Quite possibly the peak of "flawed masterpiece" art-stuff to grumble about re: combat mechanics, writing/design for women, clearly cut content (Fall-From-Grace's diary and Pharod's rod both being items that go nowhere, or more importantly Vhailor's potential attack of TNO in the Fortress only being a "shit-got-real" moment if you've actually met him, and completely pointless otherwise). Depending on your personal taste, the jankier CRPG mechanics might range from generally annoying to generally charming. My taste goes towards the latter.

But if you're able to forgive the game for its flaws, or find its whole to be beautiful and incredible, it's obviously just really great. Basically Disco Elysium's '90s fantasy father (somewhat literally considering this apparently was an inspiration), a RPG driven primarily by story, character, narrative, themes and geographic/social exploration. Pretty much the entire game is based on traversing areas, talking to creatures of various sorts, getting to know more and more about your own past, your companions, the City of Sigil and the world around you, truly getting to feel Sigil and the larger world as living, breathing places containing so many characters and so much wonderful, idiosyncratic detail. This is not a piece of fantasy afraid to be wonderfully imaginative. The idea is not just to allow a lot of room for self-expression (lots of variety available here in regards to what you may want to make TNO into), but also to deftly introduce a lot of detail, context and the central thematic notions here about people's inherent natures, the possibility for self-reflection and change, regret, belief, suffering; the alignments of lawful-neutral-chaotic and good-neutral-evil merely used as a way of engaging with those existential questions. In fact, everything slightly iffy about how quick this is to generally push "inherent natures" for specific races and people of certain regions is redeemed by its deliberate playing with those questions.

It’s there in practically everything, from TNO’s eternal quest for his own mortality and subsequent questions in regards to whether he even is the same person he used to be, to Dak’kon’s existential crisis despite being someone whose entire power comes from powerful faith, Fall-From-Grace’s taxing desire to go against her nature, Trias’s differing views of good that lead instead to a type of evil, Nordom’s listlessness in a world too chaotic for a creature of pure mechanized order, the entire world of Planescape itself, where belief can literally influence reality. The entire game is filled with a philosophical bent in regards to prime questions of human nature, of what we are and can be, of how our beliefs influence ourselves, others, and the places we inhabit, and it’s just thought-provoking and impeccable (if not as emotionally powerful) in those regards as Disco.

In the very end of the game, TNO travels to the Fortress of Regrets, a wide castle created entirely off the power of his past lives’ evil, and finally meets his own mortality. In the subsequent dialogue, the player has the chance to finally give a thorough answer to the one question the game has been truly explicit about-”what can change the nature of a man?”. If with Ravel there was a series of disparate answers, then now the game points towards a thematic conclusion-that essentially “whatever you believe can change the nature of a man, can.” It’s a bit of an easy answer, but it cuts right to the heart of the game’s existential preconceptions in one way-there is no correct answer to be found in the clusterfucks that are ourselves, the world and their connection, and perhaps the only thing you can really be sure of is that you should let your past catch up with you, because it’ll certainly never stop chasing you. The good ending is a genuinely beautiful illustration of that idea-TNO has entered Hell, but he was always going to end up there, he's finally accepted his fate, and is at peace with it. Incredible stuff.