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This game is a flawed gem for me. The first important thing for me is that there are many difficulty settings so you can tailor the game to your way of enjoining RPGs and it also lets you choose when game should autopause. It was very important for me to autopause when I find something hidden or a trap or when someone in my party lose too much hp etc. It was also very important for me to set how the XP is shared in my party and to set the kingdom management setting to effortless so I could enjoy the good parts of the game.


There are many races and heritages and classes and archetypes and prestige classes to choose from and that is very important in any RPG. It lets the player to create his own hero and roleplay him in combat and outside of combat how he wants to. I love D&D but never played Pathfinder and some of the classes here I really like as I always liked fighters, rogues and rangers in D&D and Slayer class in Pathfinder lets me combine what I liked the most in these classes into one. I like that there are many classes like that in Pathfinder that combines other classes into one in a unique way so you can pick them instead of multiclassing.


Gameplay is really solid and it feels great to be an adventurer and see all the different places, travel, fight many different enemies and get stronger with time and also do all the quests and have many different options how to complete many of them. All in all gameplay is what made me play the game and ignore the bugs or push through the boring parts like kingdom management. Time limit is also generous for each chapter to do everything you want and need in each chapter. I just wish that the game would told the players that you should finish the main quest first and after that you can do all the adventuring and side quests as many people including myself are used to doing the side quests first before pushing the main quest in RPGs.



Where to start? The most important thing is that there are still many bugs. I reported 23 bugs and 1 of them was game breaking forcing me to reload a save a few hours earlier and to do sidequests in a different order to not trigger the bug. The bug was crashing my game each time I wanted to get out of my throne room after finishing these sidequests. There are also other bugs like enemy corpses flying away or falling under ground, being able to run through the building in my kingdom instead of running around it, some points of interest that you can’t get to etc.


While there are many companions you need to do exact things in an exact time in certain locations to meet them. If you are adventuring and you are in that location before that time they will not be there and if you will get back to that location after doing some parts of the main quest it can also be too late now to meet them so in the end you need metagame knowledge to know who to meet and where and at what moment to be able to get their in your party. Also some companions are just irritating or are just a plain exaggeration of some type of political stance or ideology or personal traits. Yeah all of them have their good solid reasons to be the way they are and our actions can change them and shape them but it is strange that all of them are close to being crazy and one dimensional before meeting us. Also moral alignment for many of them is just wrong in my opinion. If you are ok with murdering the whole race I don’t think you should be lawful good. Also chaotic evil ones act more like chaotic neutral jokers and end game boss is chaotic neutral but he acts more like chaotic evil. Also it is very important to metagame to know that some of the companions will leave you at certain moments in the game and what you have to do to get them back and that at the end of the game one of them will always die and some of them will also die if you didn’t metagame your choices and didn’t pick the best possible endings for them.


Kingdom management is what made me want to quit the game a few times or made me just play some other game to have fun and then come to this game to do a few of kingdom management sessions. After finishing 1st chapter we get our kingdom and while at start managing your own kingdom sounds like fun it quickly become boring and tedious. At start you think that all the buildings are useful and all the villages you can build will be equal to each other but the more you play the more you see that most buildings are useless as they only gives you a few bonus points to kingdom stats while solving opportunities and problems with your advisors gives you much more bonus points to that stats. Also building these buildings won’t change how your kingdom looks in the game and how your villages, cities and towns look when you enter them. Sadly they will only look different in the building menu and when you are on the map before entering them. Also the best place to build all villages is close to river as the game does not tell you but building close to water gives you a special buildings you can build and a free slot for these buildings.

Most important thing is that certain buildings are closed behind your main hero moral alignment and some of these buildings are much stronger than the other ones. Bulletin board being only for lawful and stocks being only for evil are the first that comes to my mind. Bulletin board gives you +2 bonus on rolls to resolve kingdom problems and stocks gives +1. These don’t sound like much but they are huge in the end. +1 is like +2 to main stat to all of your advisors so playing as Lawful Evil gives you an option to get +3 bonus to all of your advisors. Because of how powerful that is later patches made it that if you build more than 1 bulletin board and stocks in one territory these bonuses don’t stack so you are still left with +3 bonus while before the patch you were able to stack them up and get crazy bonuses like +15 giving all your advisors 100% chance to success. On the other hand chaotic gets you a brothel that will give you +1d6-3 for diplomat and minister only so a total of -2 to max +3 for them and most of the time it will be that -2 or -1 or 0 than the bonus. Neutral just gets a fair that only gives +1 to economy for each adjacent building with economy so it is pretty much nothing as a few more points in kingdom stats in the end are worth nothing. Good gives you a hospital that gives +1 for regent and councilor so at lest that is something useful. Also being lawful not only gives you bulletin board but also a courthouse that gives you +4 bonus to Warden on kingdom problems. So in the end Lawful Evil will get the best buildings while Chaotic Neutral will get the worst ones.


This is a flawed gem. I have a love-hate relationship with this game. It has as much of great things as also bad and annoying things in it.

Overall score 6.5/10

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This game is so great that I don’t even know where to start this review. I will try to keep it spoilers free as you should experience the game and read all the lore and see everything by yourself and trust me the more you play it the more you want to play it. I was unable to think about anything else or to play anything else for a few days because of this game. I finished it 3 times already and I’m sure I will finish it 10 times more not only for achievements but mostly to see all the decisions and consequences that exists in this game and to read every last bit of dialogue and lore that there is in this game.

First let’s talk about settings. There is an option to pick English or Russian language, option to turn on or off animated illustrations and subtitles in cutscenes, sliders for music and sound and options to pick screen format and resolution and to turn on or off vsync. But the most important settings in my opinion shows up when you start a new game and it is a choice of game mode. You can pick if you want to enable or disable chapter restarts and if you want consequences to be open or hidden. While the game tells you that setting the consequences to open is a recommended game mode I would tell everyone to play this game with disabled chapter restarts and hidden consequences as this makes this game so much more deep and unforgiving and you have to think each time what would you do as the game hero, how would you act and what would you say to someone before picking anything instead of just looking at what consequences will each action bring. So while game says that enabled chapter restarts and open consequences is recommended way to play just trust me and set the game on disabled chapter restarts and hidden consequences – that way you will have a lot more fun with the game and you will play it for longer and it will find more ways to surprise you without you knowing the consequences.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2481128408

Now let’s get to the meat of things and that is gameplay. There is a lot of reading and reading and picking your responses and actions is the whole gameplay. That is why you must focus on what you read and what your choices are. You play as Sir Brante and your life is divided into 5 chapters: childhood, adolescence, youth, peace time, the revolt. I think each of these are equally important as they shape our hero and his stats and also open some choices while closing some others in our life. At all stages of our life we will be able to influence how each member of our family sees us and the unity of our family as a whole. As we grow up we will be also able to influence reputation and wealth of our family. It is also important to note that we have willpower and it is used on difficult choices we will make in our whole life and things like resting or having fun give us some willpower back but choices like that most of the times will not give us points in skills so we have to find a balance between gaining skills and willpower.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2481127789

Beginning and end of each chapter gives you a summary. The summary is what stats can you get in that chapter or what stats you got already, events that you can trigger that are also divided into family events and personal life events and events you already got and how much willpower you have left and also how many times you did die so far. Yes you read that right. You can die more than once in this world and it is an interesting game mechanic that makes you meet the gods and learn more about them before being reborn but every 4th death is the final one and after that death you will not be reborn. But there are also events that can trigger the last 4th death called a true death like being convicted for final death by one type of a court or being challenged to a duel to a true death by someone in front of a different type of court or by just making the gods angry with your actions. There are probably others way to get denied the lesser deaths and go straight to true death that I haven’t found yet.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2481129979

Childhood is our first 8 years of life and here our decisions will shape our first two skills like determination and perception. After that we have adolescence that also last for 8 years and here our decisions will shape our three new skills: nobility, ingenuity, spirituality. During these 2 chapters if we get to 4 points in any of these skills we get special events based on that skill. Also in each chapter there are some events changing the stats of your home province like wealth, order, church status and who is in power. There will be also some events changing things in your family. The next chapter is our youth and it lasts for 4 years. This is the point where the game starts to open the most and gives us the most options and consequences that will shape the rest of our lives. Also all the skills we accumulated during first 2 chapters are now transformed into 6 skills that will be with us for the rest of our lives: diplomacy, manipulation, theology, valor, scheming, eloquence. Our options will be based on our choices and these skills and this will be the skills we will be able to increase for the rest of our live. While 4th chapter also last for 8 years like the first two chapters it is the longest one as you will make many decisions and friends and enemies during this chapter and it is your life during so called peaceful times. After that the last chapter is the revolt and it is only about what things will you do during one day that is divided into 4 parts.

I just love how your choices will make you meet some characters while never get to know some others or only see some only once in your life while an other choice can make that character to be the most important person in your life. Your choices really do matter and they change who will be your ally who will be your enemy they even change if you will meet some people at all. While I was playing the same person that was most important for the plot and consequences of my choices was only seen by me once and didn’t change anything for me when I did play the second time and made different choices.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2481128241

But the most important thing for me was the world presented in this game. It is so deep and so rich with lore. Everything here is connected with each other and has some sense in this world. Yes just like the developers say it is a gritty world but it is such a complex world with many laws, many groups and religions and sects and types of magic and its own history and races that exists as well as these that went extinct. Everything in this world is really well thought out. The sound in this game like horse hooves on a cobblestones or the sound of the giant tree bark moving on the wind etc. really makes you feel like you are inside this world. I’m not ashamed to say that the world presented and the writing gave me tearful eyes a few times.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2481128010


The only problems I found were some small errors in English spelling from time to time. Things like: “Today you will you be taking” or “The” instead of “He” etc. But I think these errors will be fixed with time as developers only need to read all the text in the game a few more times to catch them all.


Do you like to read and be immersed in a great living world with it’s own history and problems and reality? Do you like when your decisions have a strong lasting impact? Just buy it now! Just do it!

Overall score 9/10