I've tried to get into this game two separate times now and I just can't. I'm still in that initial town after you get out of that prison or wherever you wake up from.

I feel like I'm missing out on a great experience because so many rave about how amazing this cRPG is. However, I can't get over how slow, boring, and monotonous the beginning feels. It feels like there's zero direction on where to go and what to do. When I've said this in the past to hardcore Torment fans, their response was, "That's how it's supposed to feel! You just woke up from death and are directionless without a clue of who you are or what to do! It's PERFECT!" Ok, that's great and all, but it's a horrible response to someone that is finding the slow and directionless beginning to be off-putting.

I do feel like if I can force myself to play enough of Torment, I'll get hooked. But the beginning is just not allowing me to get into it. So I'm wondering, 1) If there are any good guides out there you would recommend that would direct me through the beginning of the game without giving away too many spoilers, and 2) Maybe tell me what I'm missing or that the game picks up the pace and isn't so directionless the further you get into it.

On a side note, I've played and enjoyed many games that don't have a lot of direction to them. It's not that I want a game that forces me down a certain path constantly. But it's the combination of directionless and everything seeming to be so slow and boring that is causing me to quit before I can even get past the first town.

The game picks up when you find Pharod, which is fairly early on. Beyond that, I don't want to say too much for fear of spoilers. I'd also suggest checking the local taverns. After that, you will have a fairly steady trail of breadcrumbs to follow, so the aimless wandering is largely limited only to what you personally want to do; mine, I'd encourage exploration, if only because you never know what clues you might find about your past that aren't addressed by the main quest hook. That said, the plot doesn't really have the same tone as something like, say, BG where the plot is more high fantasy action; PST is paced a bit slower and has more of an emphasis on character study.

If you think a guide would help, I'd check the UHS page for PST; it keeps spoilers for a minimum and reveals individual hints on request to try to guide you to the solution, providing the solution only after you exhaust all available hints.

The "initial town", incidentally, is the main setting of the game; although there are large areas of it you haven't yet been able to access. But by this point, unless you've missed some clues, you should probably have found out that you're unable to die, that according to tattoos on your back you should have had a journal which you seem to have lost. You should also have found out that you need to find "Pharod", whoever he is. I'd suggest asking people if they know who and where he is, as well as where YOU are.

I haven't finished the game yet but I've found it to be quite fun so far. I think I'm about half-way through.

I agree with you that when I first left the Mortuary, I was completely lost and had no idea what to do. I went around talking to random people, asking if they know about Pharod and if they've seen my journal (since those were the main quests at that point). I also did all the side-quests there. Although I didn't find the Hive part to be boring, it got better after I got to the next act, and it's been getting more interesting the further I go.

You could also try a walkthrough for the game at Sorcerer's Place - Planescape.

My best recommendation is to start over and go slowly. If you are saying "after you get out of that prison or wherever you wake up from," you haven't paid enough attention to what is going on and are doing yourself/the game a disservice. You wake up dead in a mortuary not knowing who you are or how you got there; it's crucial to understand that in order to follow the story and what is going on. I don't know what type of games you are used to playing, but if you aren't up for a lot of reading a lot of the time, it may not be for you (honestly I think it can be for anyone if they allow themselves the patience and read it all.)

There should be absolutely no need at all for forcing yourself to play. It's like a good book (better), right from the first line of text it should be gripping and engaging and hard to put down. Here are a few things to keep in mind:

This is a text-heavy game and intends for you to read its text. It is the meat of the game, from the dialogues you have (which is a large part of the game, choosing your dialogue options and learning about yourself based on the choices you make), to the descriptions you see of things in the world, to all the journal entries (characters and monsters and then the actual journal.) Be in the mood to read when playing, simple as that.

The Mortuary is like the tutorial and kind of "teaches' you what to expect and how to handle it in the rest of the game. Every single zombie can be talked to with unique dialogue and things to do. Talk to them all. Explore the entirety of a single map before moving on to the next is also a good way to make something that feels too open more guided. Just make your way through it all, person by person. Imagine being an empty vessel, you must go fill yourself with all that you can find.

This isn't the kind of game to have "speed" that drives you, it's the sort of game that has worlds of infromation for you to discover at your leisure, and it should be compelling as you learn more and more, but the pace is the pace of you, it's not an action game at all. If you want a more free-form feeling, don't feel the need to do as much as possible in one map before going to the next, just go where you want to go and discover what interests you as it interests you, you will make your way back to all the things eventually. Treat it like a book that you can choose to read the entire first act of information in any order you wish before opening up to the 2nd and 3rd acts in which you will do the same.

This game is a philosophical emotional journey of the discovery of self while asking the question "what can change the nature of the self?"

I personally like http://www.gamebanshee.com/planescapetorment/walkthrough.php

There are ads that can be SLIGHTLY annoying, but I love it as a FULL resource for RPGs. It will tell you everything and spoil everything, so careful what you read. I advise just playing for a good long time until you either feel stuck or want to do something but can't figure how to do it, then reading up to wherever you are in the walkthrough, going back and doing the things you missed that you want to do, and continuing on.

I just wanted to add that I have also tried on two separate occasions and was not able to get into the game. I have seen a couple of similar posts elsewhere so I would conclude that PST, for all its reputation, is simply not for everyone and that's probably fine.

For me the issues were:
* I did not find the story interesting or engaging. Having amnesia and needing to find out who you are is a common literary trope which did not grab me. The plot needs to be constantly moving forward for this to be interesting and in this case it was just way too slow. Disclosure: I love reading lots of text and I prefer to play games slowly, but a story still has to be interesting!

* The combat was far too difficult. I died repeatedly. The combat system was also painfully dull. I did not feel like I had any control over the outcome. I did not know how to stop my allies from falling in battle given that it took ages to scrape together enough money to buy just one clot charm. Disclosure: I have played several RPGs and I always prefer the story to the combat. This was a game which has a repuation for being heavy on story and light on combat and yet it was the first RPG whose combat I found unbearably frustrating.

* I activated several sidequests but in many cases found it was too difficult to work out how to complete a sidequest without help from a walkthrough. (Yes I am used to having quest markers. I managed to play Morrowind just fine, but that is because at least it gives you directions, instead of just saying "person X wants Thing Y" and leaving it at that.) As a result I found it difficult to get XP.

I found Pharod, but that is where things got really horrible, since I ended up dying repeatedly in the catacombs. So I thought, maybe I need to do some sidequests to get some more XP. But I was not able to because you are not allowed to leave the catacombs after entering. That is poor design, in my opinion.
I found Pharod's random trinket, expecting to get a good dose of story revelations in reward but IIRC he did not reveal anything interesting so I quit.

Try this: Forget the story, powergame through it solo. Get your wisdom to 25 immediatly for the xp boost. It is amazingly fun. The gameplay is better than people keep saying. No need to try and keep all the weak party members alive, which is the main difficulty of the game. You can reach level 50-70 and all stats to 25. When you have enjoyed that, you will get interested in the story, which is pretty good for a videogame.

The better of the game is the philosophical paradoxes of the story and all characters (like what's the better in Fallout2 is the humoristic political nasty situations).
Yes, this could be good to play this game in god-mode, as the combats are bad: you will miss nothing, you will be able to live the marvellous story with no useless boring fights.

You might have some luck with gamefaq guides:

http://www.gamefaqs.com/pc/187975-planescape-torment/faqs/7964 (this one also has a recommended stat build, but you don't have to follow it if you wish to experiment - and its not too spoiler it simply tells you where things are, recommended things to find, who to talk to, where to go, etc.)

The guide also states - save before talking to anyone; a lot of this game is dialogue and talking to characters; save before clicking "LEVEL UP"

My standard response to folks like the OP is that if they find a game slow and boring and it's a game a lot of other people like, then either they are missing the point of the game or it doesn't suit them and they should put it away and try something else.

Many people who did not avidly play cRPGs back in the 90s simple will not understand how to have fun with a game like Torment because it is entirely unlike most of the mainstream cRPGs that have been made in the past five or ten years. When I hear someone say that a game like Torment is "slow and boring" I know immediately that they have missed the point entirely. What some find slow and boring others call exploration and figuring out what to do next, i.e. adventuring.

There's nothing wrong with not liking the exploration and wandering-about nature of these old school cRPG games: if exploring, talking to everyone, and generally trying to figure out what to do next isn't fun for you, play something else. Game designers have of late focused pretty much exclusively on creating RPGs that don't require so much exploration and wandering around not knowing what to do. All the big-name RPGs of late have used various means of guiding the player towards quest objectives, as opposed to leaving it entirely up to the player to figure out what to do and where to go. Play one of those and have fun.

I'm reasonably confident in stating that 9 out of 10 (probably more) of us who do enjoy these types of games would put Torment as either first or second best all-time cRPG, not counting action RPGs. (It's a close call between PS:T and Fallout 2.)

Whatever you do, don't ever, ever, ever use a guide when first playing through a game like this. You will completely ruin the experience for yourself. Use a guide for a 2nd play through to see the stuff you missed, or look up hints if you are really, really, really stuck and can't move forward (having to _work_ to explore an area doesn't count as being stuck.)

How I personally got into PS:T was the admiration of how many possible options there are. I do agree that at the beginning, it starts off slow, but it is just getting you used to the interface and the "feel" of the game, I believe. Some of this game is like a great interactive story mixed in with some D&D elements, which can take some getting used to. I would find a guide until you get far enough to where you can go off on your own, which would be an hour or maybe 2 maximum until that "hook" grabs you and starts to pull you in.

I LOVE the opening section of PS:T. Even in just those first couple of levels of the mortuary there is a huge amount of variety in characters, quests, and possibilities. You are even already making decisions whose impacts won't be felt for hours of game play! You can explore and resolve mysteries as you please, playing the character the way you want to play, with outcomes dependent on the way you chose to create yourself. You face deception, lost love, death, rebirth, undeath, crime, hidden doors and secret keys, savants, and a menagerie of grotesques. You solve puzzles that you yourself created years or decades earlier! You can run through guns blazing, skulk through quietly, or brazenly act as though you belong. And this is all in the starting location, the first 30-minutes-going-on-2-hours!

Like the OP said, a lot of people really enjoy the beginning of the game. I disagree that it's directionless. The elder scrolls games are, to me, a better example of a game where the player is not given very much direction starting out. But, like the elder scrolls games, PS:T rewards exploration and often provides some of the most colorful characters and quests in its side quests.

I think it's OK to not enjoy PS:T. As a side note, I think it's perfectly possible to recognize the objective value and quality of something without being able to fully appreciate it yourself. I don't think someone will enjoy PS:T if they felt the opening was laborious and bland. That said, it is a game whose story grows deeper and richer as it unfolds and is truly a remarkable, rewarding journey.

I'm not enjoying PST as much as other games of the time period like Fallout and BG because of the combat. The only thing keeping me playing a few hours a week at work is because I get bored and I can just read it like a story like some posters are saying. That much is interesting for sure.

I just wish the combat was more like BG. Right now I'm in catacombs and it still feels like a Diablo hack and slash with me and morte just swinging and biting at everything. Crazy thing is I put stats thinking this was a D&D game and the next screen I was going to pick a mage. But nope, just woke up and now im a fighter with way more intelligence than strength.

So why not become a mage? The earliest point you could do that is as soon as you got to the Ragpicker's square (though Mebbeth puts you through three mini-quests before switching your class). But yes, there isn't much to combat either way, even if you have a large party.

I agree. I've tried three times, but the beginning always bores me to death (to the point of almost falling asleep)

There are a lot of slow start games that I can enjoy, but I think they really screwed up the beginning of PS:T. It just simply doesn't offer anything interesting.