Planescape Torment: The Question and the Character Who Answers It

Planescape Torment’s central question — ‘What can change the nature of a man?’ — is asked in the game’s opening and answered by the final boss. But the most significant answer in the game is given by Ravel Puzzlewell, a night hag encountered in her maze, who says: ‘Anything can change the nature of a man. What matter is that you change.’

Ravel’s answer is built into a conversation that most players engage with primarily to solve the puzzle of the Nameless One’s memory and mortality. The thematic climax of the conversation is easy to pass over in the mechanical focus of obtaining the information needed to progress.

The Nameless One has been killed and resurrected so many times that he has been multiple different people — cruel versions, wise versions, good versions. Torment is about whether any of those people are him, or whether identity is continuous enough to survive radical change.

Black Isle built the game’s philosophical argument into its NPC conversations. Ravel is the game’s clearest thinker, and her answer — that change is not threat but fact — is the game’s answer. Players who rushed past her as a puzzle gate missed the answer to the question the game had been asking for forty hours.