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.