games

For games like this where you inhabit a character that can act cruelly, it's great to just read a summary of key moments and dialogue that one might encounter. You don't have to actually do the awful things to appreciate the effort that the developers put in to giving you that capacity

I can either play a stealth assassin/thief who kills from the shadows but is really nice to people, a magic user who blows people up in horrible ways but is really nice to people, or a paladin type who hacks people to death but is still really nice to people. I’ve been gaming for decades and I’ve always fallen into the same patterns.

Wallace Shawn wrote a great essay about how being an actor is about showing how you would be if you were Henry V or Darth Vader, and I just read a fantastic book by Robert Sapolsky about how we don’t actually have free will but instead are the products of our biological and psychological histories. If I were to have the exact same genetics, epigenetics, life history stretching back over multiple generations, and chemical imbalances as a randomly chosen person on death row, would I not be there?

I’m going to try playing a bad guy one of these times just with that in mind. I’d just like to know if the game has a different play through for alignment or if being bad breaks the game. I still remember the Dragon magazine article about the anti-paladin class that continuously emphasized that this was an NPC class and D&D was about discovering the good in you. I think that kind of put me on this path.

It's kind of crazy how much effort indie devs can put into a game that'll never be seen by most players.