Somewhere around the second act ofPathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous, the game stops asking you what kind of hero you are and starts asking what kind ofthing you are willing to become. It offers, among other options, becoming a lich. This goes considerably past an evil alignment tick-box: the game grows a new questline, a new set of abilities, a new attitude from your companions, and a substantially different ending. It does this for ten separate answers to the question.

Owlcat Games released this in September 2021, three years afterKingmaker, funded by a Kickstarter that pulled in around two million dollars. It is adapted from Paizo’s tabletop adventure path of the same name and built on Pathfinder’s first-edition ruleset, which is to say the ruleset that took Dungeons & Dragons 3.5 and asked what would happen if nobody ever said no. That question is the entire aesthetic of this game, and I want to defend it.

The sheet is the toy

Twenty-five base classes. Archetypes on top of those in numbers that require a wiki. Multiclassing with no meaningful guard rails. Feats that combine into things the designers plainly did not sit down and enumerate. If you have spent any time in thePathfinder build community you will know the folk canon: the Scaled Fist monk dip that turns your charisma into armour, the Vivisectionist alchemist who is a rogue with better chemistry, the Sword Saint whose entire job is to make one attack per round mathematically obscene.

The honest criticism of this is that it is not balanced, and the honest answer is that balance was never the promise.Wrath of the Righteous is not a game about a curated encounter budget. It is a game about a character sheet as a construction kit, where the pleasure is the pleasure of ademoscene release — someone found a hole in the rules and drove a lorry through it, and everybody else gathered round to admire the lorry.

The real ancestor here is SSI’s Gold Box run on the eight- and sixteen-bit machines.Pool of Radiance in 1988 gave you a party, a rulebook, and no interest whatsoever in whether your combination of decisions was sensible; the manual assumed you would read it and the game assumed you had. Everything that came after — theBaldur’s Gate line, and especiallyThrone of Bhaal’s High Level Abilities, where 2000-era BioWare quietly conceded that the endgame of a build game is absurdity — descends from that permission. Owlcat picked the permission back up after twenty years of the genre apologising for it.

What the mythic paths actually do

The headline is the ten mythic paths, and it is worth being precise about their mechanical shape, because “branching narrative” undersells it.

You commit around Act 2. Aeon polices causality and can retroactively unmake things. Azata is a chaotic good party that summons a dragon called Aivu who grows up over the campaign. Demon eats your enemies’ powers and your own restraint. Trickster rewrites the game’s jokes into rules — it can make a critical hit on a Perception check literally see through the plot. Lich raises your dead enemies and quietly poisons every companion relationship you have built. There is also Gold Dragon, Angel, Devil, Swarm-That-Walks and Legend, which discards mythic power entirely to become spectacularly good at ordinary things.

The design read: a mythic path is alens, applied at the midpoint, that recolours content you were going to see anyway. That is an enormously efficient piece of engineering. Owlcat did not build ten campaigns. They built one campaign with ten sets of rules about how you are allowed to interact with it, and because the paths land at Act 2 rather than at character creation, you have already met everyone before the lens goes on. Your companions therefore have opinions about the change. Regill, the hellknight, approves of order arriving from any direction. Arueshalae, the succubus trying to stop being one, has a complicated time watching you become a demon.

This is the thingWrath does that no other CRPG of its era matches, including the one that sold ten times as many copies.Baldur’s Gate 3 has better faces, better cameras, better everything you can photograph.Wrath of the Righteous has more consequential branching per pound, and the branching is welded to the build rather than sitting beside it.

The crusade, and the argument about it

Then there is the army layer. In between the dungeons,Wrath hands you a strategic map, a recruitment budget, stacks of crusader units, and a set of turn-based battles that play like a thriftyHeroes of Might and Magic. It is optional in the sense that you can set it to resolve automatically. It is not optional in the sense that it sits in the middle of the game asking for your time.

Most reviews at the time called it a mistake. I think that is too quick, and the reason is thematic rather than mechanical. The adventure path is about acrusade — a mass mobilisation of ordinary people against a demonic incursion — and every CRPG convention pushes against that theme, because the CRPG convention is that six exceptional individuals resolve everything personally. The crusade layer is the game’s way of insisting that the war exists whether or not your party is in the room. When your mythic power scales up the units you can field, the two layers finally touch, and the campaign map stops being homework.

The problem is the tuning. The economy is opaque, the general system rewards a couple of obviously correct picks, and the layer arrives before you have any reason to care about it. Owlcat’s own answer — the Enhanced Edition update in 2022, and the option to skip it — is a studio admitting the theory outran the execution. I would rather a studio reach for something structurally interesting and land it two-thirds of the way than ship the safe version.

Where it fights itself

The launch was rough. This is a matter of public record and Owlcat spent the following year patching it hard: scripting faults, encounter bugs, save issues, the usual toll of a game with this many interacting systems shipped by a mid-sized studio. It is in a substantially better state now, with the Enhanced Edition and five DLC releases behind it, and the console versions arrived in 2022 with the fixes baked in.

The deeper structural fault is the difficulty.Wrath is a game whose default settings assume you have read the rulebook, and whose enemies from Act 3 onwards start layering resistances, spell immunities and attack routines that will simply erase an unoptimised party. The customisable difficulty sliders are the most important feature in the game and the least advertised: you can tune enemy stats, damage taken, and the swinginess of the maths independently, and doing so is the correct response rather than an admission of anything. The record puts a full run somewhere well past a hundred hours, and a hundred hours is a real thing to ask of someone’s life. Any game asking it should let the asker set the terms.

And it is long past the point of shame in the fourth act. The Midnight Isles content, the drift into demon-realm sameness, the sheer volume of trash encounters between the good ideas — this is a game that would be better at eighty per cent of its length and does not believe that for a second.

The verdict

Wrath of the Righteous is the most generous CRPG of the last decade, and generosity is a real virtue with real costs. It gives you more rules than you can hold, more branches than you can see in one run, and more army admin than you asked for, and it does so out of a conviction that the player is an adult who can decline the parts they dislike. That conviction is rarer than good writing and considerably rarer than good faces.

Play it on PC where the mods and the build community live. Turn the difficulty sliders to something honest before Act 3 rather than after it. Pick a mythic path that scares you slightly, because the game is at its best when the answer to “what are you becoming” is one you are not entirely comfortable with.

For the opposite approach — an RPG where the character sheet has almost no combat function at all and is instead a set of arguments you have with yourself — seeDisco Elysium. The two games are as far apart as the genre stretches, and they are both right.

Spoilers below

The Trickster path is the one I want to single out, because it is a joke that turns into a thesis.

Trickster’s mythic abilities are structured as punchlines: improving your Perception until you notice things the plot did not intend you to notice, improving Knowledge until enemies are humiliated by trivia, turning the rules themselves into a bit. It reads as the comedy option for about ten hours. Then the game starts quietly showing you what a person who treats a demonic invasion as material actually looks like from the outside, and the companions start noticing, and the ending has a cost the jokes were papering over the entire time.

The Lich path does the inverse and does it more cruelly. It is the strongest path mechanically and the loneliest narratively — the game gives you power and then removes, one by one, the people who liked you. Several companions leave. One in particular can be kept only by doing something to them, and the game does not soften what that is.

The Aeon path’s best moment is the retroactive one: the ability to declare that a thing which happened did not, applied to a specific historical injustice the campaign has already presented as settled fact. It is the single most CRPG thing in the game — a rules interaction that is also a moral position — and it exists because Owlcat took Paizo’s mythic rules literally instead of politely.

That is the case for maximalism. A restrained version of this game would have had one ending, four classes and no lorry-sized holes in its rules, and nobody would still be arguing about it five years later.

Every role-playing game I loaded off tape as a kid had the same secret: the character sheet was a list of ways to hurt things. Strength was for hitting. Dexterity was for hitting first. Intelligence was for hitting at range with a fireball. The numbers described a weapons platform with a name on it.

Disco Elysium takes the sheet, keeps all twenty-four numbers, and removes the thing they were for. There is no combat system. Nothing to swing at, no initiative order, no HP bar on a monster. And the sheet ismore dangerous than any of its ancestors, because ZA/UM worked out that if your stats aren’t fighting the world, they can fight you.

Released 15 October 2019 on PC, expanded into The Final Cut in March 2021 with full voice acting and a run of political vision quests, then onto PlayStation, Switch and Xbox — it took four awards at that year’s Game Awards, including Best RPG and Best Narrative. Four years on, nothing has caught it, and the reason is structural.

The premise, briefly

You wake up in a trashed hostel room in Martinaise, a rotting district of a city called Revachol that lost a revolution decades ago and has been paying for it since. You have no name, no memory, and a body that has clearly been in a fight with a week. There’s a man hanging from a tree in the courtyard behind the hostel. You are, it emerges, the detective assigned to that.

Your partner is Lieutenant Kim Kitsuragi, who is competent, patient, and watching. Kim’s presence is the finest piece of characterisation in the medium’s last decade for a single mechanical reason I’ll get to.

You have four days.

The sheet talks back

Four attributes — Intellect, Psyche, Physique, Motorics — with six skills apiece. Twenty-four.

And each of the twenty-four is avoice. They interrupt. Logic offers a deduction. Inland Empire tells you the necktie is speaking. Electrochemistry wants you to find out what’s in the fridge and drink it. Shivers reports what the city itself is doing three streets away. Half Light is convinced everyone in the room is about to kill you. Volition tries to hold the whole lot together and mostly fails.

Here’s the design move, and it’s the one everything else hangs off:investing in a skill makes it louder. Points don’t buy competence, they buypresence. Put six points in Inland Empire and you are a man who receives visions and cannot tell whether they’re true, because the game will keep handing you visions and never confirm them. Put six in Electrochemistry and you will be offered a drink in every conversation, by yourself, from inside your own skull. A high number in a normal RPG means you succeed more. A high number here means that part of youwins the argument more often, and some of those arguments should be lost.

That reframes the build entirely. You are not optimising a tool. You are choosing which of your own tendencies gets a megaphone, and then living in the room with it. It’s the only stat system I’ve played where the min-maxer’s instinct — dump everything into the good number — reliably produces aworse life.

The failure design finishes the job. Skill checks are 2d6 with modifiers, and they come in two colours: white checks, which you can retry once something about you or the world has changed, and red checks, which resolve once and stay resolved. A red check failed is a door closed forever, and Disco Elysium’s whole reputation rests on those doors being more interesting from the outside. Failing to open a fridge in this game generates a better forty minutes than succeeding at most quests elsewhere.

Morale is a health bar

The bit I don’t think gets enough credit: there are two damage tracks. Health, which the world takes off you, andMorale, whichideas take off you.

Be humiliated in a conversation and Morale drops. Have a memory surface that you weren’t ready for and Morale drops. Run out of Morale and the game ends — you are dead, in the full and final sense, having been killed by a thought.

That single system does more thematic work than every grimdark narrative in the genre put together, because it makes the abstractionliteral at the mechanics level. This is a game about a man held together with string, and the string has a number, and you can watch the number go down while somebody is being unkind to you about your jacket. You heal it with cigarettes, with a drink, with a small act of self-mythology — each of which is a bad long-term idea that the systems reward in the short term, which is the most honest model of self-destruction anybody has shipped.

And Kim. Kim is a mechanic. He is standing next to you during almost every conversation, he reacts, and the game tracks how he’s reading you. There’s no visible approval meter to game — you just have a colleague, and you can feel him deciding. That absence of a bar is why he works. Every RPG companion since Baldur’s Gate has been a slot machine you feed dialogue options into for a romance payout. Kim is a person whose respect you can lose without a notification.

The ancestors

Planescape: Torment (1999) is the acknowledged parent and the comparison everyone reaches for, and it’s fair: a text-first RPG about an amnesiac, where the great question is what can change the nature of a man. Torment had combat, and Torment’s combat was the worst thing about it — a Infinity Engine obligation bolted to a novel. Disco Elysium is what you get when a studio finally has the nerve to cut the obligation.

The deeper ancestor is thirty-nine years old and ran on the machine under my telly.Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar, 1985, C64 among others — the RPG that removed the final boss and replaced him with an ethics exam. Richard Garriott’s game watched what you did, tallied it against eight virtues, and the win condition was becoming a particular kind of person. It was clumsy, it was gameable, and it was the first time a computer RPG asserted that the interesting variable was the player’s character rather than their arithmetic. Everything Disco Elysium does with the Thought Cabinet — where you internalise an idea over real hours of play, and it changes your stats permanently, sometimes for the worse — is Ultima IV’s proposition with forty years of writing craft applied to it.

The Thought Cabinet deserves its own paragraph, actually. You pick up an idea. It occupies a slot. Itcooks — for an hour of play, while you do other things — and then it resolves into a permanent modifier, and you can’t easily get rid of it. That’s the best model of how convictions actually work that I’ve seen in software. You don’t decide to believe something. You carry it around until it sets.

Where it fights itself

The Final Cut’s voice acting is magnificent and it slows the game down, and I’ve never fully squared that. Disco Elysium is areading machine — a million-odd words, a prose rhythm that rewards skimming back and forth, an internal monologue that works at the speed your eye moves. Full VO puts a metronome on it. Lenval Brown’s narration is extraordinary and it is also a pace limiter on a game whose original virtue was letting you set your own. I’d still recommend the Final Cut, and I understand people who hard-disagree.

The four-day clock is the other tension. The game presents time pressure and then, for long stretches, doesn’t actually apply it — you can wander Martinaise indefinitely within a day, and the deadline turns out to be softer than the framing implies. That’s a mercy for the player and a small dishonesty in the design.

And the save button undermines the red checks. ZA/UM built a game where failure is the best content, and then shipped it on platforms where reloading takes four seconds. The design’s central bet requires a discipline it can’t enforce, and most players will quietly welch on it at least once. I did.

I’ll note the obvious and stop: ZA/UM’s ownership has been through the Estonian courts since 2022, and a planned expansion was cancelled alongside layoffs in 2023. That’s the public record. What it means for anything after this game is a matter for lawyers, and it doesn’t change what’s on the disc.

The verdict

Disco Elysium is the most important RPG since Torment, and its importance is almost entirely mechanical rather than literary — which is a strange thing to say about a game with a million words in it. The writing is extraordinary. Plenty of games have extraordinary writing bolted onto a combat engine that resents it. What makes this the one is that ZA/UM turned the character sheet into a psychology, made the damage tracks include your dignity, and then had the nerve to delete the swords.

You will fail at things. The failures will be the parts you talk about at dinner. That’s the design working exactly as specified, and four years on nobody has copied the trick properly, because copying it requires giving up the thing every publisher thinks a game is for.

Play the Final Cut. Take your time. Let Kim decide about you.

What to play next:Citizen Sleeper, which takes the “your stats are your circumstances” idea and makes it a clock;Norco for the same species of rotting-place writing; andBaldur’s Gate 3 if you want to see what the genre looks like when it keeps the swords and gets everything else right.

Spoilers below

The Thought Cabinet’s cruellest entry is the one that makes the whole system legible: some thoughts are traps. Internalise the wrong conviction and you take a permanent penalty and a permanent identity, and the game charges you skill points to forget it. Nothing warns you. The idea looked good when you picked it up, the way ideas do.

The political vision quests added in the Final Cut are the sharpest thing in the expanded version and the most misunderstood. Each ideology — communist, fascist, moralist, ultraliberal — will let you commit, reward the commitment with a mechanical bonus, and then show you the sad little end of that road. The quests aren’t lectures. They’re the game applying the same logic it applies to Electrochemistry: hold a belief loudly enough and you become a man who holds that belief loudly, and there’s a scene waiting at the end where you get to look at him.

The Deserter and the phasmid are where the whole architecture pays out. The case resolves through police work — real, sourced, tedious, sit-down-and-do-the-interviews police work — after fifty hours in which the game has been feeding you visions, hunches and Inland Empire’s psychic nonsense. And then the phasmid arrives, and it’sreal, and the game refuses to say which of your two epistemologies was correct. Both. Neither. Harry gets to keep his string.

That’s the closing argument for the no-combat design. A game with a fight in it would have had to pick a winner. Disco Elysium ends on a man standing in reeds looking at something impossible, having solved the murder by asking questions, with a colleague who has decided about him. There’s nothing to hit. There never was.

In 1998 the originalBaldur’s Gate arrived on five CD-ROMs and asked you to learn THAC0, a stat where lower numbers were better and nobody could explain why without drawing a diagram. BioWare’s Infinity Engine ran combat in real time and gave you a pause key to survive it, which meant every fight was a stop-motion argument between you and six people who kept walking into fireballs. It sold well for what it was. What it was, was a genre with a moat around it.

Twenty-five years later, Larian Studios releasedBaldur’s Gate 3 on PC on 3 August 2023 and put something like 875,000 people into it concurrently on Steam over the launch weekend. That is a Counter-Strike number attached to a game where you spend forty seconds deciding whether to use a bonus action. Something in the design broke the moat, and it is worth working out exactly what.

The turn is the load-bearing decision

Larian’s single biggest choice was made years before this game existed. The Ghent studio, founded by Swen Vincke in 1996, spentDivinity: Original Sin (2014) andOriginal Sin 2 (2017) building a turn-based tactical engine while the received wisdom said turn-based CRPGs were a museum piece and real-time with pause was the commercial format. When Larian took theBaldur’s Gate licence, the loudest early complaint from the old guard was that turns betrayed the series’ identity.

The turn is why the game is legible. Fifth Edition D&D — the ruleset Larian licensed from Wizards of the Coast — is built around an action, a bonus action, a reaction and a movement allowance per round. Rendered in real time with a pause key, that economy is invisible; you are managing an approximation of it through a queue. Rendered as a turn, it becomes a small puzzle with four visible pieces, and a person who has never rolled a d20 can read the whole board in a glance. Illegibility is what keeps people out of tactics games, and a turn is complexity you can see.

There’s a second-order effect. Because a turn is a discrete unit, a bad decision is attributable. You know precisely which choice cost you the fight, which makes losing instructive rather than mysterious. The Infinity Engine games lost you fights in a fog. This one hands you the postmortem.

The verb list is the actual invention

The ruleset is licensed. The engine is Larian’s. Where the two meet is where the game gets interesting, and the meeting point is a list of verbs.

Baldur’s Gate 3 lets you shove people as a bonus action. In tabletop 5e, shoving costs an attack — a real price. Larian discounted it to a bonus action, which sounds like a footnote and is in fact a design thesis. It means every ledge in the game is a weapon. It means a level designer placing a chasm is placing a damage source. Players worked this out in about a day and started building parties around gravity, and Larian, who had watched three years of early access telemetry since Act 1 went out on 6 October 2020, plainly knew they would.

The same logic runs through jumping (a bonus action that spends movement), throwing (anything you can lift, including a smaller party member), and surfaces. Grease, water, ice, fire, poison clouds — this is theOriginal Sin elemental sandbox smuggled into Faerûn, and it does the same job it did there: it converts the environment from scenery into inventory. A barrel is a spell you don’t have to prepare.

Why it works is a matter of authorship. A fireball is a solution the designer wrote for you. Stacking three crates, shoving a goblin priest off a bridge and setting the water on fire is a solution you wrote, and the game merely failed to prevent. Games are generous when they let you feel like the author of your own cheating. The real ancestor of that feeling is the immersive sim —Deus Ex and theThief games teaching you that the intended path is a suggestion — and Larian’s contribution is proving the trick survives being turn-based and having a d20 in it.

The camera bought the audience

Here is the expensive part, and the part the genre could not previously afford. Every line in this game is performed. Larian’s own figures put the cinematic runtime north of 170 hours, on a script in the millions of words, with motion capture on conversations that a 2017 CRPG would have delivered as a portrait and a wall of text. The camera drops to shoulder height, the elf looks at you, and the genre’s oldest tax — reading — is quietly waived.

I want to be careful about what this achieves, because “voice acting” is a shallow reading of it. What the camera does is make refusal legible. When Lae’zel, the githyanki who joins you in the first hour, sneers at a decision, the sneer is a piece of feedback about the state of a system — approval, in this case — and the system is now readable without opening a menu. Larian used cinematics as a UI for the relationship model. That’s why the origin characters landed the way they did: Astarion, Shadowheart, Gale, Wyll, Karlach and Lae’zel are bettersurfaced than a goodPlanescape companion — a different achievement from being better written, and a harder one to fake.

The tabletop debt is real, too. The Dark Urge origin, the Inspiration points you earn for playing your background and spend to reroll a failed check, the way a failed persuasion opens a worse door instead of a load screen — this is a game that understands that the actual pleasure of D&D is the table’s reaction when the plan collapses. Failure as content is a hard sell in a genre trained on optimisation, and it’s the most quietly radical thing here.

Where it fights itself

The long rest economy is the design arguing with the fiction. Rests cost forty camp supplies and restore your spell slots, which is 5e’s core balancing act — resources across an adventuring day. In a video game with no dungeon master enforcing pace, the day is whatever you say it is. The optimal play is to rest constantly, which trivialises attrition; the honest play is to ration, which the game never asks you to do. Meanwhile most companion content is gated behind rests, so the game actively bribes you to break its own tension. Larian resolved this by shrugging, and I think it was the right shrug — but it’s a seam.

Inventory is the other one. Four characters, weight limits, and a loot table generous enough to bury you in gear you’ll never equip means real minutes of your life spent as a warehouse clerk.Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous has the same disease, asI’ve argued before; the maximalist CRPG keeps mistaking abundance for generosity.

And a note on the platforms, because it’s part of the story: the PS5 version is dated 6 September 2023, and the Xbox release has been publicly held up over split-screen co-op on the Series S — Vincke has talked about the memory problem openly rather than pretending it away. A game this size on a console this small is a real engineering fight, and Larian have been unusually honest about losing rounds of it.

The verdict

Baldur’s Gate 3 is the CRPG that stopped apologising. The genre spent two decades treating its own systems as an admission price and hiding them behind either nostalgia or automation. Larian’s answer was to make the systems the attraction — visible, physical, shovable — and then spend blockbuster money on the interface. The result is a game where the tactical layer and the character layer feed each other instead of taking turns, and where a first-time player and a 1998 veteran are looking at the same readable board.

It sprawls. Act 3’s city is denser than the game’s own pacing can support, and you can feel where the ambition outran the schedule. I’d take that trade every time over a game that never reaches.

If this is your entry point, the two places to go next areDisco Elysium, which proves how far you can push failure-as-content when you delete combat entirely, andPersona 5 Royal for a completely different answer to the same question: how do you make relationship systems feel like they cost something?Baldur’s Gate 3 is on PC now and PS5 shortly. It will still be worth playing in a decade, which is more than the 1998 original could claim by 2008.

Spoilers below

The Emperor is the structural masterstroke and the most divisive thing in the game, and both facts have the same cause. For most of the running time your protector is a voice in your head asking for trust it hasn’t earned, which means Larian built the central mystery out of the same substance as the tadpole mechanic — every illithid power you accept is an argument you’re losing. That the reveal makes some players feel manipulated is the design working. You were.

Astarion’s ascension is the sharpest fork Larian wrote, because it’s the only one where the “good” ending is unmistakably the smaller one. You can let a man take enormous power at a cost paid by thousands, and he will be happy, and he will be worse. Refusing it gives you a frightened person with two centuries of damage and no compensation. Most RPGs make the moral choice the powerful one. This one prices it correctly.

Karlach’s ending is the game’s honest admission that not everything is solvable. The engine gives you infinite verbs and none of them fix her, and Larian held that line through early access feedback that must have been brutal. The Netherbrain finale is the weakest hour — a big fight at the end of a game whose best fights are small ones — but the last conversation before it is the reason the whole enormous thing works.