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

After I wrote the bulky section below on Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous, I couldn't sleep, so I played Selkie Harbor and Deconstructeam's short game Many Nights a Whisper. I'm adding this addendum up top just to tell you to play this game right now. It's an hour long tops, it's like three bucks on Steam but if you don't want to spend the money DM me and I will literally buy it for you. As long as I don't get like more than 10 people asking haha.

Like the CRPGs I've written so much about lately — like all Deconstructeam games — it's a narrative experience about making choices that will challenge you. In it, you're chosen to perform a ritual where you have shoot a fireball into a chalice from a great distance. You'll only have one chance to do it, to make everyone's wishes come true if you succeed. So the game is about practicing for that shot. Where the choices — God, the choices — where they come into play is for you to find out when you play the game like I asked you to. But the game, for being so short, is incredibly impactful. Left me shaking with adrenaline and catharsis after the ritual was complete. Might stick with me forever? If you're not a fan of these short narrative experiences Many Nights probably won't win you over but otherwise, please play it, and then when you do, please tell me what you thought about it!

So. Anyway. Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous. It might be too early to say, but I think this is my new favorite fantasy/adventure CRPG (which I say only to exclude Disco Elysium, which is very hard to compare). This is developer Owlcat's second game, and the followup to Pathfinder: Kingmaker: another CRPG devoted to adapting a preexisting Parhfinder TTRPG adventure path into game form.

I've written a lot about Owlcat over the past — how long now, over a month? And I've been playing their games for about two months. My journey through the developer's output started with their most recent game: Warhammer 40K: Rogue Trader, and I'm honestly really glad it did. I was lukewarm-to-positive about that game, but I think if I had played it after the Pathfinder CRPGs, I would have hated it, because in every aspect except production value, it is a step down.

Maybe that step down was inevitable, though. Kingmaker was an eclectic game, 90% friction by volume, really less a power fantasy than a barely-holding-onto-power fantasy. For that reason, and because of its genuinely excellent character writing and great plot writing (at least in the CRPG space, a genre where the huge amount of reactvity makes it hard to create a strong main plot) I loved Kingmaker. In a lot of ways, Wrath as its sequel feels like a play for a larger audience. A lot of the rough mechanical edges have been sanded down, especially in the management portion of the game; the story is much more of a true power fantasy now, maybe more than any other game I've played. The production values have gotten much higher — you can rotate the camera! there are more than three overworld tilesets! But even so, WotR surpasses its predecessor, because in terms of reactivity, in terms of character work, in terms of the way the game encourages you to actually roleplay a character, the game simply feels unbeatable.

The biggest selling point of the game is the Mythic Path system — both narratively and mechanically. It's an additional progression system, one where you unlock "classes" by completing quests or making certain choices, and "level up" by progressing the story or finishing path-exclusive quests. Each mythic path, once selected, is locked in: you'll get maybe one, maybe two chances to switch at story moments, but otherwise once selected your path is your path, and as you play through the story, it governs who your character is becoming. You can become a gold dragon, a demon, an angel, a lich; a spirit of freedom, a cell in the body of God. This fundamentally alters how you play — by granting new abilities, yes, but also by giving you new choices and huge new branching outcomes to select; also, by building an arc, a narrative, into your character whether you want it or not.

My character, Iphia, was conceptualized as a dhampir, a self-hating undead who saw monsters (like herself) as degenerate and wanted them purged and destroyed. It made sense for her to lead a crusade against demons, to close a wound in the world; she quickly earned the approval of the queen, and the fear and respect of her soldiers. So it was only natural for her to select the mythic path of Aeon, to become a being dedicated to upholding the law of the universe, and eradicating wrongness from the fabric of the world. But even as she pursued this path, the game presented me with obstacles to challenge her belief and values. First, with the companion character Aerushalae, another monster trying to overcome her fundamental nature and do good (who I stumbled into romancing), who it would be "lawful" and "aeonic" to kill; later, with a journey to the Abyss, where her increasingly overriding Aeonic nature drove Iphia to uphold the laws of what is basically super-hell, and punish those who did good, or showed mercy, or lived by a code (since that broke the laws of the Abyss, where everyone is "supposed to" be evil). This all forced my character to really reevaluate what she believed, why she cared so much about the law, and who she was turning into, and, at a key story moment, decide not to follow the path of the Aeon, but to choose another path instead. And I think what impressed me most about WotR was how easily and regularly it did this: confronting my character's beliefs, constantly forcing her to choose, to make decisions, about how she felt about things, what she was thinking, where she was heading. Wrath is the most reactive CRPG I've ever played, but more than that, it encourages and enables roleplaying more than any other game: constantly presenting decisions, big and small, that shape not only the plot, but the character you're playing.

Back when I was writing about Rogue Trader I didn't really love the companion system. Nowadays I'm much more positive on it; I think my problem in RT was just that I honestly didn't understand it. Companions are constantly watching you, any time they're with you. Especially when you're playing their quests, or at major story moments, but at other times to, companions will react to your decisions, actions and offhanded comments in subtle, internal ways, as multiple internal gauges shift. (Other important characters, including the villain, have these too). Their perception of you will change; they might change, in ways that ultimately affect their personalities, the way their quests unfold, and how their stories end. It's subtle and incredibly naturalistic, and it makes the Owlcat companions feel more like people than in other CRPGs I've played. I'm tempted here to compare Wrath to Baldur's Gate 3, where by comparison the companions feel better integrated into the main story, and have more budget funneled into them, but they are all also hot 20-somethings with similar trauma who will fall for you at the drop of a hat. By contrast, Wrath's companions are much more diverse in terms of race, appearance, age, body type, sexuality and availability. Even morality and personality; many of WotR's companions grated at first, but I eventually developed a grudging respect or even affection for some of them. Not all; I don't think my player character could ever find it in her heart to like Woljif.

I need a pallette cleanser first, but I'm already planning my second WotR playthrough. My choices as a lawful neutral Aeon often lead to me missing a lot of content — and even killing two companions, who it would be impossible to justify letting live from a roleplay perspective — so I'm really interested to see what a more true-to-me chaotic good playthrough would look like, and what new content might be waiting. Maybe I can dive more into the combat and buildcrafting side of the game, too, which I mostly avoided this time around by playing on a lower diffculty and letting most of my companions auto level. There are two optional dungeons I'm dreading playing again, Blackwater and The Enigma, but for the most part, despite being very, very long, Wrath of the Righteous is a total joy to play.