5 RPGs that are not Baldur's Gate 3

Utilising cheap SEO tricks to talk about games i've enjoyed in the recent past

Given that it’ll likely be several years before I finally get round to playing Larian’s obnoxiously vast new roleplaying game and because I’m a total wanker for FOMO, I wanted to take the opportunity while everyone’s gushing about a CRPG again to talk about some of the recent games I’ve played and what I think they do really well. Some are obvious entries, others you may be surprised by.

That’s it. No pretense, this is a purely cynical move but I hope you enjoy it nonetheless.

DISCO ELYSIUM

I don’t need to tell you to play Disco Elysium. If you know, you know, and far be it from me to add to the sycophantic thrall of fans chomping at the bit for this fascinating Eastern European Detective RPG. It’s really bloody good, even if that advocation does come with a few caveats (I don’t like the voice acting and think it has too many systems getting in the way of it’s excellent prose).

Disco Elysium is remarkable for a number of reasons, one in particular being that it has a fresh new take on the amnesiac protagonist trope, which I talked about in my video a few years ago, but in general it does a few really neat things that are worthy of further discussion.

It’s approach to politics is remarkably different from almost every other game of its ilk i’ve played, recognising that to be political is an inherently personal experience. Taking place in a district built on the foundations of a thousand different histories, the telltale scars of conflicts past and present, it’s easy to think of this as being similar in vein to the factional spiderweb found in other games but there’s a huge component of introspection that informs how players engage with the game too.

In many cases choice is less to do with the way we can affect the environment we’ved stepped into and story we are experiencing and more about forming an idea of who we are as a person. And as I talk about in the video, the idea of the player is not some blank slate for you to pick and choose your actions, morality and ideology. Harry DuBois is an already existing person, with his own ideas, conscience and understanding of the world. He’s just too hungover to remember any of it.

It may not seem like that distinction matters, but it does. It gives the game a sort of Quantum Leap-esque quality, like you’re not really existing in this world, but rather seeing but a snapshot of it. Harry existed long before you got here, and he will go on to exist long after you leave. What you do in the interim will have long lasting effects on his life, his relationships and his health.

Beyond anything else, Disco Elysium is that rare experience for a game, one that properly understands the experience of existing within a time and place, and how complex your emotional being can be in these circumstances. Forget the expansive lore and the bucketloads of political theory, the mass of systems and walls of text, and underlying apocalyptic suggestions. Forget about Harry DuBois, Kim Kitsuragi, the city of Revachol. Disco Elysium is about you.

A wholly unique game, we will never get anything quite like it again.

ASSASSIN’S CREED: VALHALLA

Cue the groans. Yes, I know Assassin’s Creed has a bit of a reputation for farting out identikit milquetoast AAA experiences (even though I don’t think that’s true at all and also fuck you for saying it), but there’s something about Valhalla’s direction that, after two previous attempts of varying success with Origins and Odyssey, this truly feels like a roleplaying game to match the best in show.

Valhalla is a game that does two very clever things with its plot that helped it remain compelling until the roll of the credits.

Its main story arc, although inevitably going off in a wild direction that I both love and recognise as wholly off putting to some, was largely built around a single relationship between protagonist Eivor and their brother Sigurd. A slow burn dramatic sentence to return to time and time again following your myriad excursions that make up the bulk of the narrative. Early on you recieve a prophetic vision infering that you will one day betray him. Its a point that is barely returned to for the following forty hours, but remains jammed in your brain, an echo of an idea that rattles your every conversation with this person who is family to you, and I was genuinely surprised at where the story went with this. It does not end as you expect.

The second thing the game does really well is understand how to use its scope to its advantage. By having a main plot beat essentially be ‘go around England collecting allies like pokemon’, the game opens itself up to what turned out to be a lot of really great smaller stories. Many of these tales are still epic in scale, featuring their fair share of castle sieges and fights to the death, but just as many are simple cultural deep dives, conversations about tradition and personal stories that often feed back into the main story in interesting ways.

Valhalla’s greatest strength, it turned out, was adopting more of a serialised approach to storytelling. It’s Star Trek with vikings. It even has its own holodeck episode (Eivor off their tits on some swamp witch's concoction envisions themselves as Havi atop Heimdall’s tower, staring off the precipice of Ragnarok - it’s honestly a brilliant and surprisingly involved scenario).

Valhalla sticks out to me for these reasons, but also for the fact that it’s just incredibly well written. It’s a game that holds the same dramatic tension in a climactic fight in the dark with a deranged paladin as it does a tender conversation with your sibling’s spouse. A game where the decision to deny someone a warrior’s death or not carries with it the same weight as the fate of your entire settlement.

Yes it also has all that tedious Ubisoft macguffin map-splash nonsense the series is infamous for and maybe it was a tad too ambitious in giving you England, Norway, Vinland AND Asgard to explore and fill with stories. By the conclusion I was ready to be done with it, but the further away from completion I get, the fonder my memories are of the moments that truly stuck the landing. If that’s the last ‘RPG’ this series gets, they went out with a hell of a bang.

THE WITCHER: HEARTS OF STONE

We all know and love The Witcher. A raucous series of tall tales centred around inimitable monster hunter and top shagger Geralt of Rivia translated from a successful selection of novels and short stories, to a video game trilogy, to a TV series that has big mid 2000s Dinotopia energy.

It’s appealing for all the reasons great fantasy literature is. Bawdy fables of terrors in the night, men who are the real monsters and a succession of incredibly busty witches. Politics and magic in equal measure, in creating Geralt Andrei Sapkowski inadvertently brought into existence the Ur-Chad, the dude all those losers like Andrew Tate wish they were. A wall of muscle, good hair, grizzled voice and smouldering looks. One blade is for killing monsters, the other blade is also for killing monsters. So cool.

Wild Hunt has been written about countless times over the years. For good reason, it’s a brilliant RPG, a game that fully understands the responsibility to provide big picture epics alongside more wrought personal narratives. The Bloody Baron is inevitably at the top of this list as a brilliantly grim emotional thriller, but what I want to talk about here is its expansion Hearts of Stone.

Maybe seen as the lesser experience compared to its ambitious follow up Blood and Wine, this one doesn’t give you a new world to explore, and is small in scope, but it stands out to me as an example of what games like these should have been doing all this time: A new story built around characters that have been under your nose this whole time; a self contained campaign slotted neatly into an already established world.

Assassin’s Creeds Odyssey and Valhalla would go on to champion this idea of utilising an open world structure as the canvas for a lot of self contained smaller stories, but to me Hearts of Stone is the true king, a thrilling tale of one man’s hubris forcing him to hire a bounty hunter to take on the literal devil.

One of the series best villains taking centre stage after his rather humble cameo as a stranger in a pub at the beginning of Wild Hunt, Gaunter O’Dimm proves to be a more interesting antagonist in the long run as it’s not a contest of strength, or wit, or intellect but rather personality. How do you take on a being of infinite power? By challenging his ego, of course!

A brilliant excursion.

VAMPYR

I wouldn’t blame you for not really knowing how to feel about DontNod’s peculiar, janky Vampire RPG. It’s got a lot riding against it, whether that’s the drab visuals, the clunky soulsborne combat or the good-but-not-great writing, it’s solid 6/10 material. What Vampyr does have, however, is a remarkable collusion between narrative and mechanics, and a justification of the RPG elements as a means of expressing something more than just numbers. 

Taking the role of a doctor newly transformed into a beast of the night, you engage with the residents of a plague-ridden urban burrow, choosing whether to aid them or feast upon them. Some of these characters are more scrupulous than others, but at its heart of all your interactions lies a moral dilemma. Obviously draining these poor folks of their red stuff is ‘bad’, in the sense that taking a life is bad (even if you feel willing to make an exception for a landlord or two). Maybe in your heart you know yourself to be good, but these supple bodies are your best source of experience, in a game where levelling your abilities is a crucial element of ensuring the combat doesn’t make you want to drown yourself.

It’s amazing how quickly your morals wane in the wake of a roadblock. How the allure of new and frightening combat powers brings you to the brink of your own convictions. You start to think things that you previously would find abhorrent, looking at those you swore to protect with a newfound hunger. If the landlord was fair game, maybe the guy who’s been exploiting his grandmother is too. And we can’t leave granny all on her lonesome, can we? It’s a cascade of moral failings that makes up Vampyr’s most interesting experiences; a game that entices you to become malevolent, luring you to wicked acts through its design; a title who’s greatest challenge, simply, is to be good in a world that seldom rewards kindness.

For this reason and this reason alone, it finds its place in this list.

PENTIMENT

I’ve already written extensively about Pentiment here, (link in case you’re interested), but it’s impossible to overstate just how incredible I find this game to be. The most understated RPG in recent years, Pentiment sheds much of what the genre is known for, instead focusing on the core pleasure of interaction.

A confined gamespace, a small cast of characters, an impressive wealth of knowledge of the history and culture of the region, its part murder mystery, part slice of life simulation, and a veritable toybox of intricacies that demands further investigation. Moreso it is a world that feels tangible in a way so few do, a space that lives and breathes and grows with you.

This fable of artist Andreas Mahler and his various dealings with the Bavarian village of Tassing across his lifetime might not seem all that exciting on paper, and certainly in its opening hours there is a meandering quietude to the game that could so easily be mistaken for tedium. A lot of conversations with blacksmiths and lunching with priests. The first murder doesn’t even occur until many hours in.

Time passes. A LOT of time passes. All in all the story takes place over nearly 30 years, with highs and lows, drama and downtime, culminating in a profoundly atypical answer to the riddle plaguing the history of this poor, troubled village.

That slow burn, to me, is an intentional setting of the stakes, and a means of telling the player that they need to think of this game with a different mindset. When it first came out a friend told me he thought the game was ‘games journo wank material’ and I don’t know maybe he is right, it’s definitely not going to be to everyone’s tastes. It’s very ‘history with a glass of tap water please’, but I guess that makes me a games journo wank, because I lapped it all up like a thirsty dog.

Sorry Dave.

My experience with CRPGs is extremely limited. I was always a JRPG guy growing up, and became accustomed to that kind of experience over the years, it’s only recently i’ve started coming to appreciate the wealth of good stuff out there. I don’t even really know what constitutes a ‘good’ CRPG, beyond the consensus around the popular stuff.

Are there some hidden gems you really love? Or games you think are overrated? Let me know in the comments.