Comment on Planescape: Torment, Part 2: …to the Desktop by Another Alex

Cheers for the article; I'm surprised at the hostility, given that Torment was always known to be a real mixed bag.

I played Torment at the exact right time (the age of seventeen), and it made a real impact on me. Thinking back to the series on Ultima 4, I think it had the same effect on a new generation of teenagers: a game that, for all its issues, made you stop and think about something bigger than itself. I missed the era of meditating on the virtues, but I spent more time thinking on Torment's themes than I'd like to admit.

I tried playing it a decade later and found the game intolerable - I quit before leaving the first area. The sheer amount of time that everything takes really drags on the player; the simple quest of "get a crowbar, open a door" requires reading pages and pages of text, and I just couldn't stomach it as an adult. As a teenager, though, I couldn't get enough of it, beating the game multiple times. Maybe the best parallel is shaggier YA literature, which can be thematically heavy and knows its audience, but lacks the craft to go beyond it.