A quick aside from Elden Ring (which, like kanisatha, I passed on as I’m sure the gameplay is not my bag, though I’m perfectly willing to accept that it’s a fantastic game and even “Art”, just not for me).

Today, I finished my playthrough of Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous, and would definitely recommend it to any party RPG fans who haven’t yet tried it. Though I might have been the last one here on that bandwagon! I’d even recommend it to folk who, like me, gave up on Kingmaker part way as I found it less frustrating, largely I think because the timed quests I hated in the first game were mainly absent.

For much of WotR I had a blast playing a Trickster chaotic kitsune sorceror whose favoured strategy was to incapacitate her foes by reducing them to hysterical laughter then pelt them with sneak attack snowballs and the odd dead fish until they died. At least until she hit level 17 at which point most enemies just committed suicide rather than fight her. Which led to some hilariously anticlimactic scenes after baddies made a big entrance only to instantly die, and much relief on my part given that like its predecessor I think there are WAY too many samey encounters that, unless I turned down the difficulty and made combat boringly trivial, meant that pace slowed to a crawl. Particularly in what were presumably meant to be high excitement missions like the liberation of Drezen.

Overall, I found it a flawed but enjoyable game. It’s pretty clear I barely scratched the surface given that I only got 26 out of 100+ achievements despite trying to be reasonably thorough. And frankly the ending and epilogue were pretty disappointing, which I’m still a bit grumpy about. I think writers should reward all players with interesting endings even if they’re not good ones, rather than leaving them thinking “well, I clearly missed something there” despite having put in a couple of hundred hours of their time. But despite the fact that there’s obviously a lot more game to be discovered, plus a gazillion classes/archetypes to experiment with, the things I didn’t like about it will probably stop me replaying it at least for a good while. But I definitely got good value for my £10 and am glad I took a punt!

Thanks folks for your recommendation and tips here.

"You may call it 'nonsense' if you like, but I've heard nonsense, compared with which that would be as sensible as a dictionary!"