Pathfinder 2nd Edition has been my most played game of the last year by far, yet my group only gets together to play it once every two weeks. At last, a video game has arrived that can ease the long waits in-between, and most importantly, the party will obey me for a change!

Dawnsbury Days builds on the free game Quest for the Golden Candelabra, adding more story, many, many new build options up to level 4, an “Insane” difficulty, a “GM mode” so you can torment friends over Remote Play, and a custom encounter creator. The Profane Barrier DLC can then take your party up to level 8 in a continued and much more ambitious story. Gameplay is predominantly combat encounters broken up by cutscenes and rest points where you can tweak the party before venturing forth again. Pathfinder 2e’s non-combat systems and the Recall Knowledge mechanic don't get as much of a spotlight, and are altered to suit the game’s design, though these work a bit better in a tabletop campaign with a human Game Master anyway.

Effort has been made to save new players needing to delve into 2e’s hundreds of pages of rules. A PDF manual accessible from the main menu details Dawnsbury Days’ rules, including differences from the tabletop ruleset. This would be a rather dry introduction but new players can get to grips with it quite easily just by jumping in. Your available actions each turn are clearly displayed and explained via tooltips, including a breakdown of the chances of each degree of success and the reasoning behind it. The story, particularly the DLC, is a bit of a whistle-stop tour of creature types and gives you a good grounding in how to kick their various backsides. The mechanics are extremely faithful to 2e so if you like your character build you can take it from screen to table with little to no adjustment to make it playable.

In the 2e spirit, customisation is key. There are plenty of ways to express your character mechanically, as well as a selection of premade avatars for them or the ability to add your own. You can change the difficulty before any encounter, and there are even popular house rules that you can toggle in the settings. Players who haven't played 2e before should start at Easy or Medium difficulty. With access to all enemy stats, the game can afford to throw tougher encounters your way. With careful play, attention to enemy weaknesses and decent luck, you’ll generally not have trouble on Medium difficulty. Characters sometimes hint at what strategy to take, often via amusingly blunt fourth wall breaks. At one point in the DLC I was warned about a particularly tricky creature type and able to prepare in advance before the encounter; I would have liked more pre-fight info like that, so my party would start encounters on the wrong foot less often, but at least you can restart. The encounters themselves have a pleasingly wide variety which increases as the campaign progresses and especially in the DLC, introducing hazards, alternate win conditions and optional high-risk high-reward challenges. Most importantly, they all seem feasible for most (sensible) team compositions.

The presentation takes a lot of cues from virtual tabletops, which are a familiar environment for TTRPG players and good for learning. The art assets are a welcome step up from Quest in quality and variety. Dialogue and voice acting has been revisited and improved on - though in many cases the script and delivery are clear and practical at the cost of some personality. My main presentation gripe is that things in combat happen all at once with little visual feedback. This is fine if you're experienced, but otherwise, to process what just happened you’ll often need to read the combat log. Between this, and the need to examine entire monster statblocks in lieu of Recall Knowledge, you may spend a larger fraction of your time examining text than seeing combat play out.

Support for the game is ongoing; the developer regularly interacts with their Patreon supporters and the 2e community, and is continuing to fix bugs, act on feedback (including some of mine; you're welcome), implement more mechanics and character options (including 2e’s mighty archetype rules), and support modders who extend the game beyond its original scope. Via the Steam Workshop, jumping into Roguelike mode as a party of tanuki with portal guns is simple if not totally advisable.

It's a pleasure to see the 2e ruleset finally get a video game adaptation, and valuable that that adaptation is an indie project with lots of scope to be enriched by the community. The icing on the cake is that beyond a faithful technical implementation, effort has been put into making an enjoyable story with satisfying encounter design. All that plus the wallet-friendly price point makes this an easy recommendation for turn-based strategic combat fans, and hopefully a gateway into Pathfinder 2e for some of you!