Pillars 2 Deadfire Review: Melancholy Green Giant.

Fallout: New Vegas was the first video game consistently well written enough for me to appreciate like a good book. Every little nook and cranny told a story and it's still the best game I ever played. I've never forgotten that feeling of playing a game that both respects my intelligence while challenging my moral compass. Mostly because scant few since 2010 have even come close. To say that Deadfire is as good as Obsidian's apocalyptic western opus is pushing it... but its not pushing it far.

As someone who bounced hard off of the first pillars not once but 4 times, it took a lot of convincing to get me to think this would be any different. I'm pathologically allergic to crpgs and needed way more hand holding through the active combat than that game was willing to give. I'd blink and half my party would be dead. It wasn't a good time. But then came Deadfire's turn based mode which was so good my old roommate wouldn't let me look away. It was the purest distillation of dungeons and dragons into a single player experience to him. He said not only would I love it but I might give D&D another glance in the bargain. I don't know about that last part, but he was dead right about Pillars 2.

Now no character on the battlefield moves until I tell them what to do. There are no nasty surprises and if someone gets hit by a cheap shot I know exactly where it came from. That's all I needed to get into it, just a broad knowledge of which skills work and which don't. Pretty soon, 20-30 minute encounters breezed by on the strength of its mechanics. I'm told Original Sin 2 blows it out of the water but I had a damn good time all the same.

Every ship in the deadfire has their own flag. "Had" in the case of these.

Now that the game's dense lore has a chance to breathe and change things up the series comes alive. By trading the bog standard Tolkien fantasy setting for a pirate-y archipelago, pillars starts to really say something. Not that the last game's big reveal over how all the gods were just formally human rich pricks wasn't a bad turn... it just took 20 hours for that to be interesting. Pillars 2 takes that premise and wonders what those gods would do if they had to bargain with a pirate to kill one of their own.

That would be you. Only if you wanted to be a pirate, anyway. I decided to be the exact opposite of my usual taste and rolled a stoic, true believer, monk. If any developer was going to take this do gooder and put him through the politically grey ringer, it was Obsidian. I wasn't disappointed. The pirate factions weren't a fan of how unprofitable my charitable nature was and that locked me out of a ton of negotiation potential. Many a time I would have been able to flash a captain's seal and side step unnecessary violence.

This chart knows exactly how many times you've been a dick for no reason.

But I also understood them better than they did themselves. With high enough insight I was able to curb the wrath of politicians, pirates, and trading companies alike. You want bloody economics and colonialism with your high fantasy fare? That's a trick question. This is the second best branching narrative I've ever played. Its so good I can almost forgive the ending. It yadda yadda's over the final dungeon, describing it in excruciatingly intricate detail, only to dump you out in front of... well... the end. It's a total wet fart of a finale even if it involves a decent debate on whether humanity needs gods or an afterlife. I should have been more disappointed in it but the journey there was so interesting and poignant I didn't care. As much. They totally ran out of money, though.

This is a book as much as it is a game. Most of the time you will read about what's happening rather than see it. That's the most d&d thing about it. You'll play text adventure mini games about crossing rocky ravines or sneaking past lizard men. In the latter case the rogue in my party was able to gain the lizard's trust by doing fancy coin tricks. They ended up giving me food instead of killing us. You can finesse your way out of some truly stunning stuff including most major boss battles. I wanted to fight a krakken on my first run only to realize I'd already talked myself out of it.

This is how the game talks. If you can get into it... there's some pretty sick pithy burns in it for you.

Navel combat itself is a bit of a text adventure but it's commendable how much fun they can squeeze out of what is essentially just radar and text prompts. Your first couple bouts will end in failure but you'll soon be jibing with the best of them. You'll spend a decent amount of time sailing with your crew which brings me to my favorite inventory management thingy ever: feeding your crew.

The better food and drink you feed your crew, the more morale they gain. The more morale they have the more exp they get per ship encounter. But morale is expensive and maintaining the high 80's is harder than it seems; because rum in bulk is not something you can easily afford but better food isn't. Basically as long as you've got a ton of yummy +1 food with water (-1 morale) you'll be set. The single best loot drop for me personally, more than any weapon, was a +10 cake. My crew had just been through the sh*t and they really needed the break from watered down ale. Sailing is so engaging I didn't mind the lack of fast travel. I'll let you figure out why for yourself, there's a lot more to do than just raiding ships.

Who wants some evocative ass imagery?! Seriously, you're going to have to love it if you're going to finish this game.

Greed, politics, colonialism, warring gods, and the tragic impossibility of peace in the face of all of that is why you need to play this game. If you've ever prized story telling in your games, if you ever had a passing affair with the mid 90's crpg boom, and if you're a sucker for a good cast of bickering party members you need to play this game. It might teach you something about your politics that you didn't know. Long story short, their east India company equivalent made one too many good points for their survival over the opulent and internally racist native Queen. It really got to me. Which is Obsidian at their very best.