Torment doesn't struggle for imagination but to make it really work you will need to invest yours, too, for this is a game about reading, about letting your mind wander as if you were reading a book - or as if you were playing a tabletop role-playing campaign. If you don't meet it half-way you will be left with a plain experience. Fully half of the screen can be text at times, with little going on elsewhere, although sparse but well-timed sound and visual ornaments - shouts of a crowd, flashes of light - do enough to bring to life what you read. It isn't ugly, I'm not saying that; the environments are like lovely little paintings that your rather more mundane characters trample on. But it is a game that requires your input.
It does a good job of getting you in the right frame of mind, though, pushing you down into your chair and preparing you for what comes ahead.
I wrote about the the opening two minutes of the game in a separate article because they stunned me, slapped me up sharp, and this was followed by an inventive character creation sequence with not a statistic in sight. It was all story and interactive dialogue and ethical and philosophical choices about who I was. It was very effective.
