Pillars of Eternity Review

Regardless of what role you choose, the importance of endurance and health never changes. Basically, if your character runs out of endurance, they will be knocked out of a fight, but it will replenish once the fight is over (assuming you win). Running out of health, on the other hand, results in permanent death. Moreover, health can only be restored by resting. In a city this is easy enough, just visit an inn. But in a dungeon resting is limited to the amount of camping supplies you're carrying.

The balance between resting your characters and ensuring you have enough supplies to get safely back to town is what drives the tension in Pillars, as you can't simply power your way through each fight and patch up your wounds once the final enemy falls. Carefully managing your party's tactics and formation is crucial. There's nothing more disheartening than seeing your weakest party member take a beating immediately after a rest, knowing that having to rest again so soon could cost you dearly further down the line.

This will almost certainly happen to you at some point because Pillars is a tough game. Even on the easiest difficulty setting you'll frequently get your nose bloodied, and occasionally despair at the complete annihilation of your party. If the latter happens, chances are you're simply too low level for your opponent. Although there's a broadly defined path through the game, Pillars does like to hide some astonishingly tricky fights in otherwise straightforward areas. As a general rule, if it's dragon-shaped, you should probably wait. Oh, and if a tormented ghost warns you not to jump down a dark, bloodstained pit, do yourself a favour and listen.

These abrupt difficulty spikes aren't flaws as such, but Pillars doesn't always clarify how or even if you can back out of particularly stern fights, which led to one moment of undignified panicking as I thought I'd played myself into a corner and would have to repeat 15 hours of game. As it turned out there was a way out, but I almost missed it because it was squirreled away in a corner of the map.

Pillars exhibits a few other problems. The fortress you can upgrade to gain certain bonuses as the game goes on is a nice idea, but ultimately proves itself to be fairly superfluous. Also, you can only switch party members by returning to the fortress, which means sitting through several loading screens. Given the balance of your party is so important to progression, this is a real inhibitor to experimentation. As a consequence, I didn't explore a couple of the characters as much as I would have liked, and ignored one pretty much entirely.

Lastly, while the game's first city, Defiance Bay, is exceptionally designed, By comparison Twin Elms feels like an afterthought. Twin Elms is where the troubled third act takes place, and the problems are largely down to the city feeling distinctly unconvincing as a place where anyone, even elves, would live. Defiance bay is very sensibly laid out, with clearly defined districts, buildings, and faction relationships. Twin Elms seems to be a random assortment of civic and residential structures drenched in Tolkienesque gobbledegook.

Yet none of these issues stop Pillars of Eternity from being a thoroughly excellent RPG. Obsidian have delivered exactly what they promised in their Kickstarter campaign, and in some ways more than I expected. I didn't expect to find myself laughing as Edér suddenly started playing with a piglet I'd picked up as a pet earlier in the game. I didn't expect to be so engrossed by the central plot. I didn't expect to feel genuinely sad as I parted ways with its characters after 40 exhausting hours. After years doing a fantastic job supporting other developer's licenses, it's wonderful to finally see Obsidian flourish with something entirely of their own devising.