Tyranny

Obsidian's isometric RPG arrived on Windows, macOS and Linux on 10 November, and it has been on sale since 2016. It shares its engine lineage and its real-time-with-pause combat with the studio's Pillars of Eternity, and what it does with that familiarity is its own thing: here the rules are not the point, the decisions are.

The story starts after the ending

Kyros has conquered the Tiers. You are a Fatebinder, an officer in the Overlord's army, sent to restore order over a land that has already lost. The game is explicit that you are not a villager who rises: you are an instrument of the law with considerable resources and real authority from the first minute.

That changes the question the game is asking. The interesting decision is not whether to become powerful; it is whether to use your authority to strengthen the new order, to look for more power at the top of it, or to try and change it from inside. Dialogue, faction standing and the layout of the world are written to react to which answer you pick, and the world is described by its makers as altered by your decisions rather than merely commented on by them.

Conquest is a prologue you play like a board game

Before the game begins properly, you play Conquest: a sequence of decisions about how the Tiers were taken and what role you played in it. It is tied into character creation, and it is not a cutscene. The choices you make there determine the state of the world, which factions will tolerate you, and how individuals react to you when you finally arrive.

It is the cleanest version of the idea the whole game is built on. Instead of learning a history through the game's own lore entries, you write it by making calls, and then you live inside the version of the Tiers you made. If you have ever finished a role-playing game and wondered what the prologue would have looked like if you had been allowed to play the villain's side of it, this is that.

Class-less, skill-driven, and built around companions

The Fatebinder does not pick a class. Strength and weakness are defined by skills rather than by a role you select from a menu, and those skills start from the values your attributes support — each one is tied to a primary and a secondary attribute — before improving automatically as you use them. So the character genuinely becomes what you have been practising, and a Fatebinder spread thinly across every option will feel it. Committing to a style is what the system rewards.

You gather companions as you go, and they are not interchangeable stat sticks. The abilities available to you in combat can be shaped by which factions you have aligned with, and you get combination attacks with your companions, so who you bring and how you have treated them is a mechanical decision as well as a story one. With the fate of the Tiers in the balance, the game is happy to make you choose who you can live with.

Spellcraft is the best system in it

The magic does not come as a fixed list of spells to unlock. You build each spell yourself. Every spell starts with a core that combines an elemental power, such as fire or ice, with an expression of how it is delivered, such as a directed bolt or a wide cone. On top of that you add accents that change its strength, range and other properties.

The catch is Lore, and this is the rule worth getting right before you build anything. Lore is a skill your character develops rather than a pool of points you spend and refill. Every sigil carries a Lore cost, a spell's total cost is the sum of its parts, and you need a Lore skill at least that high to cast it — a character who has not built toward the elaborate combinations simply cannot use them. So the ceiling on your spellcraft is a skill threshold you work towards, not a budget you shade between spells, and the choice inside the editor is what shape you want the spell to take. Because those choices sit on the same screen, spellbuilding is the clearest expression of the game's whole argument: you have real power and you still have to decide what it is for.

What is in the box

The base game reaches its ending by different routes depending on your decisions about Kyros and the Archons fighting over the Tiers. Everything sold around it is optional. Tales from the Tiers is an event pack of new stories and details about life inside Kyros's empire, s's Wound is a proper expansion that continues the story, and there is a Portrait Pack of twenty new Fatebinder portraits for people who want their character to look the way they imagined. The Deluxe Edition upgrade carries the soundtrack, which runs over two hours.

Reception at launch was favourable, with the world-building and the game's willingness to take evil seriously earning the most praise, and the enemy behaviour in combat and an ending that arrives suddenly taking the criticism. The fights are the part I would set expectations by: they are functional rather than the reason to be here, so go in expecting the story and the spellcraft to carry it.

Should you play it

Yes, if you want a role-playing game where the interesting choice is moral rather than mechanical, and you like the idea of playing the officer rather than the rebel. Conquest is a strong opening, spellcraft gives you a system to tinker with all game, and the companions make the small decisions feel like they land somewhere.

Skip it if you want tactical combat to be the reason you are there. The real-time-with-pause fights are functional rather than the point, the story ends sooner than you will want, and the game expects you to read. It is a game about what a person does with authority, and it is not embarrassed about being one.