Planescape: Torment

Planescape: Torment casts the player as the Nameless One, a man with a scar-covered body who keeps waking up again and again in a mortuary with no memory of who he is or why he cannot die. It takes place in the bizarre, philosophically charged world of Planescape, where the city of Sigil, perched atop the cosmic Spire, connects an endless number of planes of existence, sects, and demons, and where the game's central question isn't a fight for the world, but rather what can change a person's nature.

Unlike most RPGs of its time, the game was built primarily on text and dialogue rather than combat or item collecting, offering the player unusually extensive, thoroughly crafted conversations even with characters other games wouldn't have considered, including a talking skull and a living tattoo. The system is based on the same engine as Baldur's Gate, meaning second-edition D&D rules with real-time-with-pause combat, but the combat component here is deliberately secondary to exploration and story, and the player can complete a large part of the game through persuasion and clever decisions. The Nameless One can also collect memories of his previous incarnations and summon fragments of his own past for help, which factors into solving some of the quests. The accompanying music and darkly poetic visual style reinforce the feeling of a crumbling, dreamlike world on the border of life and death, where questions of guilt, memory, and identity are treated with just as much weight as combat mechanics.

Planescape: Torment is still cited today as one of the best-written RPGs ever, praised for its courage in raising existential questions within a genre that back then relied mostly on action and gear collection. Despite a commercially modest success at launch, the game built a cult following and influenced the approach to storytelling in CRPGs for decades to come, and it's still held up today as a model for how powerfully writing and dialogue can carry an entire game.

Why play it: For players who look for a strong story and existential questions in RPGs rather than gear collection - it's still held up today as a model for how writing can carry an entire game.