Planescape Torment and Icewind Dale: Enhanced Editions

Genre: Compilation / RPG

Players: 1

.

Review:

(Note: Included in Dungeons & Dragons Bundle along with Baldur’s Gate and Baldur’s Gate II: Enhanced Editions and Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition.)

After the release of the now-legendary Western RPG Baldur’s Gate on PCs in 1998, developer Bioware followed that game with multiple other similar games using the same game systems, also using the Dungeons and Dragons license but telling different stories set in different areas of the same world. Among the games they released were Planescape Torment, released on PCs in 1999, and Icewind Dale, released on PC the following year. Icewind Dale was remade with improved graphics and features in 2014, with Planescape Torment getting a remake in 2017, with Icewind Dale including that game’s expansion content, and both games getting brought to mobile devices as well.

Finally, after 20 years, both of these games have been brought to consoles for the first time, including the Nintendo Switch, in the form of ports of the Enhanced Editions… although whether the wait was worth it is a question that will truly depend on who you ask.

If you read my review of the Nintendo Switch ports of Baldur’s Gate and Baldur’s Gate II Enhanced Edition, you’ll probably be getting deja vu at this point, and that’s because many of this collection’s good qualities and many of its bad ones are identical to those games. However, I think this collection fares slightly better, as Planescape is a smidge more user-friendly than the other games, and both of the games in this collection have visuals that have aged much better than the first Baldur’s Gate game.

That said, these games don’t exactly look fantastic. Even with the makeover the Enhanced Editions gave these games, the 2D graphics are a horrible eyesore when zoomed in, with blurry, pixellated characters and environments. Things look a bit better when zoomed out, but at that point your characters become so tiny that you can scarcely make them out save for the bright green circles around them. Oh, and I’ll warn you right now – before you even start, you will want to change the text size in these games to maximum in the options menu, because at its default setting it’s damn near illegible.

While the graphics here have aged poorly, the story still remains as epic as ever. Planescape Torment casts players in the role of The Nameless One, who awakens in a mortuary after dying and losing his memory, with only the scars and tattoos covering his body as his initial clues to who he is and what happened to him. Icewind Dale is closer to a traditional Dungeons and Dragons campaign, putting players into the role of a scouting party (whose members the players can create to their liking at the outset) who come across a dark plot that threatens the villages of the region.

The music here is good (with good use of environmental noises to set the tone), but the real treasure is the voice acting, with these games touting a who’s who of some of the most respected voice actors in the industry – names like Jim Cummings, Jennifer Hale, Keith David, Dan Castellaneta, and the late David Ogden Stiers and Tony Jay. While the game definitely shows its age, it is still nevertheless a class act in its storytelling, and the excellent voice cast is a large part of the reason why.

However, there’s another problem here beyond the age of these two games, and that problem is… these really were games built for the PC. The attempt to fit what was originally keyboard and mouse controls onto a gamepad has resulted in an awkward Frankenstein’s Monster of a control scheme that’s awkward and confusing, and even after a ridiculously long tutorial, I feel that most gamers will still be struggling with it long afterward. And despite that the Enhanced Editions of games in this series have been on mobile devices since 2012, the Nintendo Switch version features no touchscreen controls, when it feels like this game really, really could have used them. Also I need to mention that the multiplayer features have been stripped out of the Nintendo Switch version of the game.

Even beyond the control issues and missing features though, the old-fashioned design of this game is just really inelegant and user-unfriendly by today’s standards. Simply telling a character to pick a lock is an ordeal of selecting that character, going into their menu, choosing the “Thief skills” icon (not “lock pic”, because that would be too straightforward), and selecting the target… and if the lock picking fails, they need to open up the menu and start the process all over again. Planescape Torment fares a little better in this regard, with a slightly simplified version of the same setup as the other games, but it’s still awkward and takes some getting used to.

In the end, Planescape Torment and Icewind Dale both suffer many of the same issues on the Switch that Baldur’s Gate I and II did. While neither game is the eyesore that the first Baldur’s Gate game was, they both have still aged poorly, and these are games that were clearly designed for the PC, and just don’t work as well on a console (though despite being one of the oldest of the bunch, Planescape Torment has aged slightly better than the others). If you absolutely need to have these games on the Switch, they get the job done, but unless you’re a diehard fan of these games, you may find them too tedious to be worth the trouble. And if you are a fan of these games, you’ll probably find they worked better on the PC.

tl;dr – Planescape Torment and Icewind Dale: Enhanced Editions are two classic Western RPGs from 1999 and 2000 that are finally playable on a console for the first time in this release. Unfortunately, the awkward controls in this release make it seem like the game was a poor fit for consoles in the first place, and this problem is made worse by horribly dated graphics. On top of that, the basic game design here is very user-unfriendly, even for those who can get used to the odd controls. The story and voice acting in both of these games is still excellent, but only the most patient players will find it worth suffering through this archaic mess to enjoy that story.

Grade: C

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