Planescape: Torment

The Good
It's a superbly well-written game -- easily the best written game I know of in the rpg genre, ranking with the best adventure games.

The central quest to "know thyself" is not unusual if you've played a lot of adventure games, but is unusual in the genre.

Certain mini-quests are extremely memorable. The game starts you out in a mortuary and some of the things you do there are fascinating -- I especially like a moment where manipulating an item in your inventory gets you experience.

Dialog trees are not tough, exactly, but are often absorbing. It's possible to gain experience by taking the proper route with various characters, very neat.

One mini-quest, which requires you to die in order to continue, neatly subverts most rpg quest-like actions. There's also a mini-surprise here that really is eye-opening, regarding your relationship to one of the main npcs.

Excellent voice acting and music, with some genuinely haunting moments.

The Bad
I'm one of the eccentric few who find this game overrated.

Much has been made of the unique setting of the Planescape world, and that's true. That said, though, it's not that unusual. There's still wizards, thieves, priests, etc. Instead of healing potions there's blood clots, but they do the same sort of thing. You'll still see skeletons and zombies -- not quite as you have before, but they're there. Point is, much of the game can be seen as a one-to-one transfer: clots = solutions, charms = scrolls, etc.

The game is very well-written, and often plays like an adventure game. Frankly, it probably would have been more successful as an adventure game. The rpg blendings work well at the start, less well as time goes on. You're in trouble when the most interesting parts of an rpg are the conversations and puzzles, and the combat seems a slog.

My biggest complaint is that the combat engine here is awful. You can pause, give orders to your party, then unpause and see how things turned out -- but your characters don't often behave as you'd have liked. Bad guys often swarm the weakest party, and it can be extremely frustrating to pull somebody out of harm's way to safety. Especially when they kind of ran off and did their own thing despite your wishes.

This wouldn't be a game killer for me, except that combat increases dramatically in the third quarter of the game, and it's exceptionally frustrating to play. This game was not suited to dungeon-crawl antics, and suffers when you have to do them.

I in fact stopped near the end and never finished this (although I read a solution to see how it all turned out -- and the ending seems worthy of praise).

The Bottom Line
This is an interesting attempt at an adventure-game/rpg hybrid. It works extremely well in it's first half, less so in the second. It's considered a classic by most gamers, and if you're an rpg fan you owe it to yourself to try it, if for no other reason than to see what the fuss is about. Like many hybrid games, though, I think the blending of genres points up the flaws of each -- it's a tribute to the makers that they can keep the plates spinning as long as they do, but eventually it does all coming crashing down. Despite it's worthy sections, I can't recommend it.