Funnily enough, it does the same in gameplay. In
Torment, you take the place of the Nameless One, who wakes up on a table in the Dustman's Mortuary with no memories. As Chris Avellone said in our interview with him, it's very Zelazny (if you don't know who Zelazny is, read the Amber Chronicles for amnesiac fiction at its best), and it fits the game perfectly. A consequence of being immortal is that when you die, you simply wake back up in the Mortuary, and you soon learn how to resurrect your teammates as well. This gives
Torment a whole lot less of the creep-and-save syndrome that so many computer RPGs have.
Torment uses the Baldur's Gate engine, with improvements that make real-time RPGing more fun than ever before. Movement, combat, and talking are all one or two mouse clicks away, and soon the interface becomes intuitive. In addition, the hotkeys are completely configurable, allowing you to make any key on the keyboard be any function you like. Very, very handy.
My favorite part of Torment, however, is the sheer amount of text in the game. Everyone has something interesting to say, and you'll find yourself looking for NPCs just to chatter endlessly with them. Torment is much less combat heavy than most RPGs, and you'll find that you can talk your way out of a fight many, many times, and often get a lot more experience while you're at it. This is a really novel approach to role playing, rewarding the good thinkers more than any other game before it, and I enjoyed it thoroughly.
Another awesome feature of Torment is complete customization of the Nameless One. He starts off as a low level fighter, but as the game progresses, you can have him 'remember' different classes, and play the game as a thief or a mage, or whatever else you like. In addition, your alignment starts out as True Neutral, and changes by your gameplay actions. You can be an evil bastard, or a champion of law and good. You decide. The game plays completely different either way, although there are the same plot chokepoints no matter how you do it. BIS put a lot of time into making Torment as open-ended as possible, and it shows.
Oh, and the characters that join your party are great. From Morte the floating skull, to the puritan succubi, to more that I won't name for fear of ruining the plot, Torment's characters are some of the most memorable in any computer RPG.
