Astounding storytelling
The gameworld's jam-packed with lots of little details and individual personalities, and by clicking on everything and everyone I became totally immersed. The story is gripping, and it kept pulling at me all throughout the game until the very end. The storyline of Torment is actually the end of a much longer story, and the Nameless One gradually uncovers bits and pieces of the his past, some of which were actually shocking (that's how good the writing is), especially since I was playing a Good character. I was never bored, because there's just so much variety that it evokes the sense of a real live world. When I first woke up in the Mortuary and took a look around, I thought naturally that all those wandering zombies were probably clones like the nameless NPCs that normally populate towns in RPGs. Wrong: each one of them was different, and some even had surprises for my character! It must have taken Black Isle months just to write all those lengthy individual dialogues.
The graphics are decent, though rather bleak (which is appropriate for the setting I suppose) and a bit blocky by today's standards. Spell effects are simply breathtaking: even the low-level spells are cast with extensive sound and animation, and the highest-level spells come with full-motion video sequences, of energy bolts zapping asteroids and dragons swooping from the heavens to incinerate your enemies. The creature portraits in the creature gallery are also nicely detailed, as are their descriptions. I love Torment's music; for some weird reason it never seemed repetitive to me the way game music always does. Once I even paused in an area just to keep hearing its music. It's very atmospheric, dreamy in the right times, exciting during battles. Overall, the graphics and sound do a great job, though the gameworld is really brought alive in the writing.
I got the most out of Torment by playing a good mage with very high INT, WIS, and CHA. These three abilities are much more important than in most D&D RPGs, because more of the story gets revealed, and in my opinion the good alignment just added an extra dimension to the emotion of the story.
So what are you waiting for? Go explore the Planes, and be sure to talk to everyone, even your own companions from time to time, and pay attention to hints and details, and get sucked into the story and life of the mysterious Nameless One. And oh yes: KEEP THE BRONZE SPHERE!