amyhuang's review

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As a badly edited novelization of the "revered-by-the-types-of-people-who-revere-cRPGs" cRPG Planescape: Torment -- i.e. more or less a straight port -- this was readable. It helped me figure out, more than a decade later, what happened in the last 15-20% of the game I never finished, without the ordeal of replaying something that hasn't aged well. Additionally, in this format, I was able to access excellent writing and characterization from dialogue trees that I never triggered in-game. On the downside, while the dialogue translates well to novel format, the nonlinearity of the game does not -- and above all, I felt the absence of the excellent soundtrack/audio design; the immersion in Sigil; those moments when you're looking at seven or eight different dialogue options, each of which could spin off an entire new universe... so yeah, don't expect any of that from a book.

All told, consider me officially HYPE for Torment: Tides of Numenera, Tyranny, and every other game being billed as a "spiritual successor to PS:T," since, to the benefit of narrative-driven cRPG-lovers like me, they seem to be growing on trees.
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