Here is an article I ran across awhile back. It picks out 6 retro games that can run on nearly any PC (or even emulated on Linux or Mac). Just about every title here is a classic.
http://giantrealm.gameriot.com/gaming/six-titles-thatll-work-on-nearly-any-machine
Planescape: Torment. Made with the Forgotten Realms: Baldur’s Gate engine, but significantly more plot focused and less about combat. It almost plays like an adventure game.
It has a similar feel and presentation as the movie Momento. However, it came out well before Momento. Great writing overall, and great dialog.
Here are some of my previous posts on it:
“The entire hall was in ruins and still in the process of being destroyed, as dozens of combatants hurled weapons, deadly, arcane magics, and themselves at on another in a desperate struggle to be the last one standing. Plumes of acrid green smoke rose from the pile of limp bodies you dragged yourself out of, having barely escaped the wrath of some fiendish spell. There it was – across the way, through the battling throng, through the bloodthirsty battle ahead of you, sitting untouched on a miraculously upright table – your pint of mead! And you’d get it back, if you had to kill every last one of the brawling tavern patrons to do it!”
Can games tell stories? Why or why not?
What stops a game from telling a story? Why do some people play through the most craptastic turn based battle gameplay and horrible graphics to experience a story, while others cannot skip the briefest cinematic quick enough to get back to shooting nazis and terrorists? I think it is a safe assumption that most any gamer likes story (movies, tv, books), just not necessarily in their game.
https://www.donttellmetheending.com/2008/02/04/planescape-torment-the-book/
Planescape: Torment: The Book
Inspired by detnap’s assertion that the story in Planescape: Torment “just isn’t dense enough” and that “if we put all the pages of a video game story together, at the end, it might be 100 pages, but it’ll take 60 hours to tell the story,” I would like to point out a novelization that takes much of the game’s text and dialogue and edits it together into a narrative. Continue reading
Planescape: Torment was way ahead of its time. It is a great game, with an excellent story. The characters, individually, are amongst the best; deep backstories, interesting personality quirks. The setting is the Planescape plane of the Dungeons and Dragons universe, the hub plane for the rest (Baldur’s Gate’s Forgotten Realms, the traditional/original DnD, etc). It is unlike any setting you have seen, in any media. Continue reading