Pathfinder: Kingmaker (2018) - Irresponsibly Large

[This review was originally posted to Backloggd on January 14, 2025. It has been revised and expanded for this blog.] 

 

Pathfinder: Kingmaker is one of those games that feels nearly impossible to fully form a succinct thought on. Over the course of a 160 hour play through, I oscillated between "this is one of the best CRPGs I've ever played" and "this game is an absolute mess" nearly every five-ten hour interval. By the time of the House at the Edge of Time, I began to feel as though my life would forever be an eternal limbo comprised entirely of this dungeon. Then, I truly enjoyed and was satisfied by the finale. This dichotomy repeats constantly. So how the hell can I make a decision between the two extremes of the game? Is it a monumentally ambitious CRPG that I love, or is it a misguided mess that should have never made the mistakes it did?

 

The obvious answer here is that it's both. This game operates on a scale I have seldom seen in any other game. It holds an ambition that no studio in Owlcat's position at the time should have ever attempted, and yet they most certainly attempted it. How successful were they? That will honestly come down to how much you can come to accept some key divisive areas of the game.

 

Structure, and the Evils of Procrastination

 

Most RPGs have a similar "structure" that anyone who has put a large amount of time into them will be familiar with. The art of procrastination in an RPG is something that just becomes a natural practice with enough time into the genre. It is taken for granted that, in any given RPG, a player will complete as much side content as they can, before naturally moving on to the next area or bit of the main story, rinse and repeat until the game has completed. Anyone who has played a Bethesda game will intimately know the feeling of ignoring the main story for dozens or in some cases hundreds of hours until the game has simply run out of content to complete. This has always led to the classic criticism that it makes no sense to ignore a world-ending threat to fuck around with side content for dozens of hours. To some extent this is a fair point, and I'm never confused when someone says it stops them from really getting into RPGs. 

 

Even back to the father of the modern CRPG with the first Fallout game, there have been attempts to try and make considerations for this procrastination. Pretty famously, Fallout features an obvious timer, as well as a hidden system of timers that determine the fate of some of the towns in the game. Yet even this early on most of these hidden timers were outright removed or nerfed by the 1.1 patch of Fallout. Fallout 2 effectively did away with the concept entirely, save for a token time limit of 13 years. RPGs in general do not tie a failure state to procrastination, instead only opting sometimes for certain quests being timed or sequenced in ways to incentivize completing them quickly. When there are failure states they're typically only for a specific section of the game, such as in Tyranny's Act 1. There are certainly a scattershot of RPGs that have experimented with their structure, such as Persona 5, which focused heavily on time management, and offered clear time limits to complete each section of the game. Certainly there are other games that feature these time limits, but none that I have played quite match Kingmaker. 

 

Kingmaker has, especially among CRPGs, an incredibly unique structure. CRPGs often have a rough calendar system, mostly as a fun thing to track how long the adventure has lasted, and most often measured in weeks to months. Kingmaker spans multiple years. With very minimal time skips, you control the actions you take for nearly every day of over four years of in-game time. Even further, the game is structured loosely into acts, with the bulk of these acts featuring time limits that will cause your dear kingdom to collapse should you neglect them. These timers are measured in multiple months, but at the same time Kingmaker features an ocean of side content, optional exploration, and (as will be discussed more in-depth later) a whole system of management for your kingdom. I have often seen even longtime CRPG fans attempt to play Kingmaker and drop it outright due to these timers. I can understand why. The game can easily take well over a hundred hours to complete, and spending much of that time stressed out about scheduling can be extremely daunting. Again, people are trained by years upon years of RPG structure to focus on the side content before moving on to progressing the critical path. These time limits don't really allow for that, but I believe understanding how these limits work actually reveals how much agency is really afforded to the player here.

 

Commonplace advice for those looking to really get into the game is to focus on the main story content first, as after completing the main content of most acts, the player is given whatever time is left in the act to focus on side-content and kingdom management. This certainly can help cut down on the stress, and I don't really have a problem with this advice. However, I think it ignores what the system is going for. Kingmaker operates in roughly three "phases." First, the main story of each act. Usually this is comprised of an inciting incident of some disaster striking the kingdom, following up on leads to find the source, and a long capstone quest that ties the act together and finishes the main story for that act. Secondly, the phase of exploration and adventure. The bulk of time here is spent exploring the map and engaging in side-content. The game features a massive world map, with the vast majority of it having to be explored manually. This is also when almost all of the game's companion content will occur. The third and final phase is that of kingdom management. Placing buildings, assigning advisors to posts and missions, claiming territory, solving whatever problems and decisions crop up, receiving gifts from the various artisans in your kingdom, all of this occurs in this phase. 

 

Following the normally given advice, one might find the flow of their game going from main quest to exploration and back again, with the kingdom management sprinkled in as needed. This works perfectly fine, but I find Kingmaker is at its best when you engage in the balancing act by doing everything a little bit at a time. The more you neglect any one phase, the harder the others will be in the long run. Simply rush the main quest and you'll constantly be met with interesting side content you don't allow yourself to engage in naturally. Not to mention all the gear and levels you could have acquired to make the other phases go smoother. Neglect kingdom management, and you'll fall behind on upkeep and can fall into the cycle of "catch-up" trying to deal with problems that could have been avoided had you stayed on top of it in the first place. Neglecting the main quest is obviously dangerous, causing a game over should your time run out.

 

When you realize how these phases pan out, it then becomes engaging to find your own balance of time. Once you find what is satisfactory for you, you might just realize how much freedom is allotted to you. You have plenty of things to keep track of, and a large over-arching goal each act, but as long as you make efficient use of your time, you genuinely have so much freedom to alter the flow of your own game how you like. Many people find themselves stuck near the end of the act, essentially doing paperwork for weeks on end, because they've procrastinated management for so long. Perhaps the game could tighten up some of these phases more (and I will never make the argument that Owlcat games don't have bloat and pacing problems because they most definitely do), but if you engage with it enough the system strikes an honestly addicting balance of complete freedom and forward momentum that few RPGs do. 

 

Strike that, I have never played another RPG that feels quite like this. Even Owlcat's later games, despite arguably refining each individual phase greatly, never have quite the same flow as Kingmaker, mostly (with a few exceptions) on account of the lack of timers. This is not to say their other games are worse off for the change, but it does without a doubt leave Kingmaker's blend feeling totally unique. It's one of the most identifiable traits of the game, and a major reason I never quite understand when I see people convey the sentiment that "if you've already played Wrath of the Righteous you don't really need to play Kingmaker." One of the other major reasons is also Kingmaker's most unique phase of play. 

SimKingdom 2018

 

 

Any review or discussion of any depth of this game will discuss the kingdom management aspect of it. It's simply too big and persistent to not. It also seems to be the area that makes or breaks this game for most people, and it's easy to see why. Bioware's Dragon Age: Inquisition and Obsidian's Pillars of Eternity had, a few years prior, dabbled in similar ideas. All three games feature timed missions that advisors are sent on, but focus on different aspects of the concept. The concept of some kind of "stronghold management" is most certainly not a new concept among CRPGs, with Baldur's Gate II prominently featuring player-owned strongholds depending on the class of the player character. Even back to the Dungeons & Dragons rulesets of the 1970s, there was an expectation that player characters would eventually "settle down" and run a stronghold of some kind, eventually retiring their PC. However, I think there is a primary disconnect with some people with the concept. 

 

A lot of people play RPGs not to manage a kingdom, but to go on an adventure. Anything that takes time away from that will inevitably cause some friction with these people, worsening the more the campaign or game focuses on it. Kingmaker to date is probably the most focus put onto a system like this in any popular RPG. While I definitely understand the friction this might cause, (I for one really did not care for Inquisition's attempt in particular) the management aspect is a driving force of my love for the game. It's something that really makes Kingmaker (and Owlcat games in general) stand out from other CRPGs. I adore how well the impression of my kingdom comes across. The advisors I select, the decisions I make, the buildings I place, where my cities will go, what to build up, all of it sells a sense of ownership that helps the system stand out above other attempts. At times yes, it does feel like I'm literally doing taxes, and god knows there's some balancing issues (the "No Import Taxes" option is absurdly OP) but there's no other game that blends these elements of CRPG, city builder, and management strategy to this degree. 

 

The worst part of the management is just how much waiting is present in the system. For reasons that have already been discussed, time is a valuable resource in Kingmaker. Most actions you take in the kingdom will take days or weeks of in game time, during which your advisors will be occupied. They aren't removed from your party however, you just can't send them on another mission for the moment. These missions in general are not very disruptive, but where the issues really come about is the stat rank-up events. Every time an individual kingdom statistic (military, economy, diplomacy etc.) reaches a new threshold, the player must initiate a two week long event. The problem? You cannot act during these events. Time will just skip ahead two weeks, with events and problems proccing in the background. Why these don't just work the same as the other projects I really don't know. It requires much more foresight in time management than anything else in the system, and can just make the whole thing more tedious than it really should be whenever they trigger.

 

Maybe it's just the way my lizard brain is wired, but I always found something satisfying watching my little town build into a large city. Checking the city management menu and seeing every building that I personally placed just made me so happy. In an ideal world, those buildings would show up within the physical space of the city during gameplay, but I also think that would be such a complex task that it doesn't really hinder my enjoyment of the system. Plus I really do like how the actual city does change throughout the game, going from a small village to a sprawling stonework city. I absolutely adore how the main square of the city will even differ based on your alignment as ruler. It really sells the feeling that your personality as a ruler is cultivating a totally different style of kingdom. 

 

In my own play-through I began as the classic selfishly Chaotic Neutral archetype, never doing anything that didn't immediately help myself. The town square of my capital prominently featured statues of the Fey, beings representative of that Chaotic Neutral alignment. Over time this naturally shifted to helping my companions far more. I don't fully know when it happened, but eventually, my character's motivations shifted to doing whatever it took to keep the kingdom happy and free. As my character moved along the path towards Chaotic Good, so too did my capital, trading out the Fey statues for a small carnival-like gathering right in the middle of town square. It was such a small moment, but to see my character's internal growth and change be reflected by the world, even in a small way, felt so satisfyingly cathartic. 

 

This is the kind of thing RPGs can do that no other genre really can. It's the kind of thing that makes long tabletop games so memorable. These moments are what Owlcat games are built on. This is why, while to an extent I can understand disappointment or frustration with the kingdom part of the game, I can never get behind the sentiment that it didn't greatly add to Kingmaker in ways that other games have tried but always come up short. Management systems have become Owlcat's house style as much as Larian's humor and environmental interactions have. Maybe even more considering how much of their games are built around the systems. 

Rulesets and Balance: or "Why Does an Owlbear Have 21 AC?  

 

Pathfinder rules are another big sticking point for a lot of people. It is, in a word, overwhelming. All the little aspects of combat, the differences in the way the real-time and turn-based systems work, pre-buffing, the massive number of options in character building, and the complete lack of tutorials explaining these things leads to a seemingly insurmountable learning curve. You will inevitably, 80+ hours into the game, think to yourself "THAT'S how that works??" multiple times. To be sure, that can be a profoundly frustrating experience. At the same time there's a special kind of feeling there, some specific kind of fun that comes from learning a system over dozens of hours of trial and error. It's not a feeling you often come across. This isn't an excuse for the way the game telegraphs (or does fuckall to) these systems, just to say that on some level, if you're anything like me, there is some fun to be had in that frustration. 

 

It's beyond the scope of this review honestly, but Pathfinder 1e specifically was just designed differently than something like 5th Edition D&D. Pathfinder was born out of unease from the direction Dungeons & Dragons was headed at the tail end of 3.5e, both as a game and as a brand. Paizo's intention was always to take 3.5e of D&D, which is already a famously dense and complex rule-set, and to expand upon it further. It appealed to people who had been playing 3.5e for going on five years and just wanted more. They didn't want to reinvent the wheel, they just wanted more for what they already loved. 

 

Kingmaker attempts to take all the crunchy, dense, and complex rules and math of the Pathfinder system and adapt it to a video game. This in itself is a laudable goal and is another thing that has really made this game and its sequel stand out among a lot of the “lighter” CRPGs that have grown popular. There’s a lot to love here from that adaptation! The game is absolutely chock full of classes, races, weapon types, spells, abilities, sub-classes, multi-classes, prestige classes, and the list goes on and on and on. Kingmaker’s build paths are an endless rabbit hole to the center of the planet. Hell for some those builds are the game. There are people who spend hours plotting out the perfect build, play a dozen or so hours, and restart all over again. Maybe they even just run them through the rogue-like DLC. Or they make mercenaries, or mods to respec companions, or any number of things to dump hundreds of hours into a stat screen. The system is daunting there is no doubt. But it can be learned. And once it is learned, an entire new sandbox of possibilities is opened up to the player, and that is one of the most rewarding feelings you can have in a game like this.

 

 

 

Unfortunately, the system itself is just one half of the gameplay here. I would love nothing more than to praise the depth of the systems at play here and move on to talk about something else, but sadly one of Owlcat’s biggest weaknesses has to be addressed. To some degree, all three of their current games suffer from balancing woes and subpar encounter design. Kingmaker’s specific sins are just the absurd number of fights you’ll be going through, and some of the insane number bloat the game has. Let’s look at the humble Owlbear for a moment.

 

Owlbears are one of Kingmaker’s most common enemy types, appearing throughout the game in different variations. In Pathfinder’s 1st edition ruleset, an Owlbear is a rather dangerous animal that usually travels in packs of up to eight. They feature an Armor Class of 15, an average hp of 47, and a +8 to their attack rolls, two 1d6+4 claw attacks, and a 1d6+4 bite attack. Kingmaker must have put something in the fucking water supply because the humble yet formidable Owlbear has been bulking up. An armor class of 21, 147 hit points, +22 to attack rolls, a claw attack of 1d6+18, a bite of 1d8+18, and three attacks per round. Oh and a whole load of combat feats! Instead of packs of at most eight, the game will at times have you fight wave after wave of these beasts. Again, this is just the base variant of ONE enemy type. 

 

Yes, CRPG enemy AI cannot have the strategy and flexibility of an actual DM. They cannot go “the party is killing these enemies too fast, I need to bump up their stats!” or account for whatever insanely broken build the player will powergame themselves into. In some form, you do need to buff some enemies for them to have a chance. But this is where the second issue pops up. Throughout the long adventure, a player will fight far too many mindless “trash” encounters. Owlcat can make interesting, engaging encounters, I’ve seen it done before. But probably upwards of 80% of combat in this game is just smacking these overturned enemies until they die. God help you if you play exclusively in turn-based mode. This all comes to a head in the endgame dungeon; The House at the End of Time. This dungeon is the stuff of nightmares, and the epitome of all the problematic game design decisions of Kingmaker’s combat. A large dungeon, arbitrarily doubled in length by a whole “dimension swapping” mechanic, where the player is constantly hounded by encounter after encounter of overtuned, status spamming enemies. It goes far too long without any real interesting encounter design. I have seen no small number of people devote over a hundred hours to the game, and then just drop it right before the finish line in this very dungeon. 

 

So as much as I’d love to sit here and sing the praises of the excellent adaptation of Pathfinder’s ruleset, it would be a misrepresentation to ignore the very real problems the game’s combat has. Yet it would be just as much of a misrepresentation if I didn’t say that, save for that one dungeon from hell, I genuinely enjoyed my time with the systems and combat. Building my party was consistently engaging and the gearing was always fun. That intrinsic deep enjoyment of delving into a dungeon, finding some weird creature, slaying it, and taking the spoils for myself is just as strong as the rest of the genre.

 

Pathfinder: The Short Story Collection

 

 

Story in CRPGs might just be the most divisive aspect of the entire genre. Even tent-poles like Planescape: Torment or Disco Elysium will have a strong contingent that just despise the writing and story of them. Games that might not have the most proficient prose might still have some unique tone, or characters, or standout moments that still allow it to connect with many. Kingmaker might not have the philosophical depth of a Planescape or the prose of a Disco Elysium, but what it most certainly does have is a degree of ownership unmatched by most other CRPGs.  

The actual structure of the story is rather interesting. Much of it is adapted from the 2010 Pathfinder adventure path of the same name. Adventure paths are “sections” of larger Pathfinder adventures, with each “sections” published around once a month. Within Kingmaker this leads to an almost episodic style of storytelling. Yes, there is a somewhat overarching main plot running in the background, but for most of the game it just serves as a framework to tie together all the stories of the individual acts. Each act serves a mostly self contained story, and usually revolve around solving an engaging mystery related to various problems arising in the kingdom. Each of these stories have a totally different feeling to one another. One act might revolve around a town of people who have vanished, and the mystery of who or what could be behind it. The next might see the player and their party dealing with tribes of barbarians, or an army of trolls, or a rival neighboring kingdom, or who knows! Part of what makes the story so engaging is that it offers such a fun variety of scenarios. Each act feels fresh and that just helps so much in such a long game. 

Companions don’t have as much to them as some other games (especially later Owlcat games) but what they do have is consistently great. Companions all have vibrant personalities and engaging story-lines, and there's plenty of cute romances for those that want them. Rather uniquely, Kingmaker even offers a throuple romance with the companions Octavia and Regongar. Party members having romantic relationships outside of the player are already unique. To write romances that are engaging for not just two characters separately, but also together is practically unheard of in a major RPG.

 

 

Most of the companions don’t really tie into the main quest as much as some might hope, and feel more like a collection of misfits brought together by the place they live more than anything else. I think this mostly works though, because so much of the story really is the world and the kingdom. The structure of the game and the relative de-emphasis on a tight over-arching story-line, leads to something that feels almost akin to a short story collection at some times. There are certainly characters that appear across the game, and many of these plot-lines do tie into each other as the game continues, but most of these stories feels very self-contained. 

This can often lead to another trait that would become inherent to every Owlcat game thus far; pacing problems. Kingmaker’s case is rather interesting however, because if you’ll remember from earlier, the pace of the game is pretty much determined by the player. You’re often allowed to bum-rush the main plot in maybe a dozen hours or so, only to spend far longer than that meandering around waiting for a new story to trigger. Maybe you’ve waited until the last minute to finish an act's main story, which then will immediately lead you right into a whole new story-line without time to breath. The freedom the game gives you in your own pacing is so worthwhile, but when combined with a relatively unstructured main plot, it most certainly will lead to inconsistent pacing at some point in the incredibly long tale. Even then, there’s another layer of overarching story that helps tie even that uneven pacing back into the rest of the game. 

The most impressive part of Kingmaker, and what Owlcat will go on to simply excel at like no other, is how effectively every aspect of the game I’ve previously discussed ties back together to form an entire narrative unto itself. The game opens with your character, entirely defined by you, just being some nobody about to set off on an adventure with and against a whole gaggle of other nobodies. By the end that same character will have created an entire kingdom, and changed the shape of the region forever. Every step of that tale is yours to define. The big-ticket events of the story will always occur yes, but you define what kind of character you’ll play, what kind of ruler you will be, and what shape your kingdom will take. Kingmaker gives you that authority and ownership that so many other RPGs will only pay lip-service to.  Someone might say “well that’s just how CRPGs should work” to which I would emphatically yell “YES!” It’s the strength of an CRPG to give you the tools and freedom to define your character more so than anything else save for the tabletop RPGs they draw from. But Owlcat does it with just so many systems and on a completely unique scale. This is what lets me look past so many of the pacing problems, or bugs, or unbalanced combat, or poorly telegraphed mechanics, because simply put, no one else is making games like this. If CRPGs were partly created to show how video games can create the same kind of storytelling that TTRPGs allow for, then Kingmaker might just be one of the most successful I’ve yet seen.

 

The Other Stuff

 

 

Otherwise known as the part of the review where I ramble about the stuff that didn’t fit anywhere else. If I tried to give equal depth to every little thing about this game I don’t think I’d ever be free.

 

The hardest part of Kingmaker to make peace with is just how buggy it often is. Turn-based combat will often hang, requiring you to swap between real-time with pause mode and back, often losing surprise rounds, becoming flatfooted, or losing followup attacks due to the bug. Plenty of quests have bugged steps, misfiring timers, or will just plain break. Many items, effects, and spells will just not work properly. This just becomes more and more frustrating as the game goes on and the bugs become more prevalent. Maybe it's expected with how massive this game is, but that doesn't make it any less frustrating. It has improved since launch by an immeasurable degree, but Owlcat losing the rights to the game when they became independent in 2019 has pretty much ensured the game will never be at the place it could be polish wise. That’s all just with the PC version, on consoles? Forget it. 

 

The technical state is a real shame too, because sometimes it negatively impacts the art of the game. And damn, let me tell you there’s some good art in this game. Kingmaker opts for 3D environments with a locked camera angle. I do prefer in later Owlcat games when they unlock the camera angles, and the fidelity is certainly not the best for a 2018 game, but all of that is made up for with such evocative art-direction. The world of Kingmaker feels like it stepped right off the pages of a TTRPG source book. It’s simply gorgeous exploring these lush wilderness maps, or the strange beauty of the First World, or even the decaying depths of some forgotten tomb. It’s evocative and wraps you in a comforting fantasy blanket, drawing you on to see what else is out there to discover. 

 

The sound and music stand right alongside the environments in pulling you in to the game. Much of the music is serene and beautiful fantasy music, but it isn’t afraid to throw out some really interesting instrumentations too. Each area of the world has it’s own musical texture to it, and I never once found myself getting tired of any track in the game. Sound design is one thing that usually goes unnoticed unless it stands out negatively, but every little footstep noise, monster shout, environmental soundscape, everything just coalesces so nicely to just really sell that perfect fantasy adventure feeling. 

 

Voice acting in CRPGs is always a difficult topic. For most of the genre’s history, voice acting has been a great bonus when its there, but there was never the expectation of it always being there. Kingmaker however came at a time when the idea of full voice acting was becoming much more common in these games. Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire, Divinity: Original Sin both, and before long the “final cut” of Disco Elysium would all feature full voice acting. Now in the age of Baldur’s Gate 3, a lack of full voice acting alone can turn people off from a game. In Kingmaker on the other hand, a vast majority of dialogue remains unvoiced. Its a personal thing for sure, but It never truly bothered me. The voice acting was quality enough and used well enough to elevate the game for me when it was there, but I never felt frustrated when it wasn’t there. Unlike later Owlcat games however, the voices here are not as consistent in quality. Most are perfectly fine, and many rise above to be excellent! But it certainly is clear not all of the voice actors are delivering equal performances for whatever reason, and that can be rather distracting at times. 

 

But is the game good?

Well yeah. It’s better than good, it’s honestly a miracle. To borrow a turn of phrase from Bethesda’s Pete Hines about Starfield, Kingmaker is irresponsibly large. Someone somewhere should have stopped the game before it reached this scale. Damn am I glad no one did. It's engaging, buggy, complex, uneven, and above all deeply compelling. The Kickstarter CRPG boom of the 2010’s saw a new golden age of games trying to make something just as beloved as the first golden age of Fallout and the Infinity Engine games while putting a new spin on the genre to stand out. Kingmaker is no different. It captures what makes CRPGs so unique, while also emulating the strengths of TTRPGs more than any game had in a very long time.

 

The level of freedom, of authority, of ownership over your own character, your kingdom, and your story triumph over the flaws to create something truly memorable. There will always be those sticking points of the bugs, the pacing, the balance, the management, and whatever else. Those will be the things that determine if someone drops the game early, or sticks it out to see one of the most unique and compelling games the genre has to offer.

I think you can guess where I fall. 

 

Score: 9.0/10

DLC Round-up

 

The Wildcards

Pretty handily the best DLC of the whole game. The companion(s?) is up there for the best in the game. The Tiefling race are a great addition, and the Kineticist class makes for a totally new play-style, expanding the already massive array of character building options of the base game. It integrates seamlessly and is high quality all around.  

 

Varnhold's Lot

Varnhold’s Lot was a rather pleasant surprise. Taking place during the main game, the story ties into the events of one of the mid-game’s acts with a whole newly created player character. Because of this, it can serve as a really nice change of pace from the main game, or just an easy way to get some more out of Kingmaker without having to commit to a whole new run. The two main companions, Maegar Varn and Cephal, are well established and have great banter between each other. It’s a much more linear adventure, but with a very Baludr’s Gate I style area design. This is most apparent with the City of Hollow Eyes map with all of its side content spread around. It even offers a rather sweet optional romance with Maegar, changing some of his dialogue in the main game to reflect it. The last dungeon is a doozy and really reminds me of the classic DLC dungeons of Durlag's Tower and Watcher's Keep. Solid all around. Really holding it back however, are the absolute deadweight "companions" who should be dumped immediately. I think it is to the strength of the DLC that it focuses so much on the core trio, but it would also be nice if the pre-built extra party members were useful in any way, shape, or form. Effects on the main game are very light too outside of the romance, but for its position as a side adventure, it stays pretty damn fun.

Beneath the Stolen Lands

 

 

Beneath the Stolen Lands is both a game-long dungeon delve and a rogue-like dungeon crawl depending on whether you play it during the main game, or from the main menu with a custom party. Personally, I’m not someone who cares to play this game without the greater context of the main game or even Varnhold’s Lot, so the rogue-like idea does not do much to interest me. And as part of the main game, the dungeon present here doesn’t have the tight design of classic DLC dungeons of old, and so just ends up becoming a side thing to do while killing time between acts of the main story. There’s some good gear here and the final boss is cool and all, but the core dungeon just isn’t interesting enough to draw me into it.

Notes:

All screenshots used are my own or from the Steam store page. Header is from the GOG banner. Trailer from GameSpot because Owlcat posted the German launch trailer instead of the English one. The portrait I used in-game is from the very talented Šárka Claina Štvrtňová.