Whenever you want this DLC or not depends solely on if you want to add just a rather lengthy (by PoE II standards) questline that doesn't really add much to the main story of the game, the themes or to the world history. If it's a pretty cool (no pun intended) adventure you want, you can get it here. But there's pretty much nothing here that hasn't been explored in the first game and the two-part expansion it had otherwise.
Larian Studios have been doing Divinity series for 16 years now and if anything, I cannot call any of their games “boring”. But despite all of these creative and fun ideas, every single game they’ve made felt clunky, not particularly good at anything it tried to be and somewhat half-baked. I did enjoy my time with Divine and Divinity 2 back in the day, but none of the other games, including Original Sin, could get me interested for longer than a few hours, either because they were boring, or plot was terrible, or something else, or all of the above. Original Sin 2 feels like a mix of ideas Larian had before, except this time done properly. All the best elements from Original Sin return, the combat system is still solid, the absolutely amazing environmental effects system is still a joy. The game exploration is now extremely fun and seems to come naturally because the game is very smart about directing you where you need to go without feeling too restrictive but also without just hitting you in the face with a high level monster out of nowhere.And this might be the very first time Larian has made a genuinely well written game. Not just full of cool ideas and concepts, but one that is actually fun to follow. And somehow without losing the quirkiness of Rivellon. Unfortunately the game essentially falls apart in the last quarter of the game. It has about 15 unnecessary hours of absolute worst ideas and encounters in the entire game. The story more or less falls apart and becomes a confused mess, almost every fight has some terrible gimmick attached to it. But… despite the flaws, despite the terrible closing hours of the game and some of the elements that remained broken and silly even in the Definitive Edition, Divinity: Original Sin 2 is an amazing game. It’s most definitely the best Divinity game in the series so far and one of the very best RPGs I’ve played in recent years. And people who want to play coop will probably enjoy it even more than I did.
The events of the game (and the novel it’s based on) take place in the 12th century England during the times usually known as “the Anarchy” and, rarely for game stories, span across several decades and generations. The story itself is fictional but tries to be grounded in history and reality, showing lives of very different people as they deal with both personal issues of relationships, hopes, faith as well as events bigger than they are, involving politics, wars and the church.There are dreams, promises, accidents, plots, murder, betrayals, revenge and forgiveness, all centered around an unlikely town of Kingsbridge and it’s cathedral. And it is all written and told really well. Every chapter feels well put together and contained, telling a necessary story arc, while also being a good story driven adventure game to play. Switching between character viewpoints never feels confusing and makes the storytelling much more interesting than it would’ve been otherwise and there is genuine feel that you influence the story in little, but very meaningful ways, all the time. It’s not great all the time, of course. The little minigame for “action”-ish bits feels a bit silly and out of place, where the rest of the game always seems to fit the storytelling really well, for example. The cutscenes/dialogue are not properly skippable, which can be annoying if you do fail one of these minigames in specific points, which lead to a game over. And while the game almost never felt like it wasn’t really clear what to do or how, there were a few moments where it was hard to understand what the game was expecting you to do to progress. I loved my time with Ken Follett’s The Pillars of the Earth and if you love a good story and/or are interested in medieval history, you absolutely must play this game.
Ys VIII: Lacrimosa of Dana might be that game to finally get the attention the series deserved all this time. Ys are best known for great gameplay, so I’ll start with the unexpected - Ys VIII has an amazing narrative. I’d say that this isn’t just the best narrative in the series but one of the best examples of how to make an adventure story in an action RPG game. It smartly borrows from different classic sources on its story concepts, with story having unexpected, but welcome, twists and turns. It never feels static, never feels like pointless padding. Ys VIII is also very welcoming to newcomers to the series, with Normal being just perfect in difficulty, requiring you to learn the game, but never grind. And some of the super optional things you can simply postpone to new game plus, since it has a lot of helpful options for starting a new playthrough. Even the music feels especially amazing this time around. It’s expected for a game from Falcom to have stellar music, but Ys VIII might have the best soundtrack since the originals. And it’s not even afraid to experiment and at one particular activity even uses a drum and bass track which manages to still fit the tone and sound of Ys music. Important to mention, though that I did encounter some crashes and few weird performance drops as even after lots of updates the game port became "playable", rather than good and can still have issues. Ys VIII: Lacrimosa of Dana is an amazing example of how adventure action RPG games can and should be made and a perfect game to get introduced to Ys series. But even if you don’t plan to play the rest of the serious, you simply owe it to yourself to play Ys VIII.
The setting of Numenera is genuinely intriguing. It’s a world reminiscent of fantasy ideas, yet full of cyberpunk or sci-fi elements, with artifacts, magic and a lot of odd phenomena having some kind of scientific explanation. This world just oozes interesting stories and characters and it feels like you can learn something exciting just around the corner. Yet, in this game the places are interesting to look at and they seem to live their own interesting ways until you interact with them and suddenly feel as if the place is fake, just decorations that will disappear as you exit the scene. Characters pop in and out, mostly with no real impact or consequence. Game does have lots of great mechanics and ideas to tell cool stories in interesting ways, to not boil things down to just fighting or just talking. But there’s always a feeling of the “right way” and a “wrong way” to play the game, instead of different valid possibilities. And the “wrong way” will be less fun and less full on the story. A pretty good, if less impactful than it wants to be, story that is worth checking out. Though even there, apart from few exceptions, the game gets less and less full on interesting ideas as it goes, with most care put in the opening act and later story bits just kind of happening one by one. Oh and there’s also a fact that some of the things that Kickstarter backers were promised never made it into the game… I liked the game. I liked what it tried to do. I liked the music by Mark Morgan. I liked some of the character lines that felt truly fresh and unique. I liked the setting and hope to see more games set in it. But it’s not a title I would really want to revisit.
Kona is a story exploration game, it’s an adventure game, it’s a survival game and thematically it’s a bit horror, a bit of a murder mystery and a bit of a folk tale. It heavily borrows ideas and elements from other titles, but at the same time tries to be a thing of its own. There’s a rather big open location for you to explore, full of points of interest that are not that hard to find. As you run around, you gather stuff and try not to get cold or get killed by wolves in a snowy environment – that’s where the survival aspect comes in. It seems that the developers tried to make it nagging enough for you to care about it, but not annoying like a lot of survival games tend to get, yet the limited inventory space and extremely precise use of some of the items you find kills the “not annoying” part outright. It feels less of a “survival” or “fun exploration” with “solving problems” and more of a chore. Story and mood-wise it tries to have the murder mystery, except it goes nowhere interesting. It tries to keep the events suspenseful, except the surreal and unnatural events make things less interesting, unlike what you get in, say, Cryostasis from which this game “borrows” dying people memories story mechanic. The tone of the game is often all over the place, with the narration seemingly trying to emulate the quirkiness of the Coens’ movies, yet often not being particularly well written or feeling completely out of place in a bad way. Kona is a game that starts as something that could be promising, slowly devolves into rather boring run across the barren snowy land that could be much more interesting that it is in game, and ends without any kind of satisfactory ending. It’s a great idea that could’ve led to a very interesting game. But didn’t.
Return of the Obra Dinn is a mystery adventure game from Lucas Pope, best known for Papers, Please. It's a huge "whodunnit" type puzzle, where you piece together narrative shown to you out of order and try to figure out what happened, to whom, how and why. The premise is rather simple - a ship returns with dead bodies on board and you, with some mysterious clock that lets you watch final moments of some people on board, need to clear the fates of every single person who was on board. Every memory is presented as a freeze frame you can explore with some great voice acting and ambience that usually contains hints, which opens with a more dramatic presentation but is later available for you to revisit at any point if you need more references. Once you've filled in the names and fates of three people correctly those people disappear from the list of suggestions for unidentified people. This motivates you to be careful with your investigation, but also do some guessing at times. Thought it does become a bit frustrating in the last parts of your investigation, once you've seen all memories and easily identified about a half of the crew, as quite a lot of the rest will require at least a bit of guessing. This also involves manually finding the correct scene you want to rewatch to refresh your memory and entering it, then exiting it, finding the next one and etc. But the game is still extremely interesting, the story is good and full of quite unexpected supernatural twists that are somewhat reminiscent of how normalcy and magic combined in the classic The Last Express and the music complements the journey quite well. If you like games that allow you to really dive into untangling the mystery, restoring the chronology and feeling like a detective and you can excuse some occasional quality of life deficiencies, this game is an absolute must have.
