The Kindest Demon I’ve Ever Known – Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous (PC) Review

Something as outwardly massive as Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous was understandably intimidating to me – a complete and utter CRPG novice. I have played in and facilitated a number of Pathfinder tabletop sessions as a game master, however the more structured experience of a video game filled me with a certain dread. The character creator did nothing to ameliorate these anxieties. Making a single character at journey’s beginning took me precisely two hours and thirty-seven minutes. Now, having finished a singular playthrough amounting to one hundred and ten hours, I can safely say that it has quickly become one of my favorite translations of the TTRPG experience.

Owlcat Games are best known for their indulgently lavish and expansive CRPGs, typically set in other creators’ established worlds. At the time of writing, these include two in the popular TTRPG system Pathfinder’s default setting, Golarion; one released and one planned release in the grimdark future of Warhammer 40,000; and one newly announced game in the popular science-fiction world of The Expanse.

Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous is an adaptation of the 2013 adventure path – a serialized collection of connected pre-written adventures – of the same name, published by Paizo. It tells the story of the country of Sarkoris, explosively caught in an invasion of demons through a portal called the Worldwound. The protagonist – a simple adventurer at the story’s beginning – finds themselves foisted into the role of the Knight Commander, warrior and political leader of the soon-to-be Fifth Crusade. From this role you grapple with alignments of law and chaos; good and evil. The game too contains such multitudes. So, through the lens of its own moral alignments, I shall carve down this massive game into more easily digestible pieces and hopefully accurately expound on the intricacies within.

LAWFUL GOOD

Pathfinder – as a tabletop game system – is a game well known for its commitment to the “crunch;” dozens of disparate elements interlocking, clicking, and grinding to make a satisfying whole. My usual desire for tabletops is the antithesis of this, games with singular focuses where every extraneous piece is removed to better facilitate speed and vision. It was surprising to me then, when I was almost immediately captivated by said crunch. The aforementioned multi-hour character generation was not – as it is for many other games – the experience of noodling sliders back and forth to mold clay into an approximation of living flesh; it was as to filling doctoral forms at a new care provider. Background, race, class, feats, religious affiliation, stats. Every element expanded upon and begging for your attention, every decision remarked upon by the game; with decisions seemingly irrelevant continuing to come into gameplay focus as deep as seventy hours in.

These mechanical densities capture the spirit of the journey, that transitional path from level 1 to level 20 which makes your steps feel stretched ever further behind you. This too is one of the core strengths of well-designed TTRPGs. Rather than simple numeric increases in power, you are meaningfully given choices to further express system mastery. Playing as a spell caster, this stands out particularly; every few minutes a meaningful resource management question presents itself; every level, a new spell to choose at the cost of leaving others behind.

The art, sound direction, music, and voice acting also lend to this epic tone. Portrait art, in many cases, are one-to-one reconstructions of the original module’s characters, while locations are often remade to better suit the strengths of a 3D engine. The visceral sounds add the most needed juice to elevate the strategic combat. High fantasy typically lends itself to a standard – arguably, forgettable – sound. Not so for Wrath. The tracks “The Fifth Crusade” and “Mythic Power” managed to excite every single time they were used. The voice acting alone requires special mention. Where a more subdued direction would not work, every character was clearly told to put as much heart into the dialogue as possible. In some cases, you can actually hear the smug smirks of duplicitous archdemons, and the wry grins of your companions.

All of this culminates in what I believe is Wrath’s greatest strength – the secret that exists across all of Owlcat’s games– agency in their world and stories. The story as written, the demonic invasion of the world of mortals, would be trite without it. Agency, in the context of games, is not the ability to do whatever you wish and for the game to attempt to make sense of it; agency is the ability for your actions to matter, to be recognized, and ultimately reacted to. Decisions without this agency are devoid of meaning and only serve to further disincline the audience from caring.

In Wrath of the Righteous, there is no telling which of your actions will be remarked upon, or how they will impact you, therefore, you have no choice but to care. Minor decisions made in Act 1 may still be brought up and impact your playthrough in Act 6. Your companions – save for the potential generic mercenary hires – constantly call into question your decision-making, which makes them feel fully realized and three dimensional. I have seldom loved companions in games as much as this one; every time a companion quest presented itself, you could be assured it was the first thing I was going to act upon. Each one changes as the protagonist changes: they react to your decisions, fall in love with you, hate you – and depending on your management of the crusade – leave you. Yet, it is sometimes that very agency that makes things a bit more complicated.

TRUE NEUTRAL

Where I was overflowingly lavish with my praise of the gameplay before, there is an aspect of the game I am decidedly less positive on – army combat and crusade management. Where the turn-based combat of individuals is exhilarating and impactful, the combat of the armies you lead is dull and uninspired. The actual mechanics appear to be heavily pulled from another of the dev’s prior projects with another team: Heroes of Might and Magic V: Tribes of the East. However, much of the mechanical nuance and focus seems to have also been left in that game. Such combats – at least in Wrath – boil down to the dullest isometric clash imaginable, often resolved by fireballing the enemy side out of existence before they even get close to you.

Where there is a complexity, rather than being outright negative, is the actual management of the crusade. As Knight Commander you have an unbelievable amount of influence over how the Fifth Crusade conducts itself. From hiring felons to fill your ranks to lobotomizing your own troops with pre-war brain surgery, the depths to which you can sink are awe-inspiring from a story perspective. Unfortunately, they are inexorably tacked to that aforementioned utterly dull army combat. The main rewards of such political decisions often boil down to magical items, or at their dullest, more army choices for campaign combat. This is incredibly disappointing because the actual party conversations around these choices are engaging and interesting. If you absolutely hate this aspect of the game, you can always disable it, but that leads to a cascading problem. The game now controls the pace that the crusade advances, and as such you may end up in situations where your exploration is being unceremoniously curtailed by your own armies. The best result for my personal taste ended up being to trivialize the combat as much as the difficulty sliders would allow, then simply picking the choices that best matched my commander’s ruling style.  

Less easy to forgive are the gamut of bugs and crashes which plagued my first playthrough. These ranged from the forgivably mundane and silly (NPCs being trapped mid conversation in a Sisyphean torment of eternal pratfalls due to an inopportunely placed Grease spell) to teeth-clenchingly frustrating (having an enemy’s AI seize up on the final round of combat, leading to them never ending their turn and being unable to end the turn-based combat myself). Glitches and bugs are an often understatedly mundane aspect of video games; they often highlight just how difficult it is to make games in the first place. In a game as huge yet delicate as Wrath of the Righteous, they are frequent and often difficult to escape.

I wish to take this opportunity to acknowledge the greatest complexity of all. The act of converting this massive adventure path into something playable but also something predominantly good, is herculean in its own right. The adventure path consists of over 350,000 words and – given that it is for a tabletop RPG and most of the fiction is provided by a game master – none of that involves dialogue or even a suggestion of how the story plays out in a more static medium. For a weekly game, Wrath of the Righteous is something a table of six or so individuals get to enjoy for literal years. For Owlcat’s adaptation, each and every character had to explode in scope just from the sheer amount of additional information that needed to be stipulated on. No longer is Lann, the mongrel ranger, simply a bad accent for your game master to rein in once a week; he’s a companion with quests, a voice actor, and plot significance. Now multiply that by several hundred times. Even a flawed piece, this large in scope, is praiseworthy.

The most damning flaw however is one that both the adventure path and the game share.

CHAOTIC EVIL

I could talk at length about the flaws in this particular game. I could talk about how the difficulty is designed for a player using every single tool at their disposal, and resultantly how a new player will be utterly overwhelmed. I could talk about how their utilization of the difficulty system as a band-aid for these issues only muddies the waters when it comes to intended experience. I could expand in great detail how a game so similar to a TTRPG opens itself up to criticism simply by existing; when two things are so close as to touch, you notice the incongruities all the more starkly. This is a game competing with the infinite breadth of an entire table’s worth of imagination, after all.

The most glaring flaw, the one that stuck with me the most, the one that made me talk about Wrath weeks after my playthrough had ended, was its story. Or, more specifically, how stories like these feel compelled to orbit the concept of alignment and morality. Alignment has been an extremely contentious topic in the world of tabletop RPGs. Alignment – at least how it’s treated in tabletop – is the cosmic distillation of every aspect of you onto a singular axis of Law to Chaos, Good to Evil. Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous – as both a video game, an adventure module, and a universe – obsessively sticks to this structure.

In the worlds of things like Dungeons & Dragons or Pathfinder, Evil is not a thing done but a force. There are some beings which simply exist to do evil, regardless of how they feel about it or any other factor. An orc lives to fight; a demon exists to despoil, murder, and tempt. Those of us in the tabletop space have had to reckon with this. As time has gone on, people have gotten more and more uncomfortable with the idea of beings that you can exterminate en masse with complete moral absolution. I can understand why. Looking around in the real world, we see very real people with very real lives at risk of being treated in such a way. People who just want to live being treated like animals, culled like animals, and having their humanity expunged from them like they never owned it. I have no choice but to voice my disgust.

These thoughts linger with me so strongly because of the narrative paradox inherent within games of this like. This game wishes to respect your agency, while often in the same breath declaring you unworthy of redemption. A commander who chooses the demon mythic – either for aesthetic reasons or for buildcrafting – is forcibly shoved into the chaotic evil to chaotic neutral side of the alignment chart. The very mechanics of the universe will not allow otherwise. This is especially confusing given the topic of one of the game’s companions, Arueshalae. Arueshalae is a demoness who – despite her upbringing – has learned empathy and wishes to live alongside mortalkind. In a direct undercutting of the heart of this story – a story which seems to be about forging your own path – her grace is only allowed by the outside influence of a Goddess. It is not an aspect of her that allows this to be, but the capriciousness of an authority greater than her that she is allowed some semblance of redemption. Even games which place less emphasis on the agency inherent to a story can acknowledge that it is better to become good through immense effort, than to simply submit to the idea that you are just cosmically evil. In the lenses of many of these worlds, I am not a being worthy of grace simply by being alive. I’m simply “one of the good ones.”

The conversation of morality in video games has only grown in sophistication and vitriol, inevitably so given that they tie to the very lenses that people use to view the real world. Does this detract from this game as a piece of media that one can engage with? Absolutely not. Yet I still cannot shake from myself the disquiet that creeps into me when I think from such perspectives. Maybe this critique better lends itself to a conversation about culture at large; how we tend to assert that evil is a fundamental aspect of those we hate, rather than behaviors that we ourselves are guilty of. Perhaps you think it’s ridiculous that someone, anyone, would stand up for a demon of all things, when gaming for years has set itself to facilitating their guiltless, morally justified executions. Yet, I couldn’t help the way such thoughts got caught in my head.

Chaotic Neutral; OR, HOW I LEARNED TO STOP OVERTHINKING AND MAKE A LITTLE GUY.

Despite everything I just said, I loved this game. To accurately explain why, I must make a brief aside.

Kazuya Niinou, director of the first Etrian Odyssey, wrote several blog posts regarding the release of the yet unfinished video game. The one post that has lived in my head ages beyond the release of that game and the eventual death of the site (Rest in Peace, Flash) is a piece on imagination. The sentiment at least has been mercifully preserved: the act of projecting emotion onto imaginary people, in some cases even characterless numbers, is the essence of roleplaying games. The power of imagination crafts the small work into something as big as your own thoughts.

I share this anecdote now because it hung over the entirety of my first playthrough of Wrath of the Righteous. For much of my adult life, I have struggled to immerse myself in the worlds of fantasy despite being a self-admitted fan of RPGs. Perhaps on some level because I thought the hobby stupid or pointless when I could have been doing something more productive; perhaps simply because I failed to see myself in the virtual worlds so popular with more “normal” people. This then was a game that I praised, griped about, and lavished with attention for weeks. There were days where I existed for this game; I would play the game for twelve uninterrupted hours, just to wake up and do it again. Not in an addicted stupor but instead because I simply needed to know where it went next. This singularly silly, buggy, myopic game managed to bring me back to myself.

I can’t talk about such things without indulging in expressing the character I made. That’s the real strength of a game such as this; the ability for two people to experience something wonderfully branching, labyrinthine, and entirely wholly theirs. Even when the game itself seemed to rebuff my desires and make a simpler world, it was my choices that made it a complex one.

My little elf girl who was forced to contend with cosmic powers that she never asked for. She struggled and fought, ultimately becoming a demon. Despite the prejudices levied against her, she tried to do her best. She was kind and loving; she made time for all her friends even when they said things that were unkind. She became a demon of freedom, one who hated all the tyranny of the Abyss and the world at large, who refused to be judged by a higher power and ultimately chose her own path.

In her ending, even as the game struggled to spin that she was an evil tyrant and that the world would do nothing but see her slaughtered in another crusade, it couldn’t help but talk about how happy she had made those around her. How they had good times together and visited one another in the cities they settled down in. Not even the story could take that away from her. Even as friends refused her and told her she was sick and disgusting and that there was no place for her in this world – she chose to live anyway. I’m glad she lived in the end. That’s a good enough ending for me, even if the world didn’t want to give it to her.

Happy Pride Month, everyone.