4 Worlds in 48 Hours

I built my first PC, threw a bunch of high-powered parts in, it was time to take it for a run. Unfortunately for the entire gaming world, Cyberpunk 2077 was delayed. Again. Kudos for CD Projekt Red for QC, but dammit, I wanted to play! We would have a new president before we would have CP2077.

Frankly, nothing in the “graphics-intensive” world of PC gaming was remotely interesting. Metro: Exodus was a known abuser of graphics cards, but I had my fill of Metro from the first two. Awesome games, but not where I was with gaming right now. I was also one of six people on Earth that didn’t care for the first or second Red Dead Redemption. Or any Rockstar game. No GTA for this writer.

I played a few hours of Witcher 3, which my system smoothly handled on the ultra-settings. A beautiful game and one of the best games of the last several years. I had about 150 hours on it from my first playthrough. I read all the Witcher books. Loved the series. Watched Henry Cavill do Henry Cavill level awesome things like building a PC and reading the books to promote his role as Geralt. I’m a fan. But I Wasn’t looking for a retread.

Luckily, the Steam summer sale struck. And it worked its magic emptying my bank account. I checked my wish list for sales. Steam struck gold, and I found more of what I was looking for. Recently, not too long before COVID-19 threw a wrench in the gears of the world, I became interested in the old-school style RPGs having a renaissance in the last few years.

While carting my daughter to her after school activities and idling away in the YMCA lobby, I started in on Pillars of Eternity. Love it. Pillars struck deep in my D&D loving heart. My laptop was running on Intel integrated graphics, but it did fine with Pillars. The sheer choice, lore, and dialogue in this game were fantastically overwhelming. I played about 17 hours, 40 minutes at a time before I gave up. Pillars runs in real-time with pause combat. Not a fan. Give me turn-based, especially with a party-based game.

The itch was there, though. Soon after came the platinum standard for this renaissance, Larian Studios much-lauded Divinity: Original Sin 2. Finding a negative review of this game would require a deep dive into the dark web. It deserves its laurels. It is a well-made, fun, engaging game. The mechanics are intuitive; the environment matters; the story has gravity. And, best of all, it is a turn-based game. I gave Divinity about 30 hours before buying Pillars of Eternity: Deadfire, the sequel to the original Pillars. Also, a turn-based party cRPG, but darker and more serious. Not as well designed, but thematically more my tastes.

Back to Steam. I bought north of ten games for future playing, four of which were Pathfinder: Kingmaker, Divinity: Original Sin, Outward, and Hard West. I played all 4 in 48 hours. Here is how it went.

Divinity: Original Sin

Larian Studios has made plenty of Divinity games. Beyond, Divine, Divinity 2: Developer’s Cut, and so on. D: OS was a departure. I played the enhanced edition. I tried the game on my Xbox a while ago, but I did not care for the controller scheme. Didn’t feel right. Divinity starts strong. Crashed ship, dead guys on a beach—tutorial dungeon. I’m in. The dialogue between the two core party members is light and sounds much like two people who have traveled long paths together. Larian has a sharp ear for dialogue.

After your run through the tutorial dungeon, slaying cultists and vengeful undead, you fight some orcs on a beach and kick off your introduction to the central city, Cyseal, by meeting a wizard polymorphed as a cat. And he has a murder investigation for you. Divinity is never that straightforward, thankfully, and it gets a touch zany from there.

In Cyseal, you do all the RPG stuff: meet the town captain, get XP building quests to fetch the missing sheep, that sort of thing. If you take a perk called ‘pet pal,’ you can chat with animals and possibly get more quests or information. The core companions of the game, with their story quests, are found in Cyseal. Wizard, Rogue, Ranger, Cleric….err Source Hunter. Someone at Larian is a Dungeon Master on the weekends.

During the execution of one quest, you are teleported to another dimension where you meet a hyper gnomish creature inspired by The Neverending Story, who is the chronicler of time. As a history major, I was in for it. You also meet the mistress of giving the main quest gravitas. Universe destroyed, etc. When you beam back to Cyseal, Cat Wizard turns out to be an ally of the gnomish historian.

Around here, the slog sets in. Outside Cyseal, the game gets substantially harder. The gate guards even tell you not to adventure beyond the gates. I needed 4th level to be ready. And that damn murder mystery. I went here. I went there. I went back here. And then there. And back. Again. And again. Knowing I was missing something, I consulted walk-throughs, followed the directions carefully, but got nothing. I backpedaled to old saves—several times. I went on Reddit to the Divinity sub and asked if anyone else found Cyseal a hopeless drag. Thirty responses in the affirmative.

That’s about where I stopped Divinity. The atmosphere is so good, but it hits the brakes hard in Cyseal, trying to work out the murder mystery. A narrative misstep, I thought—time to move on.

Outward

The reviews at the bottom of the Steam page for Outward are praising if you are addicted to absolute choice and a complete lack of guidance. Everyone agreed it was hard AF to play given it did no player hand holding typical of other RPGs. Except for the one person in every review section. The class president of gaming who finds no game hard. “You just have to get into it.” Right.

Outward also gives me a stranded on a beach opening. Extremely popular. It is a third-person perspective game. The character does some running around, picking up junk that can be weapons. Eventually, you come across a small camp and a familiar face where you can rest where you balance rest, taking watch, and nourishment. That was a neat mechanic.

Soon after, you are in your village, being told you’re a piece of garbage for failing the tribe. The elder mother saves your hide and lays out a couple of options at redemption. Cold hard cash or becoming a tribal hero. Get to it.

That was my last bit of playing. I researched this game before buying it. It came up on recommendations often, and I usually shot it down. Difficult for the sake of difficult just is not my thing. I set my difficulties to story or normal. I want to play a story, not brag about my tactical genius. Chiefly, because I had none. I can see going back to either Original Sin game; this one is done for me. If you like pure exploration, no explanation mode of gaming, this might be a game for you.

Pathfinder: Kingmaker

Pathfinder: Kingmaker is another that was recommended from across the spectrum of sources I frequent. So, Reddit. It belongs in this category of game called “it’s fun if you first.” The first can be a mod. It can be playing past a bad first five hours. Pick your poison. Owlcat Games, the developer, had polished Pathfinder based on user feedback. That was promising. Its $8 price tag was also encouraging. I flipped it on, made a character, and I was in the palace of the giver of the quest.

The dialogue is not… great. This game is based on the popular tabletop RPG of the same name, and the cheese of the writing sounds like it came off a Saturday night gaming table. That could be by design. But I already have a Saturday night gaming table. I didn’t want to play it in a game.

I mentioned Pathfinder is an “if you first” game. It has mod recommendations. I forgot about the mod I would want. Pathfinder is another real-time with pause. I hate that kind of gaming. A community mod exists to make the game turn-based. I forgot to remember that. It deeply affected my perception of the game, along with the general cheese of the writing. I was on this one for a couple of hours tops. I don’t see myself going back to it.

Hard West

Hard West exists in this nebulous world I sometimes can’t resist: “turn-based strategy with role-playing elements.” I am not a fan of western themes in general. I prefer sword and board or laser guns. But I do like weird west, the demon-haunted cowboy world Hard West inhabits. Death is the narrator, after all. The turn-based elements are fun, with an escalation mechanic that encourages moving around the combat map. The longer you stay in the same place, the easier you become to hit—also, Winchester rifles. I’m sold.

The RPG elements are light, even for light. You scooch around the world map to do some mining. Sometimes this mining reveals gold or new locations. Or a deep howling abyss. It is very functional and not in-depth enough to label RPG. These varmints sold me broke down horse, and I was gonna have my justice at high noon.

If you like turn-based shooting strategy like XCOM, you should probably like Hard West. I did. It got about 4 hours out of me. Hard West’s main problem in my library is I also bought Total War: Warhammer 2. Grim and Perilous always wins over six-shooters for me.

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None of these games are bad or poorly made. This is not a review of any of them. I was thinking about the unreasonable specificity of the style of gaming I am looking for. I’ve tried much more than I’ve mentioned here. The D&D titans like Baldur’s Gate or the much-lauded Knights of the Old Republic have all passed through my view at one time or another. I have two dozen such games on my iPad.

I didn’t come close to finishing either Divinity: Original Sin 2 or Deadfire. They check all the boxes I’m looking for. Maybe I’ll go back to one of those and finish them.

Or I’m just kidding myself, and I’ll just play my eighth playthrough of Skyrim still swearing I won’t make the overpowered sneak archer build this time.