“There are other worlds than these…”
Changing the format, I think, as we haven’t really been able to get much of a discussion going. By all means, continue to play along with me on Twitter and in the comments, but I thought we’d take a more personal approach tonight.
Reading (well, listening to) The Dark Tower at work turned out to be a fitting companion activity for this game. Both, after all, deal with parallel realities and the interactions among them. I find myself far more fascinated with the incidental lines of small NPCs about the metaphysics of the multiverse infinitely than the main thrust of the narrative, such as it is so far.
I got into this with G. Christopher Williams over Skype yesterday, regarding how in fandom we would call Dark Tower an “id fic.” “Id” for the Freudian concept of the base, animalistic mind; “fic” from fiction. Dark Tower‘s first volume is rough, raw, shot from the hip. Torment is not, or at any rate not to the same extent–but it does deal quite consciously with ideas of chaos and order, the purpose of things, their placement.
If something stops me from finishing Torment it will likely be that I keep getting overwhelmed and killed. Death may be a mere inconvenience for The Nameless One but that isn’t making traversing these catacombs any easier. And I don’t really care about TNO yet, the visceral sense of embodiment he lends the player aside. I want to know how this damn world works and how the little pieces fit. Fighting ghouls and zombies and getting overwhelmed by massive hulking wererats frankly doesn’t even seem on-message right now.
Not that I’m entirely sure what the message is meant to be at this point. Except that this is some of the more creative worldbuilding I’ve seen out of a Western RPG. Bioware’s contemporary offerings seem so mundane by comparison. (Still good, don’t get me wrong. But not nearly as wildly imaginative.)
Next week’s target: Get out of the catacombs.
Comments
Oh, you’ll find out the message yet… Please don’t give up; the reason fans of Planescape Torment are so utterly enamored with the game has to do with the way the main narrative gradually unfolds, becoming more wide-ranging and staying very intimate at the same time. Some tips to get through the fighting:
- It’s almost impossible to give TNO a good Armor Class, but tattoos help. Still, it’d be good to keep him out of close-range fighting for now and use Morte and Dak’kon as tanks;
- Do as many sidequests as possible before entering the catacombs;
- Upgrade your companions’ abilities by talking to them (requires high Int and Wis).
On an unrelated note, The Gunslinger is by far the most interesting novel in the series, stylistically speaking (though the rest is still very much worth reading). King abandons the rough and raw writing style in the other books.