Baldur’s Gate 3 is incapable of escaping comparison to fifth edition Dungeons and Dragons, and it clearly doesn’t want to try. It aestheticizes the act of rolling dice, offers cosmetic skins for when rolling them, and the d20 polyhedron is a core part of its narrative’s iconography. It aims to capture the Dungeons And Dragons Experience, something heavily informed by Critical Role, Community episodes, and broad parodies as much as it aims to capture the 5e player’s handbook.

5e works to take a genre renowned for fiddliness, sand off the rough edges to lower the skill floor even if it harms the ceiling, market it as a beginner-friendly experience even if it lacks common features for any other modern game on the market and has lacking systematization for non-combat sequences, use its unique market position to have eye-catching production values that no other game can attest to, and then have the canny and luck to release right in the middle of a massive upsurge of interest in tabletop roleplay. This, coincidentally, perfectly describes Baldur’s Gate 3 as well.

No game in this genre has had this much effort put into filmic direction and realistic visuals since Dragon Age Origins, and its focus on high-quality cutscenes, voice acting, and motion capture is exactly what was needed to make it sell Elden Ring numbers. Twitter artists’ attention spans have been caught by it in the same personality-altering ways as Mihoyo games and Final Fantasy XIV, which is the true mark of a culturally significant work. Doing mocap for every NPC in the game speaks to its unparalleled ambition and production scope.

Mechanically, the game attempts to offer systemic interactions uncommon to the genre. A confession: I could never get into Divinity Original Sin or its sequel and thus struggle to directly compare its execution. On its own merit, the implementation suffers because of how stifling 5e’s action economy is. Taking two standard actions to throw a barrel and ignite it in a game with a four-man party limit is very rarely the most effective use of a turn, and magic takes forever to start creating interesting environmental effects, by which point it is probably a better use of time to turn one cast Haste on the cracked-out martial class of choice and let them solo the encounter instead.

Martial classes get changes from the 5e PHB which are highly appreciated - general rebalances make some subclasses more compelling, weapon proficiency now grants combat maneuvers with each weapon type that replenish on short rest which allow for debuffs, area-of-effects, and crowd control in ways that are pretty logical for each weapon type, and the oodles of magic items synergize incredibly well with oft-neglected playstyles. An open hand monk with a three-level dip in Thief for the extra bonus action can crack 300 damage per turn by endgame, and if one has, say, a decade of Pathfinder brainrot, that’s deeply satisfying in ways not offered by the uninspiring feat and class feature list.

It’s inherited from the tabletop game, but it’s still disappointing how guided and on-rails character building feels. Feats are hard to come by and are in direct competition with ability score increases, which creates incredible opportunity costs for efforts to go gimmicky. Being guided towards picking one, maybe two build-defining feats and dumping others into ASI feels really bad, and multiclassing means losing out further and subsisting entirely off of choiceless class features or every-so-often subclass bonuses (and 80% of subclasses either have linear progression or are just picking spells with extra steps).

The lack of flavor is reflected in non-combat dialogue choices, which focus on the act of decision-making as a substitute for roleplay. Actual dialogue options are bland, simplistic, and any personality is pre-defined from the player’s chosen origin or class. The focus on full mocap, as much as it means there are truly excellent performances (shoutouts to Astarion), means individual conversations run short and utilitarian. Dialogue often lacks distinct character voice (Astarion and Lae’zel exempted), it instead gaining its sparkle from behavioral tics, quivers in the voice, or sweeping body language. Each line is usually just a short sentence or two, and conversations rarely run for too long.

Similarly, quests are often binary and offer few chances to meaningfully tinker with inputs, outputs, or outcomes, or are obscenely frustrating in the lack of consideration for alternate paths. The quest chain that defines Act 1, a crisis between goblins, druids, and refugees caught in the middle, outright resists any method of play that is not “go to druids, get quest to go to camp, go talk to goblins, kill them where they stand, teleport back to applause.” Narratively, siding with the goblins immediately loses two party members from the player’s ranks and has literally zero in-character justification past moustache-twirling villainy. There is no way to make the tieflings flee ahead of the assault, and they try to kill the PC for suggesting it. Interrupting the druid ritual similarly has no real effect on the outcome. Playing both sides and luring Minthara out into the open grants the player a harder fight with more at risk and less roleplay reason to do it. In the third act, the narrator (assumedly playing the role of game master) drops the artifice several times to clearly explain the binary choice at play and suggest there is no other route, which is, put politely, advice no GM should ever take.

This sense of railroading and resistance to straying from the beaten path is omnipresent, and further hindered by its frankly godawful approach to ability checks. Here is where the fetishization of dice comes to the fore: it outright ignores how 5e is supposed to be played solely to introduce more randomness. The Dungeon Master’s Guide (and 5e’s director) states to use passive checks for rolls that aren’t player-initiated - passive checks working by simply adding ten to the player’s proficiency bonus and deterministically answering whether they succeed. This allows the GM to conceal rolls, a valuable tool, but equally so it being non-random is important. Player’s skill choices and ability spreads affect the outcome when they’re operating on autopilot, not their luck. This is in contrast to ability checks, which are high-stakes and player-initiated.

The d20 is an inherently insanely random and swingy die, and even skilled player characters are often at risk of failure. This is exciting in a tabletop game, where failure can have unintended consequences. 5e’s DMG (and its director) knows that failure despite extensive investment can be frustrating, however, and explicitly rules that critical failures and successes should not exist when rolling ability checks. Literally none of these rulings operate as such in BG3. Passive checks don’t exist; everything is rolled. Critical failures and critical successes both apply to ability checks, and success/failure is either strictly binary (either losing out on quest progression or getting sent into combat, or getting exactly what is desired or and/or avoiding combat) or entirely superfluous (a lengthy series of ability checks in its climax has literally zero difference between success or failure in terms of animations, dialogue, outcomes, bonuses, or penalties).

It is a mantra of most actual play and most dungeon mastering guides, regardless of systems, to have the dice serve to amplify stakes but not define the game - only let the dice come out when the outcome is meaningfully uncertain, and when what is being rolled is clearly defined. There is a place for it, and systematizing uncertainty is a key part of what separates TTRPG from improvised narrative (check out Amber Diceless Roleplaying, though!). However, it defining all aspects of player expression is equally poor in execution - it smudges out roleplay, character building, and simple fun to have a high-level master of the craft still muck up something completely mundane - unless there is a factor in the scene to add tension, which rarely occurs in this game.

This is further compounded by the game embracing save-scumming. Unlike many, many other games in the CRPG space (and obviously unlike TTRPG, which is beholden to linear time) the player can quicksave and quickload at any point in dialogue, including on the ability check menu. The only thing stopping them from constant, eternal success is a belief that failure is interesting (it almost never is) or respect for their own time (an assumption challenged by the game’s mammoth length).

This is a sizable pacebreaker, but it’s mitigable by offering the game respect it doesn’t earn. By far one of the most frustrating and runtime-bloating occurrences is inventory management, a symptom of rough edges and ill-conceived QoL decisions colliding messily. Party member inventories are individualized, and logically are taken with them when dismissed. The player can send items to camp at any time (except for the final dungeon, for some reason, despite there being no reason to ever manage your inventory by that point?) and can similarly teleport to camp at almost any time.

These systems interlink to create a system that is fiddly (individual party members may overcap their inventory at any time, necessitating shuffling and sending to camp, and searching the inventory (an already-onerous task due to poor UX and lacking categorization) does not display items from the inventories of camped PCs) but also entirely superfluous (being able to visit camp at almost any time means the player can swap out party members or access their storage equally at almost any time). It lacks any actual difficult decisionmaking about what to bring, as combat-affecting items like scrolls, potions, and grenades weigh fractions of a pound while the limit even for STR-dumping characters is somewhere around eighty.

This has the side effect of completely eroding the feeling of camp as an actual space that inhabits the world, instead coming across as Fable 3’s inventory dimension. Despite its accessibility and lack of immersion, there is no way to quickly dismiss or replace party members past individually walking to each one (which can take 15+ seconds on larger camp maps) and mashing through dialogue. The low party limit means that there is incentive to do this a lot just to play the game and advance quests, but the completely RNG environmental skill checks means there is a want or need to swap people out for another reroll after all the WIS people in the party chunked a perception or survival save, the presence of locked doors potentially incentivizes a pocket Astarion to teleport in, jimmy a trap, and teleport away, and the ever-present horror of realizing the wrong person has a desired item and the player will thus have to cycle through everybody’s inventories one-by-one until it turns up.

The game is obviously not lacking in redeeming value - as a set of encounters it is unreal. Every single fight in the game has a unique compounding factor, and the infrequent instances when enemies are reused it is in very different compositions and contexts. The acting direction really is good, and Astarion might ultimately unseat Daeran as a new favorite in the CRPG canon of prissy assholes who prove that negging really does work. Some quests are enjoyable, even if many ultimately disappoint or get their conclusion swallowed up in the sea of bugs and inconsistent writing that is Act 3.

What it excels at, notably, has little to do with tabletop roleplay (unless your table has trained thespians) and rarely happens in CRPGs. This speaks to its broad appeal, but more notably gets at the heart of the matter: the commercial ideal Dungeons And Dragons Experience is not actually how almost any tabletop game, 5e or not, is played or performed. It is defined by secondary experience via podcasts and television episodes and broad parodies. This, more than anything, is what Larian offers: the ability to play a game that your favorite voice actors play, or to get the Dungeons And Dragons Experience when you’re not in a position to get a group going. It offers the idealized and aestheticized vision of it, even when that idealization makes the game outright worse.

I played both prior Dragon Age games in a binge that has stopped dead in its tracks due to this game.

smug 2009 atheists should be punched in the face before they're allowed to write narratives that centrally explore themes of faith, because they cannot fucking approach the topic with any empathy and it massively defangs their critique. DAI being from the perspective of a literal inquisition but having no coherent ideology behind it and not actually being founded in any religion is so craven, they deny themselves the ability to meaningfully critique these structures by never stepping inside them and this profound inability to even try to understand the religious mindset and its decisionmaking while simultaneously making it a large narrative component is continually the worst part of dragon age as a series. truly baffling that they play into it harder and harder with each successive game

if this first act was you being like an anti-rift militia and trying to manage the complexity of operating on both sides of a border that was hotly contested within most people's lifetimes, and as you pick up steam you eventually discover records of the ancient inquisition and take up its mantle that could be, like, a story! but no, instead the cool-down section after the obligatory stupid action setpiece tutorial has you immediately fucking start the inquisition, which is insane, that feels like an end of act 1 thing where the world opens up. as a result there's no weight to it, it doesn't make sense and doesn't fit any coherent expectation of what an inquisition is, and it muddles the shit out of everything from the start.

this is an agnostic-atheistic politics-free inquisition with no authorization by any political or religious athority performed in the style of a syncretized cult from a millennium ago, which makes about as much sense as disgruntled knights during the hundred years' war converting to zoroastrarianism because their lords aren't doing shit to help their countrymen. except zoroastrarianism still has a coherent ideology and set of strictures behind it.

there's no sense of place to Haven by the time you leave it behind for the hinterlands, the only way you'd know where it's at is by implication of the world map and if you recall loghain's descriptions of war with orlais back in origins. the town has no history, has no culture, has no attachment to the player past a bunch of MMO questgivers and menus. awakening does so much more with so much less of import within minutes of its opening action sequence and its aftermath.

cullen leads your troops and queen anora handpicked the quartermaster to help with the inquisition, despite the inquisition having been founded approx. 30 seconds before you visit, how the hell do the orlesian politicians not see the massive amount of fereldans who were teleported into the inquisition's ranks as they operate directly on the state border and perform extrajudicial killings of templars and not see that as an insanely partisan threat to their security? how are they STILL doing the "both sides bad" thing for their stupid fucking templar/mage conflict? how do they manage to have you fight both groups in the same encounter but not actually design encounters around these multiple enemy types, they just spawn in a wave of templars then a wave of mages? why did the time to decompress not give me any fucking time at all to meet the cast and get to know how they tick? i still have no reason to give a shit about solas other than his deeply unnerving design

bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, and it makes me wish i'd never given these games a shot. no game in this series ever approaches its potential and they are all fundamentally compromised products. dragon age origins has constant bleeding chunks of its world be stitched back, gangrenous, via abhorrent 2009 DLC practices. dragon age 2 is completely unfinished, a vastly superior game when you skip all combat with the press of a button. and inquisition reeks of the same shit i see in every other frostbite-era bioware game: two years of prototyping and engine dev that led nowhere, followed by 18 months of crunch where nothing comes out in any sort of way that people are proud of. i fucking hate this company dude

Persona 5 Royal improves on Persona 5 in every way, unfortunately this way is so disconnected storywise that it almost acts as an entirely seperate experience to the main game, being thematically an almost condemnation of the main game's storyline due to how disjointed the two narratives are. However, it is a superior storyline in almost every way, discarding many of the awful villains employed before in favour of one that had some pathos and connection to the themes of the Persona series as a whole of the exploration of the self, rather than the exploration of society the original Persona 5 opted for.

Gameplay takes a simultaneous leap in interesting ideas and a large stumble in difficulty due to said ideas, the new systems at play all make an easy experience absolutely trivial, an example being Persona traits add a lot more customisation to personalising a Persona's playstyle and ability usage but it becomes apparent this system isn't balanced at all, like giving Alice the ability to make instant death spells cost no SP, resulting in Alice killing every encounter that doesn't have an immunity to death instantly and cancelling out most late game random encounters. Ultimately, Persona 5 Royal shines in what it doesn't share with it's predecessor, and what it does share looks even worse in comparison.

ELEX marks Piranha Bytes’ sixth take on their tried-and-true Gothic formula. For the non-Europeans those who have never played any Piranha Bytes games before, here's a quick introduction. PB games stand out from other RPGs through their small yet dense game worlds. Players progression is soft-gated through high-level enemies rather than physical barriers. This way skilled enough players can edge their way into parts of the world they’re not supposed to be in yet. Then there's a progression curve that–relative to most RPGs–has you start from level negative five. You will start off as such a useless sod that even a basic oversized chicken is a major threat to your life; something you must grow to overcome by running away and kissing the boots of those stronger than you. This time, the world is one of the biggest PB has ever made, and you get a jetpack right at the start of the game. How does it pan out?

The exploration in ELEX is downright addicting. What starts as a short stroll in the woods towards a quest objective turns into a constant string of “oooh, what’s that?”`. You'll end up taking detour after detour, going from one interesting landmark to the next. After scavenging everything you can find–only an hour later will you remember what it was you came here for in the first place. Despite the size of ELEX's world, it’s consistently dense with stuff to explore, and there's always another landmark in sight of another. The only exception is the region of Ignadon, which f.e. has only half or 2/3rds the amount of quests compared to the other two main regions, despite being as large. It also helps that the quest design in ELEX is good at sending you towards different parts of the world where you can (hopefully) get sidetracked.

ELEX’s world is on an intrinsic level appealing to explore because of the jetpack. In past PB games the main obstacles you faced were enemies blocking your path, but now the terrain itself is a major obstacle. The world terrain features much more vertical variation compared to previous PB games, as there are way more structures and landmarks that make you go “can I climb that?”. 99% of the time, you can, and 99% of the time you’ll also find an item up there as well! There are almost no invisible walls in ELEX that get in the way of your exploration; the only limit is your jetpack fuel.

One would think that a jetpack would trivialize combat and exploration, but turns out it's quite well balanced! The jetpack only allows you to gain height for about six seconds, and takes about three times as long to recharge from 0 to 100. Fuel only recharges if you’re standing on a solid surface. Infinite flight isn’t possible, and fuel takes too long to recharge to spam the jetpack in combat. Climbing terrain then isn’t a matter of ‘hold spacebar to climb’. It does take planning and fuel management to fly over gaps and climb buildings. In combat the jetpack doesn’t have much use outside of running away or shooting enemies mid-air.

With flight being a thing, PB was finally forced to address the longstanding issue of using high ground to cheese enemies. PB made the decision to give almost all enemies ranged attacks that can lead you. Meaning, they shoot towards where you are moving towards rather than where you are. As most combat in ELEX takes place on open plains or hills, this is definitely a sensible decision. This way you can’t just fly or circlestrafe to cheese most enemies, now that they can snipe you out of the sky. There are other ranged attack types (such as homing/interruptible hitscan) that ELEX could have used to vary things up, but sadly it never does.

Though the exploration in ELEX is great, its rewards are rather disappointing. Expect to find a lot of junk items, healing/mana potions, some cash, some crafting materials, or a piece of lore. Sometimes you will find an actually powerful piece of gear… with such insane stat requirements that it takes 10 more hours of leveling to equip. All the above is of course still valuable, but the fact that most places in the world yield more of the same makes it rather predictable and unexciting. Of course there must be more low-value than high-value finds to make the latter feel appropriately rewarding, but in ELEX that ratio is too skewed towards the former.

That ELEX reduces the average value gained per square unit explored does make some sense, however. In earlier PB games the worlds were relatively smaller, so for every square meter explored you were more likely to find a high-value item. In ELEX the world is larger, yet just as dense with items. This results in a greater total amount of items to discover, which for a game like this makes the difficulty curve and economy much harder to balance. If ELEX kept the same low/high-value find ratio of the old games, there’d be so many good items to find through a bit of exploration that the player would become too strong too early, likely resulting in the player being bored as they steamroll through most of the world without too much effort. Thus it was necessary to reduce the value you get on average out of exploration. Yet, the end result of the rewards for exploration not being exciting persists. The design challenge here is as follows: How do you maintain a reasonable difficulty curve and keep rewards for exploration exciting, while having a high density of discoverable items spread out across a much larger surface area?

One method ELEX already uses is to ‘split’ high-value items into parts and spread them across the world (akin to collecting Heart Pieces in The Legend of Zelda to create Heart Containers). For example, the world contains a lot of Natural Elex that’s not that useful on its own, but you can combine several pieces to craft Elex Potions for attribute/skill points. There’s also Gemstones, which you can slot into gear to give you minor stat boosts. Smaller Gemstones can then be combined to create larger ones which provide greater boosts. This way there’s a noticeable sense of progression without rewarding the player with too much power for exploring a small part of the world. The implementation of those ideas in ELEX are rather flawed (certain vendors can sell infinite amounts of Natural Elex to the point where finding Natural Elex in the wild doesn’t feel as rewarding anymore, and Gemstones are so rare to find that even in my semi-completionist playthrough I only had enough Gemstones to make one (1) Large Gemstone), but the idea behind them is sound.

ELEX also prevents you from being able to equip powerful gear you find until you meet certain stat requirements. These are necessary in games like this to some extent, but in the context of ELEX they are absurdly balanced. In practice, you often won’t be able to equip that nice gun you found until ten or twenty more hours of leveling up. The costs for increasing your stats increase the higher the stats themselves get (when a stat is over 30 it costs 2 attribute points to raise it by one, and when it’s over 60 it costs five points to raise it by one), so if you also factor in that all armor/weapons have requirements for two different stats, and that most of the gear you find have requirements around 50 or higher, it’s going to take a little while until you get there. To rub more salt in the wound, even if you do finally meet the stat requirements, you’ll find that most high-tier gear you find in the wild isn’t even that good compared to what you can buy from the store and upgrade yourself–on top of having more reasonable stat requirements to boot! In fact, one of the most powerful melee weapons in the game is just a fully upgraded store weapon. So you often can’t use a lot of weapons you find through exploration, and by the time you meet the requirements you’ve most likely found a better alternative already.

This is where the ‘split’ method could be applied to gear. By ‘splitting’ gear into components spread out across the world, the player can still feel a sense of progress for having found a part of a powerful item that can later be combined into one. This should reduce the need for absurd stat requirements in high-tier gear as well. Dividing a high-tier item across several high-level areas or from materials dropped by killing high-level enemies should already pose enough of an implicit stat requirement of its own.

Splitting items has its limits when there’s not that many items to split to begin with, so another solution is to add more items by introducing more item categories. The currently available equipment categories in ELEX are for weapons, shields, body armor, helmets, leg armor, one ring and one necklace, but so you could also add categories for things like gloves, boots, belts, another ring, earrings, or cyber-implants. Since finding a new piece of equipment in the wild only feels valuable if it’s better than your existing gear or if it has an unique use case (like masks that offer radiation/poison resistance, or can be broken down into useful crafting materials), scaling out horizontally by adding more types of gear allows you to populate the world with more equipment that feels unique and valuable. The player being encouraged to multi-class in ELEX is also a good extension of this idea. It means that more weapon types and thus more items one finds through exploration are more relevant to one’s playstyle, whereas earlier PB games tended to focus more on pure builds with a single weapon category. The only caveats to scaling out gear horizontally is that the difficulty curve of the game should factor in the player having an item equipped for every category, and that the economy should factor in the player being able to buy an item for most categories. Keep also in mind that there’s only so many equipment categories you can make: a massive amount of categories could devalue each individual item category, the equipment system could become Armored Core-levels of complicated in a way that doesn’t suit what the game is going for, and having a humanoid player character be equipped with so many different items and baubles could feel a bit silly.

Another option is to scale out vertically by adding more equipment tiers per equipment category. That way there’s a lot more stuff to find per equipment category before you get your hands on the highest-tier gear, thus keeping the world populated with useful items that aren't immediately too powerful. ELEX already applies this by having most weapons come in four minor tiers of power, on top of major tiers per weapon category that have actually different names but the same moveset. For this to properly work, there would also need to be more enemy ‘tiers’ to exercise this newfound power against (be it through new enemy types, variations of existing enemy types, or a pack of lower-tier enemies that you’d have to fight all at once). If mid-tier gear is enough to deal with endgame enemies, then the higher equipment tiers are overkill. You could balance the highest equipment tier around the highest enemy tier, but if you then try to squeeze in a 1000 equipment tiers even though there are only 5 enemy tiers, then the end result is an incremental sense of progression which feels like the only difference between an old and a new weapon is that it does +1 damage. It’s hard to appreciate new gear you found if it’s barely any different from your old gear. You need to strike a good balance between the amount of enemy tiers and weapon tiers, depending on how many assets (weapon/enemy models, animations) you can afford to create and how large you plan to make the world.

Finally you can add another dimension to itemization by letting the player modify and upgrade existing gear using upgrade items. This reduces the need for horizontal scaling by introducing more equipment-relevant items that aren’t actually equipment items. It also reduces the need for vertical scaling, since being able to make low-tier items as strong as high-tier ones would reduce the amount of equipment tiers necessary. Such upgrade items can function as one-time consumables or reusable modifiers you can equip onto equipment, like the aforementioned Gemstones. These upgrade items themselves can also be tiered, split into parts/upgrade when combined, and either apply to all equipment categories or some/one of them. Care must be taken to not make upgrade items too powerful and versatile, otherwise there’s little point in finding better tiers/uniques of an equipment type (beyond slightly higher base stats) when you can already upgrade a low-tier weapon to be as strong as a high-tier one. ELEX manages to avoid this by limiting the amount of Gemstone slots on a weapon by its weapon tier, where higher weapon tiers have more slots to put gemstones into compared to lower tier ones.

To sum it up, we’ve added more item categories, added more tiers per item category, relaxed the stat requirements for items, introduced upgrade items that can modify items, and also split all aforementioned items in parts and recipes for good measure. Will that be enough to populate a large world with useful but not-too-powerful items in a way that’s satisfying? Well, no. Populating the world with useful items like upgrade potions and higher-DPS weapons is one thing, but populating it with interesting items is another. If the only thing better items do is the exact same thing as the previous tiers but with a higher armor/damage value, then all you’ve done is establish more progression for the sake of progression. Such number-goes-up itemization holds nothing new and no surprises by itself, leaving no sense of excitement to be had.

The secret ingredient behind what makes upgrades exciting is precisely all the new gameplay opportunities they open up. Exploration in Metroid wouldn’t be as rewarding if Energy/Missile Tanks were the only items you could discover, since they usually don’t open up any new opportunities. Stat upgrades like Energy/Missile Tanks or all the methods I listed above only serve to make the world feel less empty by populating it with useful rewards, but they cannot be a substitute for creating interesting rewards.

ELEX’s gear rewards aren’t very interesting because the only new things better gear offers is usually just a higher attack/armor value. There is no leg armor that does anything but increase your armor stat, most helmets (aside from sunglasses and the Protective Mask) only increase your armor stat, and all body armor also only increases your armor + poise. Rings and amulets are a bit more special in this regard because they can boost your skills or attributes, but given the aforementioned insane weapon stat requirements, I ended up mostly wearing rings and amulets that let me equip a better weapon. Even unique weapons with special names don’t do anything special. First, they are always based on an existing weapon that you can buy in a store, and thus don’t have any unique moves or modes attached to them that other weapons of the same type don’t have. Second, they might come with elemental buffs or gemstone sockets pre-applied, but since you can craft those on any weapon yourself it hardly makes those “uniques” unique. Aside from the sunglasses and the hilariously broken amulet that lets you survive one lethal blow (an effect you can reset by re-equipping the amulet), most gear does not provide any unique effects or synergies or anything that can change the way you play, like in Diablo or Baldur’s Gate. Since finding a better sword by itself isn’t as satisfying as it is in Gothic or Risen, giving weapons more unique and interesting effects (both in combat and outside of combat) could allow one to populate the world with a greater amount and variety of equipment items without having to scale equipment out horizontally/vertically as much. Either ELEX should have introduced new gear properties/systems to justify strewing so much gear around the world, or it should have shrunk down the world to accommodate the gear potential it already had.

While Gothic and Risen took an even more basic number-go-up approach than ELEX to gear progression, it ironically did work out better for those games. One reason being that each better equipment item that you did get was a major and noticeable upgrade because there were less equipment tiers. Every armor set in Gothic/Risen represented a major milestone that required you to do several quests and save up a ton of money just to be able to unlock it. They wouldn't be as impactful if you'd get more new armor sets in the same timespan. The second reason is that Gothic/Risen's worlds were filled with gatekeeper NPCs who would gib your unarmored underleveled ass if you got too close. Putting on better armor posed an immediately noticeable increase in your chances of survival against them. The excitement from finding better gear in those games stemmed from all the new areas and potential for exploration that opened up for you, much like finding a key item in a Metroidvania. Of course, finding better gear in ELEX serves a similar purpose, but that sense of progression is way more incremental and thus less pronounced due to the greater amount of equipment items, categories, and tiers present in ELEX–not to mention that ELEX has way less clearly defined gate(keeper)s to test your newfound strength against.

The larger world of ELEX has not only caused the value of itemization to be stretched out, but enemy design as well. I’m not upset at the fact that enemies are reskinned at all–that is simply an inevitable reality of game production–but rather that there is not much variation in enemy behavior and attack design. It's a problem that applies not only between enemy variants, but whole enemy archetypes as well. Whether it’s a Biter or a high-level Stalker, how you approach them is identical: dodge their attacks and stunlock them during the gaps in their attack strings for as long as your stamina and surrounding enemies allow. The only variables that change is the HP/armor/damage on the enemy, whether they have ranged attacks at all, and the animations + punish/dodge windows in their attack strings. Dealing with melee attacks is mainly a matter of timing your backstep/roll button, and rarely about positioning, which curbs the potential variety in enemy melee attacks. Ranged attacks too almost often only come in the form of a projectile with leading, but never spreadshots/lasers/homing/area-of-denial attacks/etc. There are only a few NPCs that use explosives, but that’s about it. Enemy behavior (such as how aggressive they are, how they respond to your actions, whether they can interact with other enemies such as by buffing others or use group tactics) also remains the same throughout. Enemies trying to impede you indirectly (such as by inflicting debuffs, altering the environment, etc.) is also something that rarely ever happens. Only humanoid enemies behave differently from wildlife since they can block your attacks and prefer to use ranged attacks at range. While there are several firearms with unique firemodes and spells and stims available to the player, humanoid NPCs don’t seem very interested in using these. The end result is that once you’ve gotten familiar with the combat system and gotten some decent gear, each fight will play out similarly. For a game where you’ll be doing a lot of fighting, that is not exactly a boon to making each part of the world feel unique.

Even if the enemy NPCs and their variants were more varied in behavior and how you had to fight them, there’s still the issue of having to spread them out across the world in a way that’s not repetitive. There’s only so many enemies and variants that can be reasonably put in the game after all, especially with Piranha Bytes’ AA-level budget and manpower. For this reason it’s important that existing enemy types are combined with each other to create new unique combat scenarios with the same assets, and that enemies are designed in a way where they can synergize and play off of each other to facilitate this approach to encounter design. This may sound asinine to bring up (especially if you’ve read my other reviews), but it bears repeating in ELEX’s case. External modifiers (things like difficult terrain, weather, environmental hazards, interactable environmental objects, or other magic nonsense) can be overlaid on top of a combat zone to multiply the amount of mileage you get out of the few enemy types you have. This would however require that enemies more often attack you in groups/packs, and that they aren’t as susceptible to being picked off one-by-one. That would otherwise defeat the entire point of combining enemies to create new combat scenarios. Of course, even with the above there’s only so many combinations you can make, but at that point you should ask yourself whether your world isn’t just too big to accommodate what little content you have.

That brings us to the second main culprit of ELEX’s lackadaisical balancing: it’s utter and total devotion to non-linear progression. ELEX takes the non-linearity of its forebears even further by letting you go anywhere you want after you exit the tutorial zone, with almost no invisible barriers or story gates holding you back. Such non-linearity doesn’t need to be a bad thing at all. If anything, ELEX’s quest design massively benefits from being able to progress quests out-of-order by being able to find key items or deal with key NPCs before having even started the relevant quests (unlike prior Gothic games where said items/NPCs only spawn after having started the quests… in locations you’ve already explored). Rather, the issue with ELEX’s approach of total freed.om of progression is that it makes it significantly more difficult (but not impossible) to balance character progression, item progression, story progression, and enemy populations, since the player can tackle most content in any order. It’s possible to predict non-linear outcomes and entry points to smaller isolated entities like quests and dungeons, but how do you as a designer predict such things for a massive overworld?

Prior PB games were renowned for their freedom of exploration (especially relative to most mainstream RPGs at the time), but they were–for good reason–not that free. The crux lies in how the games handle how the worlds of those games changed as the main story progressed.

In Gothic I, when the main story moved to a new chapter, most of its world got refreshed with new content. Wildernesses would be repopulated with higher-level enemies (but lower-level enemies would not be despawned, thus not screwing you over if you didn’t systematically exterminate every single NPC for XP per chapter), and NPCs would offer new quests. This meant that the world by hand adjusted itself to match the player’s progress in strength, and also helped the world feel alive by having it respond to changes in the main story. Yet, this approach of refreshing the entire world can only realistically work when its surface area is small enough and when the new content itself is fresh enough. The greater the surface area, the more content would need to be refreshed, which from a production standpoint becomes exponentially more taxing. Not to mention that the player would be expected to sweep most of the world again just to come into contact with the new content, which is something that increasingly feels like forced backtracking and padding the larger the world is. This approach also only works if the refreshed content has truly new story/gameplay ramifications, otherwise it too will come off as padding.

Gothic II had a larger world compared to its prequel, and instead of periodically refreshing the entire game world, it instead cleverly decided to refresh only one part of it. The way that worked is by structuring the world around a central hub–the Khorinis Mainland. In one chapter the player would explore the mainland, then the next chapter a hard-gated border zone would be unlocked (the Old Valley of the Mine, Jharkendar) featuring higher-level content appropriate to the player’s expected level at that point in the main story. The main story then expects the player to explore and do quests in that area, after which they’re led back to the Mainland, which has since been refreshed with new content while the player was away in a border area. This usually brought with it a meaningful change in the situation, such as the introduction of Seekers or an Orc invasion, after which the process repeats itself. Since the border areas are situated on the borders of the world, the player is less likely to pass through them again while backtracking or doing Mainland quests, which means that their lack of new content won’t be noticed. The fact that all the refreshed content is only placed in the central hub/crossroads of the world means that the player is more likely to “organically” (i.e. guided by the designer’s graceful hand) come across all the changes and new content as they’re backtracking. This way they are more likely to engage with it out of their own curiosity and initiative, rather than being told by an NPC that they should investigate something in position XY, which can feel like it is invalidating player agency. Now that the designer can reasonably predict how the player progresses through the world, new level-appropriate content can be placed in areas that the player is likely to visit and come across.

Now compare this to ELEX. Here, almost nothing is gated, and after the tutorial zone the player can go about anywhere anytime. The fact that there’s shit to explore in practically every direction makes it very likely for the player to get pulled into every which way, making predicting player progression through the world rather difficult.

Besides that, ELEX has only three story acts, where the bulk of all side-quests (save for some companion quests) can be completed in the first act. There is no pressing reason to progress the main story, and if you’ve played a few RPGs, you are most likely used to completing as much of the side content as possible before progressing the main story (out of a merited fear of the sidequests permanently disappearing otherwise, as is already the case in ELEX with the Domed City). If you do all the sidequests first and the main story second, then the world will appear barren and its settlements lifeless now that there's no reason to interact with the rest of the world. Only the Domed City changes noticeably after the main story progresses, and even then it doesn’t offer you any new content when it does.

For this reason it would have helped if there were more main story acts and if more sidequests were gated in later acts, but this presents another issue: how do you notify the player that there's new quests available across vastly different parts in the world? Now that the designer cannot predict how the player will backtrack and place new content along that path, either the player must manually check each settlement and/or NPC to see if anything's new, which is time-consuming, or the player must be notified through either phone calls or messenger NPCs spawning near you to notify you that's something new. But the latter has its limits; it feels a bit silly if after a story act change you are bombarded with a dozen NPCs at once telling you you can progress their questline (which is something that actually happens when you visit your companion hub after a story act change). Given the design challenges here, it's understandable why PB would skip all this hassle by just making all side-quests available from the start.

The above paragraphs mostly concern themselves with anticipating progress between major zones of the world, but what about gating progress within those zones? The most common approach by PB games is to have high-level enemies soft-gate your progress, and nudge you towards areas more suited for your level. Instances of this do exist in ELEX, but they seem to be rather applied for guarding small buildings or inlets containing phat loot, rather than guarding larger areas. Even if higher-level enemies were spread out across larger areas, they still wouldn't be effective gatekeepers since enemies in ELEX have trouble chasing you down at all. Not to mention that it makes slipping by them rather unrewarding because of how easy it then tends to be. One of the reasons for this is that enemies never sprint towards you at full speed. Bizarrely, enemies in ELEX can sprint at high speeds, but they only ever do this if you point a ranged weapon at them. The jetpack also makes it easier to simply fly over any would-be gatekeepers, especially once you know how to dodge leading projectiles. That is something that can only be solved by introducing new ranged attacks for enemies that are significantly harder to avoid, or by making the jetpack itself upgradeable so it starts weak, just like how the player character has very limited stamina at the start of the game.

Another victim of this total freedom approach is the difficulty curve. Assuming that the player doesn’t use one of the game’s many exploits or broken tactics, the ‘hobo phase’ (the start of the game when the player is still weak and must scrounge by using any means possible) lasts too long, whereas after that the game completely dissipates in terms of difficulty, offering no meaningful enemy barriers after that point. Admittedly, no PB game ever had a difficulty curve that didn’t fold halfway through the game, but at the very least they still had a functional hobo phase. Yet in ELEX, the player is so weak relative to the average enemy roaming around the starting settlements that they have no choice but to do non-combat quests in towns for several hours before having the stats and money to equip the gear necessary to survive the wilderness and get into actual combat for once. While that is part of the hobo phase too, making it last for so long as in ELEX’s case can make it feel like the game’s just about being an errand boy. At least other Gothic games were more generous with placing weaker versions of enemies in the world.

Once you do hit the magic threshold (which is usually getting the stats to equip a weapon that deals decent damage), the world folds. The grand majority of overworld enemies can be reliably solo’d, you have enough healing potions at that point to mitigate most damage, and the only higher-level enemies are present in isolated pockets that are easily avoidable. From what I can tell, ELEX attempted to balance the fact that the player can go anywhere by balancing most overworld enemies to be mid-level. If the goal is total freedom, then each route should be equally valid, which can mean that each route should be equally dangerous. This would then result in the aforementioned overlong hobo phase (since lower level enemies are hard to come by) and the world having little to offer after you do reach mid-level.

The issue of insane stat requirements on gear can also be traced to the fact that the player can go anywhere at any time. A game whose world had some zones that were hard-gated could simply place higher-level gear in higher-level zones that the player can’t access to begin with until they reach a higher level, while populating the parts that the player can access with weapons more appropriate to their expected level range. Same thing goes for enemies: by gating world progression in a way where the designer can predict how much progress the player has made, they can then have the player fight more level-appropriate enemies. For example, in Fallout: New Vegas the player can take a short route to New Vegas by passing through mountain ranges filled with deadly high-level Cazadors or Deathclaws, or they can take the long and scenic route populated with more level-appropriate NPCs and quests. When the designer cannot predict how the player might make their progress through the world, they're forced to take a one-size-fits-all solution (level scaling in Bethesda’s games, or in ELEX’s case, respawning the world with enemy types depending on the player’s level) to enemy balancing, with limited success.

ELEX did introduce a new (for PB games) way of soft-gating the world: through environmental hazards, or danger zones as I like to call them. Step into a danger zone, and you receive a debuff that saps your health until you leave the zone. You then only have a limited amount of time to go about your business if you don’t want to die, which automatically acts as a barrier for the ill-prepared. It also brings with it interesting trade-offs. So you need to decide if you want to equip gear with a worse armor value but a better ailment resistance if you want to survive the danger zone itself, while leaving you weaker against enemies within the danger zone. So having to spend one buff slot on ailment resistance stims is one slot you can’t use on something else (which matters if your playstyle is reliant on stims). Of course you can try to force your way through the danger zone, but here ELEX actually disables healing through healing potions if you’re inside. The HP that you came in with is all the HP you have to play with. Since each action in the danger zone affects what other actions you can take/how much time you have left down the line, you also can’t just savescum your way through, when it’s a bad decision from half a minute prior currently screwing you over. Unfortunately danger zones are not used as often in ELEX as I would have liked despite the engaging challenges they offer. The few danger zones that there are don’t feature combat or platforming that often (even though combat/platforming under debilitating conditions would have made for more interesting challenges). The only negative in the implementation of the danger zones is that each danger zone type (heat/frost/poison/radioactivity) functions the same (sapping your health over time). It's the same thing but in a different skin depending on the biome the danger zone is in. The danger zones could be more unique from each other if each damage type affected you differently as well.

To conclude, I hope this all illustrates the challenges and caveats that come when expanding the surface area of an open world game. While I would have preferred that ELEX’s world was smaller in size, I do not believe it impossible to create a game with a larger world whose progression and balance is still sensible. The only challenge is doing so is whether the developer has the budget and manpower to realize that, which a larger studio like From Software recently set out to prove with Elden Ring (to great success, I hear). If you’re wondering why I didn’t cover other aspects of the game in any detail, it’s because simply I didn’t find them interesting or worthwhile enough to dissect a lesson out of. Others have provided better insight on them than I can.

During the time while I was (procrastinating) writing this piece, ELEX II was released to muted fanfare. Rather than to polish the strengths of the first game, it seems like per nu-PB tradition it’s yet another “one step forwards, two steps backwards” affair. Oh well!

There's a great satisfaction in a job well done. I think more than anything that is the fantasy that Chaos Theory offers- to step into the shoes of a consummate professional instead of a macho action hero. Sam Fisher is no Arnold Schwarzenegger- he won't have his face on the cereal boxes no matter how many lives he saves. But that's ok, thats the quiet life he wants. Saving the world from the shadows is just how he earns his paychecks. This whole view clicked for me in the Displace International Headquarters mission. I had just infiltrated their server room in the top floors having swept through the whole building like a phantom, touching not a single hair on the head of any guard nor lingering long enough to even be a flash in the corner of someone's eye. I knocked out lights, hacked doors, shadowed guards, shimmied along pipes, all to reach my goal. And when I reached the end undetected, you know what Sam had to say? He forgot to do his laundry before he left. It was such a moment of mundane and relatable frustration that I laughed out loud. I miss games like this man. Competence porn is something I always associated with the stealth genre, and now that it's gone silent, so has specific sense of satisfaction.

But thats enough of that tangent, I need to talk about the game itself a little. Its incredible, if the 4 star rating at the top hadn't tipped you off. One of the best stealth games I've personally ever played. There is ALWAYS a way to ghost through levels, no matter how impossible it might seem at first glance. You always have the tools, routes, and abilities to get that perfect run. The sound and light based detection combined with your incredibly fine control over Sam's movements allow for pixel perfect control of your ability to infiltrate. At no point did I ever get caught through no fault of my own, it was always as a result of my own mistakes.

So the controls are perfect, how about the stages? Welllll, there's a reason this isn't a full five stars. The level set is a mixed bag. The opening stage is by FAR the worst level in the game, set on a completely linear path with no room for experimentation, exploration or clever play. This is immediately improved upon however by the next FIVE, all of which are some of the best stealth sandboxes I've had the pleasure of experiencing. Though sadly, the remaining five are a steady downward slope, growing more and more linear and less and less satisfying with each passing stage. The North Korean missile base is FINE, but compared to the amazing run of stages prior it doesn't hold up.

Ultimately however Chaos Theory is still an amazing stealth game 18 years later, and it set a benchmark of quality that few games following it were able to meet. Hopefully, if Sam Fisher ever comes out of retirement, his next outing is even a third as enjoyable as his heyday.

There’s a deep seeded vulnerability to every significant character in The House of Fata Morgana, a vulnerability that is festering behind a thin shield of various defense mechanisms and a facade of the person they purport to be among others. “You instinctively accept as truth the events unfolding before you”, the title crawl declares. This could be taken at face value of course, one must accept the magical element of the story for it to hold any weight, but I also took it as a challenge of premise. The game entreats the reader to investigate the real people trapping themselves behind this fata morgana (a term for a type of mirage I embarrassingly only learned about after completing the game so if you also didn’t know, well, there you go) and observe them for the holistic human beings they are, beyond what they want or are compelled to portray themselves to be. Beyond this, I can say that narratively the game succeeds at interrogating themes of victimhood, cyclical abuse, vengeance, hatred, and personal identity with strokes of deftness and occasionally nuance as needed and that is the greatest praise I could shoulder upon it. Light spoilers for The House in Fata Morgana follow so if you're interested in reading this VN completely blind, be warned.

Now I just said that Fata Morgana’s thematic strength in relation to its fully realized characters is its greatest strength but I can’t help but contradict myself just to express how enthusiastically I have to celebrate its character art, background art, and music. These components alone are what I imagine most immediately captures every person who even mildly likes this VN so I cannot stress enough how much I would understand the argument that these are its greatest accomplishments. Every piece of background art, at least for the PC version, expresses these rough impressionistic outlines of indoor and outdoor environments that can be equally as crude and grimy and stark in visual texture and color as they can be soft and dream-like and enigmatic. There's an appreciable contrast between these dappled, almost amorphous background shapes and the beautifully detailed, porcelain-like character art realized by Moyataro. In the landscape of visual novels the character art is immediately distinct, sure, but even more than that it often allows for the oft-unsettling atmosphere to permeate through characters such as The Maid, The White Haired Girl, the Beast, and the Witch whose entire physical existences reek of uncanniness or horror or both. The CGs must bear mention here as well because the painterly quality of the facially expressive character art as well as their posing and framing within stark backgrounds is unforgettable.

Now, perhaps the most pivotal element in contributing to Fata Morgana’s atmosphere, which is equal parts dour, chaotic, dreadful, ethereal and occasionally euphoric, is the music. It's also the aspect of the game I was immediately enamored by the moment the eponymous title track coincided with the opening title crawl. The most apparent strength of the soundtrack of this VN is its willingness to let the reader steep in despairing moods accompanied with discordant tracks that can at times grate against the ear or overwhelm with a sense of discomfort and eeriness. Not every song is appreciable outside of its game context but given the eclectic variety and the distinct place that every song has in the soundtrack, I wouldn’t have it any other way. There is an abundance of vocal tracks, most of which are sung in Portuguese by Japanese singers, with different affects and vocal effects placed on them. This is certainly an oddity within the space of VNs as I understand it, but it's one I welcome given the sheer ability of the singer(s) in every song. Speaking of song placement, I cannot neglect to mention that in the case of the first half of the game wherein the reader explores four different doors in varying locations and time periods, the soundtrack is curated in a way that each door to each setting also opens a portal to a distinct sonic palate that makes each one have a greater sense of identity both within the world and in my memory. Altogether, the entire soundtrack is worthwhile and one of my new favorites in a game; I revisit at least a portion of it nearly every day.

There’s an anthological vignette structure to the first half of the narrative that is ostensibly only loosely tied by the mystery of the player character’s identity. It’s within this framework that I think Fata Morgana is most consistently impressive in its effective creation of small period pieces reflecting on sort of tangential themes like class disparity, avarice, relationships and their need for communication, the nature of man, race and gender identity. Many of these themes, while carrying over between vignettes, don’t exactly get fully realized explorations unfortunately (such as class disparity and race), but they do serve to unflatteringly portray the blemishes of the people and period in a manner that is coherent and establishes societal systems as being quite influential in the production of discriminatory and heinous acts that take place later in the story. The second door that explores the reality of a nebulous and foreboding beast that the Maid is catering to in 1707 was an immediate highlight following a tonally and atmospherically successful first vignette that played a little too close into reader expectations without much characterization of the brother and sister beyond their roles as tragic figures. This is a criticism I have of the first door, albeit one that did not impede my enjoyment of the first few hours, but it's also a purposeful trend in the first four vignettes (called doors) that pays off fantastically by the end of the fourth door as the realization that these tales curated by the Maid with tragic tones and cruel ends and all too poetic finales serve a dual purpose in punishing the characters within and obfuscating the truth from the player character.

Around the halfway mark of the narrative, the game asks the player to make an almost superficial, inevitable choice, one with a much deeper emotional resonance that I only realized much later. Without leveraging spoilers to entice any potential future readers of The House in Fata Morgana, I want to make it explicitly clear that this game is queer. I obviously cannot speak for the writer themselves, but Fata Morgana itself is a story very much predicated on the experience and themes of gender nonconformity that speaks in equal parts to intersex people and transgender people; the narrative crux pivots around this as a core element and it can’t be ignored, especially because of how empathetic and surprisingly delicately the writer handles the topic. The distinction has to be made, of course, between intersex and transgender people but with the understanding that intersex people can also be transgender, it is through this lens that Fata Morgana explores gender identity and it acknowledges this difference. There is of course some discussion to be had about the portrayal of intersex and transgender peoples in situations of despair and suffering and oppression in media, and I as neither cannot speak to it genuinely so I leave that in the hands of actual intersex and transgender people to unpack. In my limited judgement though, I think Fata Morgana takes a few missteps of language and drags out some sequences of suffering in a way that mirrors some sluggish pacing in the second half of the story in general, but ultimately affirms and celebrates these identities in a way that is some of the most respectful I have seen in media.

Briefly, I want to touch on the core themes of abuse, victimhood, hatred, and forgiveness. These are all inextricably tied together but what I found most compelling about their implementation in Fata Morgana, specifically near the end, is that the game never relents to a strict “cycles of abuse perpetuate hatred and violence and ill will and thus everyone is equally culpable and in the end nobody is really at fault(or everybody is at fault)” sort of mentality. Many of the characters in the game are fully realized in ways that often don't make them agreeable or even tangentially good people by the game’s judgement. The reader is asked to accept these characters not for their cumulative goodness or likeability, but for the human beings who have done good, bad, and everything in between that they are. All that being said, the VN also makes sure to emphasize that it is always in the hands of the victim to weigh the heinousness of the acts done upon them and determine whether they can forgive or cast off their abuser entirely. Several characters offer several different perspectives and decisions when presented with this query but it never creates a situation wherein the victim is beholden to meet their abuser(s) halfway. I can’t speak for others obviously but this was an intensely gratifying stance to me that the game reinforced constantly.

A lot of the elements of the game were similarly gratifying to me in a way that coalesced into a whole that consistently affected me. Yes, I teared up and cried on more than one occasion. I have some minor misgivings with the pacing and overly grave tone of the second half of the story, the relatively safe ending even though I somewhat made peace with it, underutilization of several key characters who could have used more fleshing out, and with some details of its exploration of gender and sexuality. All that being said, none of these came together in a way that meaningfully detracted from The House In Fata Morgana’s messaging, its characters or thematic weight. Perhaps the biggest tragedy surrounding The House in Fata Morgana, despite its notoriety in visual novel circles, is how little its merits and (relatively minor, in my view) failings are discussed or dissected, even among those who have played it, outside of overt characteristics like its art and music. Considering that I produced this review as a passionate, spoiler-skirting entreaty to play this visual novel, I am perhaps no one to talk as well. Maybe this will foster more discussion from new and old readers, maybe it won’t. So long as I contribute to the dialogue and even one person picks up this wonderful game, I can’t really complain.