Category: Singleplayer

Baldur’s Gate 3 at 4 Players

It feels a little pointless for me to write about a game that has already been devoured by the game journalism/influencer cycle that is modern games media So to actually add some value here, most of this writeup is going to be from the perspective of how the game plays with 4 human players, and some of the oddities with that.

The best way I would describe Balder’s Gate 3 is that it’s a digital version of Dungeons and Dragons, run by a strict but infinitely patient Dungeon Master. Yes, you can win all these combat encounters by just shoving people off cliffs. Yes, you can attack random people around you. Yes, you can let yourself be dominated by the purple mindfuck octopus. It eats your brain, you die. Better load a save.

This is where Baldur’s Gate is at its best in some ways. The engine handles all the stupid fiddly bits around combat, rolling dice, keeping track of HP, movement, spell slots, inventory, items, weight, etc.

Brief aside: Baldur’s Gate also gets to do one thing that tabletop D&D doesn’t: forcing players to learn systems via failure. Unlike a standard D&D game, where TPK’s mean everyone rolls up a new sheet, BG3 can wipe the party, ask “Now, what did we learn from that?” and have you run it back. And when it comes to learning D&D’s esoteric bullshit, I think this is quite a strong way to do it.

Act 1: You meet in an out of control spaceship.

So first, some background. I’m not a massive RPG person, so the only way I had any real interest in BG3 was playing the game with friends. I also didn’t want to spend $60 only for everyone to drop out.

Before buying, I got the three friends I planned to play it with to promise that we would play the game every weekend at some point on Saturday until we finished it. The hardest boss (scheduling) already defeated, the adventure kicked off.

Baldur’s Gate 3 is split into 3 parts, or Acts as the game calls them, with limited ability to go back once you proceed from one to next. To my mind, Act 1 is the strongest, with Acts 2 and 3 being a bit weaker for reasons we’ll get to. But at 4 players, Act 1 worked quite well.

We spent a lot of time messing about in Act 1 and it had some of the most satisfying moments of the game for me. The highlight, though, was the Underdark, and some of the roleplaying choices it offered. Baldur’s Gate tends to play more with the tropes of “Good vs. Convenient” rather than “Good vs. Evil.” This is to say, you can get what you want by letting people suffer, or can stick your neck out for them, and have someone else try to chop it off.

I think the strength of Baldur’s Gate’s writing was the clearest to me when I found myself wanting to really have my character (a paladin) stick to his ideals even when it was incredibly inconvenient. On the whole, though, Act 1 as a group of 4 didn’t really have as many of the pain points that would start to crop up later, starting in…

Act 2: The woods are dark and deep and trying to eat us.

Act 2 is where problems started to crop up. If Act 1 is traditional D&D fantasy (after the opening), Act 2 ratchets it up a bit, bringing you into the Shadow-Cursed Lands. They’re lands that are cursed by shadows. And these shadows try to eat you. One cool mechanic is that they won’t eat you if you’re carrying a torch. Which is fine except if you’re a party of 4, everyone is going to be carrying torch. This means no one has a weapon out when you get ambushed.

It’s also where we started seeing bugs. Here are some notable ones. We got soft-locked at our camp, and had to lose an hour or two of progress. The host player’s computer crashed each time he talked to an specific NPC for a romance-chain cutscene. Once, one of our characters was permanently locked up jail, even while not jail, and required that special type of esoteric bullshit to fix.

Act 2 was also where the meta-gaming got ratcheted up, at least a bit. Of the 4 of us in our party, two hadn’t played the game before, and two had. There were a few encounters that we did not do in what I’d call the “full spirit” of the game. For example: when I go to talk to strangers, I do not usually immediately barricade the entire room with pallets in case, say, I’m attacked by flying ghouls mid conversation.

I have mixed feelings on this. On the one hand, I don’t harbor any ill will towards my friends for this. I knew they’d played before, and it’s hard to just play a game knowing everything that happens, and not spoil anything. On the other hand, it kind of a bummer. I think sometimes failing to protect an important NPC and living with consequences of that is fair.

In addition, Act 2 also involved one of the major problems with the game at 4 players: NPC party member quest chains. Many of these chains require having the NPC present in the party for the chain. But your party is capped at 4 characters, which meant that we had to kick out a human player and have them sit on the side while everyone else escorted whoever it was to wherever they had to go.

It’s a huge frustration, and makes it very difficult to want to do these quests, as it meant not actually playing with my friends. You know, the people I’m there to play the game with. But more on that in…

Act 3: We’re outta time, and only got 4000 minutes to save the world.

Act 1 is pushing the shopping cart down the hill. Act 2 is the wheels getting a little wobbly. Act 3 is the bit where the wheels fly the fuck off, and the whole thing flips head over heels.

That’s not to say Act 3 is bad. Baldur’s Gate, as it is realized in the game, is one of the best designed cities I’ve ever seen in a video game. They manage to make every inch of it both relevant and interesting, but without feeling like it was designed just for the player. It’s fascinating design that I can observe, but not parse in any way that I would be capable of mimicking.

And because it’s so jam packed, there is a ton to do. That said, it does feel less fleshed out on occasion than some of the other acts. Finally, this where the “Add the party member to the party” comes back with a vengeance. There were at least four party quests we didn’t touch because it would have meant someone had to stop playing.

That’s not to say there wasn’t enough to do. Despite having party members who had played the game multiple times, we found a new-to-them side quest that elaborates on some pretty critical lore for one of the primary characters. I cannot stress enough how content packed this game is.

I do have one story I want to share though. Throughout the game, we had kept an NPC alive, and done various side quests around him. Many of these were a pain, but it was really fun to see him change as we helped him, and grow.

Then in act 3 one of my friends murdered him for armor. It felt really bad. It was made even worse by the fact that we didn’t need this chest armor, and this person got it only because they wanted to respec into a brand new build for the 5th or so time.

This was probably the biggest moment that broke the fantasy for me, and it’s unfortunate that this happened right before the…

Finale: wake up and choose violence.

The finale to Baldur’s Gate is a comparatively short affair compared to the rest of the game. It is an impactful and cinematic story moment and set of fights that doesn’t quite overstay its welcome.

It is also unfortunately where the game just shits the bed technically. Performance is incredibly bad. Some of the enemies really don’t quite look like they belong. We saw at least 3 fairly major bugs occur, including enemies not spawning, one member of the party having all of their items unequipped while still equipping them, and watching a magical spear that returns after being thrown… not doing that, and just vanishing.

It’s unfortunate, because instead of a blaze of glory, BG3 goes out with the equivalent of an oil fire. Instead of a sense of dramatic triumph, the primary emotion I have when I think back on this part of the game is frustration. I’d rather fight mind flayers than pathing and the framerate.

But when the dust settles, it’s time to take stock of the casualties, and the story.

Hey, remember when I mentioned issues with the NPC party member quests?

Epilogue: So long and thanks for all the flesh.

So. Because we hadn’t done many of the NPC quests, the “post” final fight sequence of cutscenes was one of the most depressing end-game sequences I’ve ever seen. Because we left almost every character to suffer.

This included watching Wyll, who only hours ago had promised marry my 7 foot dragonborn paladin, rushing off to the Hells with Karlach. So yes. After 76 hours, BG3 ended with my character getting cucked by Karlach. Yes, I am salty. Can you tell?

It’s unfortunate, but the result is that Baldur’s Gate 3 ended on kind of a low note for me.

Baldur’s Gate undeniably deserves its game of the year award. But it’s not a perfect game by any means. It’s a masterpiece as a result of its scope and depth, but not its polish.

And to be frank: it doesn’t quite work at 4 players.

Slay The Princess

Slay The Princess is a horror visual novel, in the purest sense. It’s well produced, with excellent voice acting, and art that does a very good job of communicating what it wants to. For anyone turned off by the “horror” aspect, this game has maybe one “jumpscare”-esque moment. It also doesn’t rely on any breaking of the 4th wall, like messing with files with on your computer or those sorts of things.

As a result, it almost entirely relies on the strength of its writing, art, and voice acting to tell a story, and a really interesting one. This makes it incredibly difficult to talk about.

As such, I’m left with two choices. I could engage with the work itself, and try to access it. Or I could dance around it, and look at the space it exists in, without engaging with it directly.

This writeup will be the second one. At the end of this writeup, there is a link to a page full of spoilers, because there are some things I want to discuss, but simply cannot without spoiling the game. But that page isn’t here, so if you are afraid of spoilers, you can keep reading (just don’t click on the link. There won’t be anything here that couldn’t be seen by looking at the steam page, or booting up the game.

To some extent, game reviews and criticism aren’t particularly well suited for evaluating games that are almost entirely reliant on narrative. Literary criticism tends to do much better at that. Game reviews are better at evaluating mechanics.

The primary mechanic of Slay The Princess is reading text. As far as mechanics go, is it a fundamentally strong mechanic? Yes. We have an entire medium of work reliant on that mechanic that isn’t games. They’re called books. Slay The Princess also has images, which means we can compare it to comic books, which are also pretty popular. Or we can call them graphic novels if we’re being fancy.

I think it’s a very strong visual novel, and if you enjoy horror, or games focused around narrative discovery like Gone Home, I would recommend it.

That said. If you want spoilers and longer form discussion, here you go. I suggest you only read this if you have no interest in the game, as doing so will destroy parts of the experience.

Slay The Princess is $18 on Steam.

Pikmin 4

Overall I like Pikmin 4. I have issues with how its mechanics play into the game’s overall theme and aesthetic, and I have skeletons worth of bones to pick with the game’s difficultly curve, but I liked it. I would recommend it. If you want a game that doesn’t quite play like anything else, grab this.

Pikmin is one of Nintendo’s strangest franchises. An apocryphal tale states the series’ designer, Shigeru Miyamoto, was inspired to create the game after watching ants while he was gardening.

Here’s Pikmin 4 in one sentence: “Pikmin is a game about strategically managing ants. Except the ants are mobile semi-sentient plants and everything wants to eat them.”

As a summary, it hits a lot of high points. Pikmin is a strategy game. Your units are adorably small, and the Pikmin, while not stupid, have the same amount of self preservation skills as an ant. They also exist in a world where they are the very bottom of the food chain.

Story-wise, Pikmin 4 is the lightest in the series. The main game modes have unlimited days to work with, even though the time pressure is still present. The story does what it needs in order to serve the mechanics.

Mechanics

Gameplay in Pikmin 4 takes place across zones. Each zone is a single large map that can be revisited. Each visit is one day, lasting about 16 minutes.

Unlike other RTS games, the player only has direct control of two units. These are Oatachi and a custom player character. Oatachi is an upgradable space dog, and the Rescue Team member is a small alien in a spacesuit.

Across these zones, the goal is to explore and retrieve treasure and castaways, and delve into dungeons. There are other game modes. I’ll cover them later.

There are two pillars to Pikmin’s gameplay: real time combat, and strategic management and planning. The real time combat is simple to explain. The player character and Oatachi can command a force of Pikmin to follow them, and instruct them to interact with objects or attack enemies by tossing Pikmin directly onto those enemies.

The indirectly controlled units, the Pikmin, come in several different flavors. As this is the fourth game in the series, there are now seven types. Using the right one for the right task is often necessary. For example, don’t throw the yellow Pikmin (electricproof) into the fire.

Pikmin will attack enemies that they’re tossed onto. Most enemies will eventually shake Pikmin off, flinging them to the ground. Both Oatachi and the custom PC can whistle to call fallen back Pikmin to the main group. While Oatachi the PC control mostly the same, they do have some of their own strengths and weaknesses.

These are the micro mechanics of Pikmin, small interactions dependent on mechanical skill. But they’re fairly subservient to Pikmin’s macro mechanics, a term the game even has it’s own word for: Dandori.

Pikmin’s macro strategy revolves around a really interesting push/pull tension. The player has a limited number of Pikmin, and can only control their own character and Oatachi directly. Ultimately this turns Pikmin into a sort of resource allocation/routing game, where the real question becomes “What is the minimum number of Pikmin I can allocate to any single task, and still complete that task in a desirable manner?”

Combined, this is what makes up Pikmin’s mechanics: the high level ability to plan and route individual enemies and encounters, and the quick twitch ability to deal with enemies effectively (and respond when things don’t go according to plan).

Game Modes

Pikmin 4 has multiple game modes. They all use pretty much the same controls, but I do want to cover them quickly.

Overworld Expedition: As mentioned above. Adventure around a large map with a 16 minute timer looking for treasure and enemies.

Dungeons: Can be entered from the Overworld, bringing Pikmin with you. With no timer, dungeons made up of a series of floors, with various challenges, often with a themed gimmick (ice, conveyer belts, etc), and a boss fight at the end. You can’t refill Pikmin during a dungeon.

Dandori Challenges: Also entered from the Overworld, these are effectively puzzle rooms. You’re given a set amount of starting Pikmin, a goal, and a time limit. Beating them requires getting a certain amount of points, or completing the goal within the time limit.

Dandori Battles: The player faces off against an equivalent NPC to try to gather more stuff than they do over a given period of time.

Night Explorations: The easiest way to describe these might be “tower defense.” The player is dropped into a night time version of a day time area, and has to defend an object called a Lumiknoll until time runs out, or all enemies in the map are defeated.

They differ in two key ways from day time, in that enemies will periodically aggro and actively attack the Lumiknoll in waves, and that the only Pikmin available are Glow Pikmin. Glow Pikmin are immune to all elemental damage, and also warp back. The end result is a fairly different experience than normal gameplay.

Shipwreck Tale: Closest to something like a New Game+, this mode has the player trying to complete a separate set of objectives on the same maps, but with only 15 days. It’s much harder than the base game.

End Result: Pikmin has a lot of pretty different content.

Bugs, Minor Issues, and Bones to Pick

Pikmin 4 isn’t perfect. One of my biggest issues with the game is that it has pretty terrible load times, taking forever to transaction between zones and dungeons. This is mostly not an issue, except for when you find yourself jumping in and out of a given dungeon floor to farm a specific type of Pikmin.

There were a few graphical issues, but far more annoying were some of the bugs related to the game’s task system. There’s very clearly a hidden system that manages the player’s actions around throwing Pikmin at certain interactable objects. These can include ropes to be unspooled, or sticks be dug up and used as a shortcut. Sometimes it just breaks.

Here’s an example: I would throw Pikmin on a rope, but they would fall off the ledge near it. The game considered them to be still performing the rope “task” but there was no way for them to get back up. So when I threw additional Pikmin, the hidden system managing the task wouldn’t let them interact with the rope, because as far as the game was concerned, I already had the max Pikmin that could be assigned, even though some couldn’t actually reach it.

This is intended to be an anti-frustration feature, as it actually is mostly visible when the game stops you from tossing more Pikmin then required to carry an object. But it was still annoying.

My biggest bone though, has much more to do with tone than mechanics.

Pikmin: Ants or Locusts?

Pikmin has a weird tone. It’s a tone that I generally enjoy, one where you lead small plant creatures against monsters fifty times their size, something captured quite well by the Pikmin 2 box art:

There are a few things underlying this tone, but one of the biggest ones is an unspoken statement that Pikmin are underdogs, and they are the bottom of the food chain. They are small, individually quite weak, and live in a giant world of terrible things.

So here’s the problem: Pikmin 4 doesn’t respawn enemies in the overworld once they’re defeated. It’s a reasonable design choice to allow anyone to progress through the game, and it means that obstacles don’t have to be dealt with more than once.

But it also means that after a certain point in the game, every map ends up feeling completely empty and wiped out, stripped clean of wildlife by the Pikmin. And it’s kind of a weird feeling, more like you’re commanding a group of loathsome locusts, instead of adorable ants.

I get why they did this, but it does lend the game a really weird tone.

Difficulty Curve

One of the strangest things about Pikmin 4 is the difficulty curve. I would say that approximately 80% of the game is incredibly easy, to the point of being a non-challenge. Then there’s the other 20%.

They say a picture is worth a thousand words. So here are two pictures.

These are my total stats for the game as to Pikmin lost/grown. I lost a total of 336 Pikmin, not including rewinds and redos.

And these are my stats for Cavern for a King, the final dungeon of the game. Total losses, with rewinds, for a single dungeon are 61 Pikmin.

21% of my total losses in the entire game came from this single dungeon and that’s including the game’s system for save scumming (rewinds).

Every dungeon in the game has a maximum of 5 floors (except for a single other dungeon with 6 floors), and usually 1-2 to boss fights .

Cavern for a King has 20 floors, 15 of which have bosses.

Up until this point in the game, I was actually going to write this article about how disappointingly easy Pikmin 4 was. But then Cavern of Kings was much harder than every other dungeon. The final night exploration missions required more save scumming than every day exploration combined. The final super secret challenges are incredibly difficult.

It’s a super weird thing because it’s not a bump in difficulty or a smooth escalation; it’s a massive jump. The term “Vibe Check” comes to mind, as it just feels like at some point, the developers pulled off the kiddie gloves with no build up in-between, and smacked me in the face.

Conclusion

I liked Pikmin 4. I recommend it. It’s supremely weird, and there really aren’t any other games like the Pikmin series. Pikmin 4 isn’t a perfect entry, but it’s very fun overall.

Even if it does have a difficultly sheer rock wall instead of difficulty curve.

Moonring

I haven’t beaten Moonring yet. Normally, I don’t write about games until I beat them, but I’m going to talk about Moonring early, because I’m done with it (for now). I also recommend you download Moonring immediately, as long as it’s been at least two months since this post went up.

Moonring is a singleplayer cRPG with some roguelike elements. It’s brilliantly weird, and has a fantastic tone and art style. Moonring is also the buggiest game I’ve played so far this year, with an impressive smattering of bugs and crashes.

Here’s a quote from the sole developer that might shed some light on why it’s so buggy:

To tell the truth, I wasn’t expecting more than – maybe – a hundred or so downloads of Moonring. In addition, only two of us (me and one Discord member) have been bug-testing, so reports have been few and far between up until now.

Dene

I recommend playing Moonring, but I recommend playing it a few months from now after we’ve had a few more patches.

So, what makes Moonring unique enough that I’m willing to look past a crash-to-desktop every time I try to throw myself into a pit?

In a word: ambiance. Moonring is based off a much older series of games, most of which I’ve never played, but the primary influences I believe are the Ultima series, early text based adventure games, and early roguelikes.

The end result is an interesting set of mechanics, combined with a series of practical changes to make things more human.

Mechanics

Here’s an example. Instead of dialogue options, or a dialogue tree, you talk to NPC’s by typing key words and phrases. But instead of forcing the player to type in every single option, or remember everything an NPC ever says, the game highlights key phrases from past discussions with that NPC, and shows them above your character. It also has auto-complete functionality to fill in words. In addition, the game has a note system to keep track of what you’ve heard.

There are still secret phrases, and riddles, but Moonring is set up in such a way as to let those be the focus, rather than syntax or brute force.

Another good example of Moonring’s unusual elements is its leveling system. Here’s what happens when you defeat an enemy in Moonring: they die, and maybe drop an item. Here’s what doesn’t happen: you get experience points of some sort.

That’s because leveling up in Moonring isn’t tied to classes, or kills, but instead to a series of objectives you can complete for the the gods of the world. Every god has certain general objectives, like visiting their hometown. Others objectives are specific to the god in question. The Great Wolf for example, rewards the player for hunting a deer. The Lords of Dust give a bonus for repairing a construct.

And Moonring does the same with the roguelike mechanics. Instead of forcing a full restart if you die, only the game’s dungeons are somewhat rogue like. Die in the dungeon, and the game kicks you out to before you entered, but also regenerates the entire dungeon.

It’s probably not a game for everyone. Between food meters, managing amber lamps, and mechanics that feel counter-intuitive to many modern design choices, it can be overwhelming. But I don’t think I’ve seen anything quite like it, and I’m excited to play more.

As soon as it stops crashing.

Conclusion

Moonring isn’t currently good enough to unseat my favorite example of game mechanic revisionist history; that’s still Shovel Knight. But it does a fantastic job presenting what feels like an alien piece of design, without sanding all the strange corners off.

Moonring is free on Steam, but again, I really suggest if this sounds interesting, you wait a bit. It’s still fairly buggy, and sometimes can be quite frustrating.

Last Epoch

A few weeks ago after I finished eviscerating Grim Dawn, and bemoaning my lost $12/12 hours, I continued on the quest that brought me to it in the first place. That quest was to find a good ARPG that wasn’t Diablo 4. I won’t be playing that game for reasons I’ve touched on before.

Note: That said, just because I’m not playing Diablo 4, it hasn’t stopped my friends. And I’ll be honest, after the honeymoon phrase wore off, none of them seemed to find it super compelling.

Then I found Last Epoch. And fortunately for me, Last Epoch is exactly what I wanted. A smooth, enjoyable ARPG with the ability to make a fun necromancer good build diversity, solid skills, and meaningful end game.

ARPG’s in Brief

For those who might not know, ARPG stands for “Action Role-Playing Game.” ARPG’s are defined by having virtually no roleplaying elements, and the action parts dominated by spamming your abilities every second you have the mana/rage/potato points to do so.

Here’s a less cynical definition: ARPG’s are traditionally top-down or isometric real time action games defined by extensive skill trees and character customization. Combat generally has two modes, fighting against trash mobs, which are pinatas for stacks of loot, and fighting against bosses, which are also pinatas, except this time they have the baseball bat.

Last Epoch doesn’t make any innovations that were obvious to me in the moment to moment gameplay. Skills are fun and enjoyable to use, attacks are generally well telegraphed, and have interesting variety. Bosses and enemies have a variety of interesting designs, instead of just being 20 different dudes in armor.

Skills and Skilltrees

But that’s not to say Last Epoch doesn’t innovate. The two main places where it makes changes are in its leveling and skill system.

Last Epoch has two parallel skill systems that compliment each other without overlapping. The first is a traditional passive skill tree that unlocks further abilities as pointed are allocated, with some abilities being gated behind specific earlier unlocks. Each class has a base skill tree available, along with several masteries. Investing points into the base and masteries unlock further active skills for use.

The second set of skill trees are the active skill skill trees. Each skill in Last Epoch has a full secondary skill tree that can fairly radically change how the skill works. Skills level independently of the player, and how they’re leveled can change the impact of the skill.

As an example of this, one of the bread and butter skills of my build was Summon Skeletons. Based on how it was leveled, I would have been able to turn it into a skill that summoned vast hordes, or a much smaller but stronger pool of skeletons. It could also built out in such a way that it summoned melee brawlers, flame arrow launching archers, or poison applying rogues.

Last Epoch does limit the player to 5 equipped skills. Initially I expected to hate this, but I found after a bit that instead it just forced me to focus on picking which skills I wanted to use.

Endgame

I think my favorite thing about Last Epoch, though, might be the endgame’s monolith system. Monoliths will feel familiar to anyone whose played Path of Exile, as its somewhat parallel to that game’s map system. They’re sets of random maps that are linked together on a world map. They generate semi-randomly, remixing tiles and mobs from the main game, with a temporary challenge to clear them.

Clearing them generates stability, and clearing them without dying also gives a chest of extra loot, and some specific rewards based on the nodes, allow for a certain level of target farming.

Stability in a given monolith unlocks sets of bespoke mini-missions, with specific boss fights items that aren’t available in the general pool, or main campaign. My personal favorite was a fight against a gigantic icy necromancer dragon.

There are also a bunch of other missions and modes that are unlocked by collecting and spending keys. I’ll be honest, I’ve tried some of these modes several times, and I’ve been flattened each time.

Life pro-top: Don’t try to take the screenshot of the early endgame boss during the fight.

Crafting and Items

A brief note: For most of this post, I’ve been trying to explain things in a way that would make sense to someone who isn’t familiar with the genre. This section isn’t going to do that. If you’re not a nut-job for ARPG’s feel free to skip this bit, as I’m going to be using a bunch of jargon that won’t make sense if you’re not familiar with the genre.

There are several categories of items in Last Epoch. These include normal items that roll affixes within tiers as is commonly done in the genre. They also include unique items, items that can drop with variation in their rolls, but generally offer some sort of weird build around benefit that can change up a build. Finally, it has set items, similar to unique in having specific names and rolls, but offering a benefit for equipping a certain number of items in the set.

There are also legendary items, created in a system that involves fusing unique and exalted items, but I haven’t actually made any of these yet. Point is, there’s a lot of depth here.

Last Epoch doesn’t currently allow trading between players. Instead, it makes up for it with a fairly robust crafting system, and providing a pretty ample amount of resources to do so with.

Unlike other games that only allow you to reroll the affixes and tiers of an item, items in Last Epoch drop with a value called forging potential. This is loosely a resource that defines how many changes can be made to the item before it stays locked in forever.

The crafting system is simple: spend items called shards to either upgrade or add prefixes/suffixes to an existing item. Doing this spends forging potential. However, items can only have their tiers upgraded to a particular level, with items having a tier above that are only available in drops.

In case none of this made any sense, here’s the end result:

Last Epoch has a strong crafting system that allows upgrading existing and weaker gear to be tuned for the current content, and also easily allows shoring up missing stats such as resistances. At the same time, it still puts the highest tier of gear locked behind drops, thus making it so that there’s still incentive to farm for end game gear.

Maybe I should have just written that instead.

Closing Comments

Last Epoch is still in Early Access. While there’s some content missing, including several sets of skills and masteries for various characters, and the full complete story campaign, I never really felt their absence. The only real problem I have with the game in it’s current state is with the multiplayer. Multiplayer suffers from some small lag and loading issues, with multiplayer and online games having much longer load times than offline.

However, these look like issues that will eventually be addressed. And I still recommend the game in it’s current state.

Last Epoch also has a bunch of other small features I really appreciate but don’t quite have time to cover in this writeup, including a powerful but understandable item filter, auto-sort, the ability for crafting items to be sent to storage at any point in time instead of eating inventory space, and a reasonable skill respecing system.

Last Epoch is $35 on Steam.