BeeRadTheMadLad Pathfinder: Kingmaker Review

If you're looking for gratuitous wish fulfillment cheese, look elsewhere. Really, look to the vast majority of role playing games made in the last 15 years. Pathfinder: Kingmaker is as brutal in its immersion as it is immersive in its brutality - this is by design, it's the intent of almost every mechanic and story idea in the game and the team did an outstanding job at creating the experience that they were going for. A large number of complaints about the game that you're seeing are actually a byproduct of this - you don't just get gratification handed to you here. You don't just get everyone and their mom's golden ending by making a single obvious dialogue choice. You can't just burn all of your most powerful limited-use abilities in a single encounter, rest, and repeat ad-infinitum. When a companion tells you there's something urgent to attend to, there are...wait for it...actual consequences if you decide "Eh, I'll get to it in a few months...maybe." All of these mechanics and systems overlap with one another to create an experience that you have to navigate by fully immersing yourself into the setting and making your judgment calls as if you were there, deliberating your way to the outcome you get as you advance the story. Consequently, the far more likely outcome to all of this than "and everyone you know all lived happily ever after" is a mixed bag, which for some of us is a massive and desperately needed breath of fresh air compared to the direction role playing games across the board have gone in the last decade or longer. If I sound out of touch with the average modern gamer, well, maybe I am. All I can say is that my experience with this game left me with the lasting impression that I have experienced gaming peak that very few other role playing games ever made can even touch.