It was lauded for its immersive dialogue, for the dark and relatively obscure Planescape setting, and for the protagonist's unique persona, which shirked many characteristics of traditional role-playing games.

An enhanced version for modern platforms was made by Beamdog and released for Windows, Linux, macOS, Android, and iOS in April 2017 and for Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One in October 2019.

[17] Notable non-player characters include Deionarra, a former lover of one of the Nameless One's past incarnations who died as a result of his amoral actions;[20] Ravel Puzzlewell, a night hag who helped the Nameless One's first incarnation to become immortal;[20] Trias the Betrayer, a fallen deva who decides to take matters into his own hands due to his disillusionment with the gods’ stance on fighting evil forces;[20] Coaxmetal, a giant golem confined inside the siege tower in Sigil's Lower Ward who forges weapons for the inhabitants of the planes to destroy each other in the name of entropy;[20] and the Transcendent One, the embodiment of the Nameless One's mortality and the final boss of the game.

[14] Morte also reads the tattoos written on The Nameless One's back, which were inked there as reminders by a previous incarnation of himself, that contain instructions to find a man named Pharod.

[9] He finds Pharod, who is the chief of an underground village of scavengers and the adoptive father of Annah, and is asked to retrieve a magical bronze sphere for him before he will give answers.

[17] Later on, The Nameless One learns from a powerful sorcerer named Lothar that the night hag Ravel Puzzlewell caused his immortality,[17] but that she is imprisoned in a magical maze for committing crimes against the Lady of Pain.

[17] The Nameless One eventually finds a portal to enter the maze, but realizes that it requires a piece of Ravel to activate it; for this, he locates a daughter of hers and takes drops of her blood.

[17] The portal that The Nameless One and his party found in the maze takes them to the city of Curst, a gate town on the border of the Outlands and Carceri, to find Trias.

[17] Depending on the player's choice, The Nameless One either slays The Transcendent One through combat, convinces it to rejoin with him, or commits suicide with a special weapon, with either option ending his immortality.

[26] Planescape Torment aims to provide its players with a sense that they are excavating a history (the avatar's forgotten past) while exploring, more or less at will, a vast and bizarre invention.

[30] Avellone remarked that many of the ideas in the game "could only have been communicated through text, simply because no one would have the budget or resources to fully realise many of these fantasy works through TV or movies".

[34][35] Although only a few additional subplots and characters had to be discarded to meet the planned release date, he accused the Interplay management of disregarding the development team regarding things like package design and marketing.

[35] He also claimed that his overall influence on the game was greater than that of Avellone, Eric Campanella, or Dave Maldonaldo, but since a producer often has to make unpopular decisions, his role was later downplayed.

[36] Make up lasted for about two hours, and photography took 45 minutes, Henkel said: "My face was red as a beet and burned for the rest of the day, because of the solvent that was used to remove the appliances.

His first time working on a video game project, Lustmord considered the experience "terrible", eventually reusing some of the elements from the score in his 2001 album, Metavoid.

[49] Needing a replacement soundtrack done quickly, Interplay then reached out and asked Mark Morgan, who had worked on other Black Isle Studios games, to do it.

[50] The game's cast of voice actors included Michael T. Weiss, Sheena Easton, Rob Paulsen, Mitch Pileggi, Dan Castellaneta, Keith David, Jennifer Hale, John de Lancie, and Tony Jay.

[28] Allen Rausch, writing for GameSpy's 2004 retrospective "A History of D&D Video Games", commented that Black Isle Studios "went way over the top for this one, crafting an utterly unique experience that has yet to be equaled by any RPG since".

There's lots of macabre humor, some rather deviant sexual references, and enough weirdness to send the devotees of Tolkienesque fantasy running for their copies of The Hobbit.

[52] In 2005, GameSpot stated "Planescape: Torment has quite possibly the best implementation of role-playing an evil character ever to appear in a computer or video game to date".

[28] The heavily tattooed, egocentric, and potentially selfish Nameless One was welcomed as a change of pace from the conventional RPG hero, who was considered a predictable do-gooder.

"[13] Uros Jojic of Actiontrip commented that "Planescape: Torment proves that it is possible to make an inventive, fun and refreshing game in this "sea of clones".

"[75] Cindy Vanous of Computer Games Magazine notes that "Planescape's bestiary features legions of the unknown, and its landscape is an ever-changing tapestry of the bizarre.

Although by the time of its release in late 1999, Planescape: Torment's default 640x480 resolution was not considered particularly advanced,[11] reviewers were pleased with the art design and color of the environments.

[8] PC Gamer also praised the fine-tuning of the Infinity Engine, such as the use of a radial menu, which allowed the player to stay focused on the game instead of managing multiple screens and "messing with windows and buttons".

[10] Bugs were responsible for slowing down the game when a high level of graphical assets were on-screen at the same time, but it was reported that a fix was released that solved the problem.

[94] In the United States, Planescape: Torment sold 73,000 copies by March 2000,[95] a figure that Desslock of Computer Gaming World regarded as substandard.

Richie Shoemaker of PC Zone noted at the time, "January saw only one new release make an impact: the bizarre role-player from Black Isle Studios, Planescape: Torment.

According to PC Player, Virgin Interactive was "only slightly disappointed" by its commercial performance in the region; writer Udo Hoffman noted that the game by nature was tailored to "a more mature and therefore smaller target group.

They otherwise did not significantly change the game, with the studio's CEO Trent Oster saying that making larger improvements to their work would have been comparable to "basically going in and repainting the smile on the Mona Lisa here".