canada. And fewer still dare to go into the completely fantastic, worlds that defy any sort of easy analogies with real world history. Which is a shame, because there aren't really any intrinsic limits here. You're creating a whole universe in a box, so the rules are only what you make them.

Because so much of my time was wandering around talking to random NPCs (and fighting off the periodic thug attacks which add basically nothing to the experience), I haven't gotten too far into the plot. My immediate goal is to find Pharrod, a shady scavenger who may or may not have the Nameless One's diary, which could offer tantalizing insights into his past. As much as Planescape: Torment's trial and error gameplay annoys me, I'm looking forward to advancing the plot. Even 20 years after the fact, the game looks gorgeous and it has atmosphere to spare. Just existing in this world is enough to keep me on the hook for the foreseeable future.