What games have you been playing, and what's your opinion on them?

Pathfinder: Kingmaker is the second CRPG I've played from Owlcat Games. It was their debut project, a Kickstarted COVID-era adaptation of an official module for the Pathfinder TTRPG (an open-source-y D&D derivative from the nineties). A few weeks back I wrote about their most recent game, Rogue Trader, which I generally quite liked but had some quibbles with, and playing Kingmaker was a revelation, because it was everything I wanted from Rogue Trader, and it also made me realize why some of its best elements would get streamlined away in subsequent games from the studio.

It will suffice to say that, unlike Rogue Trader, huge amounts of Kingmaker's systems are designed around creating a sense of friction between the player and the game; of making their actions feel committal and deliberate. The game is divided into an exploratory, open-world-ish RPG campaign and a crunchy, challenging kingdom management simulator; by and large, you won't so much be doing both of these at once as you will be alternating between them, going from long, challenging main quest adventures to months' worth kingdom crisis resolution on the map screen, all under the weight of an ever-present ticking clock. You're playing a baroness, building your small barony into a poweful and influential kingdom, but even so the game never makes you feel powerful or secure in your position. Constant crises undermine your authority, challenging both your power base and your philosophy. And all of this ties into a sprawling but well-crafted plot about displacement, curses, the cruelties of the powerful, and violence against women.

A real standout here are the characters in your party, which are, I believe, almost entirely original to Owlcat's take on the Kingmaker story (in a tabletop campaign, they would be replaced by player characters). Owlcat do a decent job at tying them into the main story where they can, but where their character writing really shines is in incidental moments: in camp conversations that don't involve you, in the advice they give on dilemmas facing you kingdom, in main quests where they interject at a moment where you don't expect them to. Although only one of your twelve companions — maybe two, tops — feels truly integral to the game's main plot, they're all extremely believable as people, with key links to the game's themes, and arcs that generally felt extremely natural. At one point in the game I noticed that a character who I had hated at his introduction had suddenly become one of my favourites, both because I understood him better, and because our journey had humbled and changed him. And I didn't even notice as it was happening.

Kingmaker takes place over the span of I think three or four years, so the passage of time allows characters and plot to really go places without anything feeling rushed or crammed. If anything, the game runs into the opposite problem, especially at the end, where it's just too big, and you're kind of eager for it to be over (this not helped by the penultimate dungeon, which decides to be an ultimate combat test and increases both the quantity and difficulty of enemies in a way that grinds the pacing to a dead stop).

It was a case of extreme serendipity perhaps, but the character I built and roleplayed for my Kingmaker playthrough played a pretty big role in my enjoyment of the game. A lot of its plot involved the fae, including one whose whole aesthetic is "big burning ball;" I conceived my character as a whimsical, chaotic figure, who was burning up inside, which manifested in the form of intense fire powers. A lot of the game is about explicit or implicit sexual violence (at least in my reading); I named my character Io. You know, how you roleplay the character you create has a substantial impact on your enjoyment of a CRPG story, and Kingmaker never really asks you to consider the character's backstory, but more than most games I've played I felt that the game really responded to and enabled my roleplaying choices within the story thanks to its alignment system — which often provides 5-9 options at major decision points, instead of the 2-3 you often see in other RPGs. And since the character I conceived of happened to align naturally with the game's themes, it really felt like I was in conversation with the game when it came to the choices I made, even or especially when they led to tragic outcomes that forced my character to re-evelauate herself. The ending I got, pursuing an ultimately doomed romance with one of the game's antagonists, felt suitably tragic and complex (though I hear if I had just done one or two things slightly differently, I could have gotten the "true" ending, which probably would have been less bleak).

In some respects, the game really feels like a freshman effort. The pacing is rough, especially near the end; though I liked the kingdom management system, it was pretty controversial; I haven't even talked about the combat or buildcrafting, which was pretty confusing, assuming a level of familiarity with Pathfinder's systems that I did not have. There's a ton of asset reuse, and the camera is fixed and can't be rotated, which severely limits environment design. All that said though, Kingmaker might be my favourite experience I've had with a fantasy RPG. Part of that is just the character I played, who felt really important to me by the end; part of that is the game's themes, its story, its sense of mystery and precarity, all of which are genuinely really well done. In part because of all the friction (some the result of elegant systemic design; some, of jank) It's just a super rewarding experience, with a lot of bold design choices that maybe don't quite work out all the time, but never fail to contribute to a wholly unique gameplay experience.

If Kingmaker is too big to really talk about, Reverse 1999's newest story update, Spring Unending, is too dense. It feels like an extremely concentrated distillation of all the game's themes about marginalization, power and politics into a frankly delightful Wuxia story set in the distant past. In it, Yao — personified plants and animals who will only live for a few months or years — desperately search for longevity; they bump up against an immortal Daoist who tries to help them but is simply incapable of understanding their experience of the world, a city-state that is hell-bent on blaming them for all its problems, and a cabal of influential figures who leverage this climate of bigotry and hostility to push the Yao towards radicalism.

Meanwhile, in the nineties, another Yao, doomed to die before spring, uncovers this ancient story on the burgeoning internet, on forums, in internet cafes, her path crossing with some of the immortal figures from that ancient history as the events of the past threaten to repeat themself.

On the one hand, you've almost certainly read or played a story that's a lot like this before. On the other, Reverse's take on the quest for longevity is quite simply a clinic on storytelling and structure: thematically dense; rich with believable characters whose arcs intertwine and overlap and mirror each other in delicious ways; an elegant mechanism of setup and payoff that is never shocking but still manages to delight in its specifics. There are so many threads I could pull at, could weave into a workable analysis, that it's a bit overwhelming.

Here's just one. The story is titled "Spring Unending." Both of our main perspective characters, past and present, are herbacious Yao: embodied reeds who "won't even survive a full cycle of seasons." Implicitly, then, the story suggests a question: "what good is an unending spring, if you won't even survive the winter?" And this is deftly explored: for example, our immortal deuteragonist, Paper Heron, urges the Yao not to hurt themselves in their pursuit of longevity; to instead follow the Way, and let the world wash over them and not trouble them. But how can the Yao acheive this kind of peace when they're told it might take years, and they're faced with a ticking clock counting down on their lives? It's an excellent depiction of the transperency phenomenon, the way that the privileged, however well-meaning, are often literally incapable of understanding the experiences of the marginalized. And it's not a surprise when this friction of worldview eventually plays into the conflict in a way that feels both tragic and inevitable.

It feels like Spring Unending has a dozen or a hundred threads like that. To explore them all, I would have to turn into a spider. And since that's beyond my powers, I'll just say that I'm not sure that this story will stick with me — it didn't move me, really — but it feels genuinely masterful in a way that you almost never see in gaming.