Hugin & Munin Journal

Fantasy has many ways of making death speak. It summons ghosts, raises skeletons, preserves ancient spirits and lets the dead return with unfinished business. One of its strangest versions is also one of its funniest: the talking skull. Morte from Planescape: Torment floats, bites, lies and turns metaphysical horror into banter. Bob from The Dresden Files is not a dead man’s personality but a spirit of intellect inhabiting a human skull, part magical archive and part catastrophically unfiltered assistant. In Jonathan Stroud’s Lockwood & Co. , the ghost associated with the skull inside Lucy’s jar is more intimate and manipulative, a dangerous confidant whose wit makes him easier to listen to than to trust. Murray from Monkey Island wants to be recognised as a demonic force of world-conquering evil while remaining a portable skull with severe logistical limitations. These characters are not the same kind of supernatural being. Their resemblance is narrative. Each turns death i...

When Torment: Tides of Numenera was first announced, I was immediately drawn in. It was presented as a thematic successor to Planescape: Torment , promising philosophical storytelling, difficult choices and companions with lives and motives of their own. I backed the record-breaking Kickstarter campaign , joining 74,405 people who pledged more than $4.1 million. The scale of that enthusiasm also became part of the game’s burden. Expectations expanded with every stretch goal, while the project itself took almost four years to reach its full release in February 2017. The finished game did not contain everything imagined during that campaign. Some promised systems and companions were reduced or removed. Yet in the areas that matter most to me—story, dialogue, worldbuilding and moral consequence—it remains a remarkable role-playing game. Its most interesting achievement is not simply that choices matter. It is that every choice is made from inside someone else’s attempt to escape co...