TL;DR: Torment is a bad game.

How dare you criticize me, mortal?

For years, if you’d asked me what the best game I’d ever played was, I would’ve said “Torment.”  I bought my copy way back in 1999, before the horseless carriage conquered our streets.  Things were simpler then.  If you failed to doff your bowler to a bemonocled gentleman passing you on the promenade, why, his valet would strike you square on the jaw and you’d deserve it, too.  

Torment didn’t sell well but is fondly remembered for its poignant story and remains a cult favorite that routinely tops best-ever lists.  When Roger Ebert opined that video games can never be art, he was repeatedly offered Torment as refutation.  I agree that its story was superbly compelling, but if we set that aside and consider Torment as a game, it’s far from artful.  It’s bad.


When I describe Torment as a bad game I’m not commenting on the quality of its plot or characters.  I’m judging the interactive mechanics that make Torment a game and not, say, a novel.  These mechanics are bad.  Torment abounds in boring fedex/killex quests solved through shallow combat defanged by the Nameless One's immortality.  The world’s peculiar poverty of loot obviates equipment management, one of the genre’s staple amusements.  As a mage, the Nameless One has only a handful of interesting and useful spells.  As a thief he’s gimped.  As a fighter he’s boring, but deadly so, switching the game over to easy mode. 

I'm not trying to assassinate a sacred cow here.  My interest is in considering how Torment illustrates the shortcomings of the video game as a storytelling medium.  Torment tells its story through dialogue trees so extraordinarily long as to constitute a Choose Your Own Adventure book read in parallel to the game.  This in itself isn't a problem;  I've enjoyed books far lengthier than Torment.  The problem is that Torment's game elements impede its story.  Morsels of delicious plot are sandwiched between tedious hack/slash rampages often of only tangential relevance.  The result is a corking page turner welded to the world’s worst e-reader—to traverse the gap between chapters you have to click three hundred times. 

Torment in a nutshell:  half wall of text, half isometric hack'n'slash.

Once I’d begun thinking about Torment in this way, I tried to think of a game whose mechanics added value to a story.  I can imagine a better game containing Torment’s story but I can’t imagine a game that would improve the story, make it into something more satisfying than it could have been as a mere block of text.  How can a game breathe life into a story?  That isn’t a rhetorical question—I hope someone figures it out.  As it stands the video game is a terribly inefficient storytelling device.  This is not to say there’s no hope for games as art (a separate question) or even as story-writing devices.  Even my dear old mum—never played a video game in her life, bless her heart—thought my Dwarf Fortress stories were interesting.