4 Worlds in 48 Hours
Let’s Play Divinity: Origin Sin, Outward, Pathfinder: Kingmaker, and Hard West.
I built my first PC, loaded it with a bunch of high-end parts, and it was almost 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! Now I was forced to look elsewhere to try and fill the void left behind.
Frankly, nothing in the “graphics-intensive” world of PC gaming seemed remotely interesting to me at the moment. Metro: Exodus was a known abuser of graphics cards, but I had my fill of Metro from the first two installments. 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 The Witcher 3, which my system smoothly handled even on 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 Netflix series. I even watched Henry Cavill do awesome things like building a PC and reading the books to promote his role as Geralt. Clearly, I’m a fan. But I wasn’t looking for a retread.
Luckily, the Steam Summer Sale struck, working its magic to quickly drain my bank account. I checked my wish list for sales, struck gold, and downloaded a long list of incredible games. 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 and absolutely loved it. Pillars struck deep in my D&D loving heart. My laptop was running on Intel integrated graphics, but it did just fine with Pillars. The sheer level of choice, lore, and dialogue in this game was fantastically overwhelming. Despite all it does well, Pillars runs in real-time with pause combat, a style that I’m just not a fan of. As such, I played it for about 17 hours before putting it on the backburner.
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, as it was met with widespread acclaim upon release. It deserves every bit of praise, too, as the mechanics are intuitive, the environment matters, and the story holds incredible weight. Most importantly for my tastes, it is a turn-based game. I gave Divinity about 30 hours before diving into the Steam Summer Sale, a trek that ultimately led to this article.
I bought north of ten games for future consumption, four of which were Divinity: Original Sin, Outward, Pathfinder: Kingmaker, and Hard West. I decided to try all four in a 48-hour window. Here’s how it went.
Divinity: Original Sin
Larian Studios made plenty of Divinity games. Beyond, Divine, Divinity 2: Developer’s Cut, and so on. Original Sin was a departure. I tried the game on my Xbox a while ago, but I did not care for the control scheme. On PC, though, I felt right at home.
Divinity starts out strong. A crashed ship, dead guys on a beach, and even a tutorial dungeon to boot. From the jump, I was in. The dialogue between the two core party members was light and sounded much like two people who had spent plenty of time with one another. It’s abundantly clear from the start that Larian has a sharp ear for dialogue.
After you fight through the tutorial dungeon, slaying cultists, and vengeful undead, you fend off orcs on a beach and begin your introduction to the central city, Cyseal. Upon arrival, you run into a wizard polymorphed as a cat, who gives you the task of investigating a murder. Divinity is never that straightforward, thankfully, and it gets a touch zany from there.
In Cyseal, you do all your typical RPG activities: meet the town captain, pick up XP building quests to fetch the missing sheep. If you take a perk called ‘pet pal,’ you can chat with animals and get even more quests or information. The core companions of the game, each with their own unique story quests, are also 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 clearly inspired by The Neverending Story. You also meet with 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.
It’s at this point that 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 to hit level 4 before even attempting that. Ultimately it was that damn murder mystery that got me, though. 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 walkthroughs, followed the directions carefully, but got nothing. I backpedaled to old saves — several times. I went to the Divinity subreddit and asked if anyone else found Cyseal a hopeless drag, getting 30 responses in the affirmative.
That’s about where I stopped Divinity. The atmosphere is so good, but it comes to a screeching halt in Cyseal. A narrative misstep, I thought — time to move on.
Outward
The reviews on the Steam page for Outward were singing its praises, especially if you love absolute choice and a complete lack of guidance. Everyone agreed it was incredibly hard to play given it didn’t hold the player's hand one bit. Still, I was intrigued enough to give it a shot.
Outward also starts out with your group stranded on a beach opening. The character does some running around, picking up junk that can be weapons. Eventually, you come across a familiar face and a camp where you must balance rest, taking watch, and nourishment.
Soon after, you’re 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.
That was my last bit of playing. I researched this game before buying it. In the end, difficult for the sake of difficult just is not my thing. Whenever I play story-driven games, I set my difficulties to one of the lowest settings. 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. Outward, however, 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. It belongs in this category of games called “it’s fun if you first do something else.” Something else can be installing 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. There are plenty of mods recommended by the community, including one that morphs it from a real-time strategy game to a turn-based one. Unfortunately, I forgot about that particular mod and it deeply affected my perception of the game. Not to mention 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 swords 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 was instantly sold.
The RPG elements are as light as can be. 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 as an RPG. These varmints sold me a 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.
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 maybe I’m just kidding myself and will eventually just start my eighth playthrough of Skyrim still swearing I won’t make the overpowered sneak archer build this time.