It’s not often that I’m tormenting myself by playing a game. But that’s exactly what I’m doing the last couple of months by starting with a game that has been sitting on my backlog for a long time: Planescape: Torment. I told myself that I would start this game sometime after playing through first Baldur’s Gate I and later Baldur’s Gate II. Looking back, I see that I finished the latter game back in June 2022. I’ve been too busy playing other games that I’ve only started with PS:T in late 2023. And I’ve not been playing it as I should have. The way I usually play games is that I pick a main title that I focus my attention on and next to that I play other less demanding games. Often that are games that can be played in short sessions, like racing games or puzzle games. The last big game I finished this way was Divinity Original Sin 2 in October 2023. Since then I have been playing a lot of games that were not too big, but took too much time to play in between a big game such as PS:T. Games like Another World, Lord Winklebottom Investigates, The Ghosts of Blackwood Manor, Lykia and Goodboy Galaxy.

That’s why I haven’t made much progress in PS:T and also didn’t enjoy it as much as I would like, because every time I continue with the game, it has been too long to remember what I did before. Luckily there is an in-game journal that helps with that. It also hasn’t helped that a busy real life got in the way of gaming lately. But I want to rectify this by focusing more on playing only PS:T from now on.

And to help me with that, I want to make a write up of my progress after each session. Due to a still very busy real life, there might be more time in between sessions than I would like, but at least there won’t be any distractions of other games (exempting playing games together with my son).

The last time I played PS:T a third party member finally joined our gang: Annah. But I’m too underlevelled for the first quest she wants us to do, or I’m simply too bad in playing this game properly. So I need to do other things first or buy better gear. I only recently figured out how tattoos work, so maybe that will give me an edge.

In previous play sessions, I totally screwed up one important seeming quest about helping the undead with their rat problem. At one point I made the undead angry with me and now they attack me on sight. That left me no choice but to ally myself with the rats. Completing the quest requires me to get a key. And I think I know who possesses that key, but he simply zaps me to dead every time he sees me. I think completing that quest would be a huge boost to my experience, but I might be wrong.

Although I completed a lot of quests already, there remain quite a few yet to be done. I’ll see how much progress I can make the next time I get a chance to play.