Culture

Platform: LINUX (5/5).
The Nameless One's golden armour is not inexplicably polished to a mirrored-sheen. He does not ride into battle on a small but plucky caramel-coloured mare, trading blows with troll-bandits to heroically save the spice-merchant. He certainly does not go on rodent-killing errands for a series of identical jolly barkeeps in a series of identically comfy medieval European-style hamlets. The protagonist of 1999's Planescape: Torment awakens, stinking of embalming fluid, every inch of grey skin, from his grease-matted black hair to his stained rusty loin-rags, littered with ragged scars and tattoos.
 

An immortal in Sigil, the City of Doors, you awaken in a morgue surrounded by grizzly embalmed bodies and the undead who tend to them. Out of desperation, many Sigil residents sign their bodies over to postmortem labour. Perhaps you were destined for that; you can't remember because your memories vanish every time you are reborn. In the Nineties, the amnesia trope was not quite as hokey as it is today, and in Planescape: Torment it is used extremely effectively. You spend emotional and beautiful moments learning about the grizzly crimes of your former selves, and deciding whether or not to follow a new path.
 

Torment's dialogue contains 800,000 incredibly well chosen words. Don't worry - you don't need to read of all them, the game made branching conversations into an art before the majority of RPG designers knew what they were. It's clear that Black Isle Studios intimately understood the design of their game. Maybe what I appreciate most is that they understood that the combat wasn't a strength of the game. It would have been so easy to wrestle with it, making it an incredibly frustrating blemish; instead the simplistic encounters are usually easy, your immortality makes it difficult to fail, and it becomes a fun little change of pace.
 

$10 US on www.gog.com. Go, children.