I remember mining the companion conversations for XP and somehow accidentally triggering a romance banter with Annah (with kiss).

This was my disgusted face.

Can a game have better NPCs than PS:T? All of your companions have an amazing backstory - I remember the long conversations with them with a lot of options and huge walls of text (I love huge walls of text). Till this day I never found a game that have companions this deep (Mass Effect and Dragon Age get close). It's hard to choose a favorite, but the one I remember best is Dak'kon's.
The only downside is that sometimes you have to battle, what interrupts the flow of the game - the total contrary of any other game :D

As an SSI Gold Box game fan, the word "Encamp" had always meant a 5-second-long task of regaining HP and hoping to avoid a random encounter while my party slept. It wasn't until PS:T that I experienced entire multi-hour playing sessions just "encamped": talking with party members and gaining XP, spells, and items as a result. No combat, no quests; just entire sessions of my party sitting around the campfire and talking (in my imagination).

No other game has ever made "resting" so enthralling.

Thank you so much for the promo!

Ahhhh, Encamp - Fix, so many memories...

I stopped "roleplaying" with BG and PS:T - those other characters were not *my* characters, and I couldn't speak for them. And, of course, I played the Gold Box games waaaaay before the Infinities, when I had time for a magical tea party.

Planescape was why I joined GOG.

Updated my journal.
Updated my journal.
Updated my journal.
Updated my journal.
Updated my journal.
Updated my journal.

I'm gone.

Planescape: Torment is one of the very few stories which managed - and still manages - to move me for the duration of the entire game. It's hard to describe exactly what is so incredible about it, but I'm sure you all have a particular work of fiction which you hold very dearly because of its quality.
It's the kind of story that manages to tell many clever stories in its own telling, that manages to always impress you with its cleverness, novelty and its ability to genuinely surprise you, that never lets down the quality of its writing, that endears itself to you for its sheer genius.

Only a handful of works have made me feel this way since childhood (where every new trope was a wonder to behold), and I hold Planescape: Torment above them. Final Fantasy Tactics: War of the Lions, Neverwinter Nights 2: Mask of the Betrayer, Harry Potter, Watchmen and A Song of Ice and Fire are the works that spring immediately to mind as possessing these same qualities, some more enduringly than others, although I can probably think of a few movies and the odd TV episode if given time.

You *know* what I speak of by now, yes? They're stories that make you think in new ways, that change you.

I first played the game when I was 14 or 15. As I recall, I had recently finished the first Fallout, which I had picked up on a whim, and decided that I should give some of these old RPGs a chance. I vaguely recall comparing it to the other Infinity Engine games, so I had probably played Baldur's Gate a bit around then as well. I had always been a bit intrigued by Torment - it had received a nice review in Svenska PC Gamer a few years prior, it had a strange setting and it supposedly did some very strange things with normal RPG mechanics.

Going in, all I knew was that I would probably enjoy the macabre and alien milieu, but that was basically it. The box and manual were no help, as they were, for some reason, in Italian. I started up the game, *knowing* that I would likely enjoy a few of the songs, but not all of them; I knew I would start up in a morgue; that there would be a skull chattering at me, and that I couldn't die.
To say that I enjoyed it would be an understatement. The main menu theme had me enthralled from the get-go, and once I had created my character I was lost. It took me about three hours to get through the Mortuary, but I didn't notice. The strange, surreal setting with its many interactions and flavourful details proved to resonate very strongly with me, and just going through the first dungeon had me hooked. I played through the game with no long breaks as I had with Fallout and the first Baldur's Gate (which I think I finished after PST anyway), and *know* that I enjoyed every bloody second of it.

I have since replayed it twice: the first time I got to the Upper Ward and then somehow lost interest, and the second time was almost two years ago when the game was released on GOG. Somehow, I think the story was even better both those times. Nonetheless, to keep it fresh, I must pace myself; I can't replay the game whenever I want, which is a moderately common urge, lest it cease its imparting of wonder. One playthrough will last me for months in terms of catharsis, but there are so many things I can do differently next time, is there not?

Maybe my torment is to *know* that the game can only be experienced for the first time once.

I thought you were a deader for sure.

Don't trust the skull.

You know what guys? After reading all this

I FEEL STRONGER.

It took me years to get into Torment. The atmosphere was completely different from any game that I had ever played up until that point and originally put me off.

Once I finally got into it, I became hooked for probably a week and would not leave the computer. Each time I replayed I found things that I had missed before.

I remember that I missed the Alley of Dangerous Angles during my first playthrough, and my experience was that much richer the second time around for it.