Worthy of Your Soul

Title's a reference to this. Review of the CRPG Pathfinder: Kingmaker.

Hoo boy. This is a big subject; it's a big game. Let's start with the good. First off, this is a marvelous translation of a tabletop game to a computer. I never played things like Neverwinter Nights, so I was not prepared to have my characters' weapons actually expressed to me in terms of literal dice. Also I get to play an eldritch archer, the ranged-oriented "archetype" (think a 2e "kit" applied to a Pathfinder class) of magus; I might do another playthrough as a divine hunter, the ranged-oriented paladin archetype. I like martial-oriented classes that aren't professional meat-shields. (I don't think frequently choosing the neutral good option will muck up paladinhood, so long as I also choose the lawful ones now and then; it's only evil acts that paladins have to avoid.)

Second off, I like how all the companions' whose backstories involve them rejecting various gods of the setting—the former paladin of the goddess of beauty (though I still don't know how "art for art's sake" can have a paladin order), the dwarf apostate who worships the god who will end the world—have character arcs that consist of them learning not to be kneejerk self-righteous fools. A lot of people on the Steam community are very unhappy with that, although they mostly misrepresent what happens in order to do it. Valerie (said ex-paladin) doesn't grovel before her former goddess and admit she was completely wrong; she just admits that just because she disagrees with the people who worship the art-god is no reason for her to treat all artists (such as bards) like criminals and social parasites.

Just in general I really like the companions. About the only major issue I have is that Nok-Nok, the goblin rogue you acquire in the third arc, is not chaotic evil, I don't care if he does worship a demon lord; he's chaotic neutral, pretty much right down the line. I don't really like Pathfinder core-setting gnomes but Jubilost is a very tolerable example of one (yes he's obnoxious, but "gnome alchemist travel-writer who talks vaguely like a male Dorothy Parker" is a very amusing take). Probably my favorite (or perhaps tied with Nok-Nok, though part of the latter's appeal is when he one-shotted a hill giant with a knife) is Amiri, who I have chosen to dub "bandere", for her hilarious-slash-adorable bashfulness.

I really like how almost every companion's "arc" consists of them reconciling their own wishes with the society and tradition that they usually partly rejected in order to become adventurers, or otherwise realizing that the world does not revolve around them while simultaneously not rejecting their own identities. Existentialism isn't much as a real philosophy but it can make for good themes in fiction, as anime can attest.

Third off, the story is mostly excellent. There's some false notes here or there (bonus dormitat Homerus) but overall it's very far from being the warmed-over Dragonlance that I've come to expect from Western fantasy games that aren't Warcraft (and I won't play that because I loathe MMOs that aren't also FPSs). Don't assume anyone is your friend, is my advice, because a lot of people will turn on you in this game, usually for very good reasons of their own, but also be willing to forgive them if you get the chance. At least one of them is a huge advantage in a fight if not for a story-based RP reason. That you can basically redeem every antagonist in this game except for three of the six "Big Bads" of the separate arcs is a huge selling-point, to me.

On to the bad. There's really only two issues. The more basic is simply that this is not a triple-A game and it was probably released a bit earlier than it should've been; if you read the early discussions of issues with it, it becomes clear that what they released was probably a mid-stage beta, and what we're getting now is probably a late beta. It's buggy and the load-times take forever; it was doing weird things with "developer tools" on my machine for a while, too. (That may have been Steam rather than the game, since I only got Steam for this game.)

The other issue, more directly relevant to game "quality" (though you're seriously going to want some hacky-sacks to juggle or something, during the loads—especially since you have to schlep through your palace and then through your capital, to get back out to the world map, starting in the second chapter) is that a lot of the quests will give you a very sub-optimal ending (as in "the lost child you were looking for flipping dies") if you don't know exactly what to do. A tip: talk to everyone in the final area the quest takes you through, that usually leads the way. You also need a walkthrough, though; accept it. There's one part where you're set up to be able to avoid a problem by not doing something, and then an NPC goes and does it anyway. Apparently there's a way to not have that NPC do it, without murdering them; I'll have to try it on another playthrough and see. (It was funny in the Steam forums, a bunch of people defending the effective railroading by saying "oh well it worked better in the tabletop adventures the game's based on". Really? Because if I tried that shit at the table, as a DM, my players would lynch me with my mouth stuffed full of dice.)

Another gameplay issue is that the kingdom-management aspect of the game, after which the whole work is arguably named, is mostly a chore and very often counterproductive. Trying to manage each arc's crises by assigning advisors to deal with the hordes of monsters, bandits, etc., is usually a recipe for disaster; just go handle it personally by resolving that arc's plot. Still, the kingdom-management does give you bonuses, e.g. my current party have permanent poison immunity while in territory that I control (presumably a blessing placed on my followers via my domain's priests).

All in all the game does one thing very well: it is a tabletop RPG in computer form. So the "score" I give it depends on how much you itch to see a tabletop experience translated about as faithfully as it can be. If that is, for you as for me, an abiding yearning, the game is easily an 8 out of 10 overall, and storywise a 9.5; knock a point off both if you do not ceaselessly hunger and thirst for the specific kind of thing this game is.