My guest for this issue of Multiplier is Andrew, project lead at Walky Squawky. Based in NSW, the studio is currently working on its first game: Your Party Blows Ass. You can follow Andrew over on Bluesky and follow the studio over on its website for more information.

Fergus: Games often get compared to movies when it comes to money or the way they mimic the cinematic style or aesthetics of their inspirations. However, when it comes to the craft involved, opera often comes out ahead as a better point of reference. To be clear, this is far from a new take and the fact that it remains a relatively obscure perspective probably says more about the relative popularity of opera in 2025 than anything else. All the same, it remains difficult to read about Richard Wagner’s concept of a 'Gesamtkunstwerk' and not feel like video games fit that framing without too much fuss.

Like operas, games can be a synthesis of different disciplines into a singular spectacle that’s greater than the sum of its parts. Aside from perhaps the interactivity involved, the two mediums map onto one another so neatly that you have to wonder why the comparison doesn’t get more attention or even just casual acceptance. 

Andrew: A Gesamtkunstwerk literally translates as a "total work of art", meaning something that embodies multiple art forms to create a full, considered and holistic world and experience which is then presented to the viewer. 

I cannot think of a more pertinent modern example of what it means to be a composite, "complete" art form than that of the modern video game. A typical game cannot go to launch without artists, sound producers, script writers, visual technicians, engineering, etc.

Games are a modern marvel and crossbreed of different schools of practicality (utilitarian studies such as engineering or software) and artistry that are often said to be incompatible; engineers often working closely with artists to breathe life into their drawings and make their visions real, programmers and writers work to choreograph, orchestrate and execute on scenes and plays that craft a narrative and bring the player into the world.

Game developers create whole worlds through this synthesis, this polymerisation of disconnected pieces into one cohesive whole, one world in which the viewer is part of the experience, part of the art, and part of the world. No longer relegated to just an observer, the viewer is actively engaging with the piece and becomes one of the dancers on the stage, something that not even opera could bring into its body of work.

We are seeing the artists, architects and crafters of our time create their own Sistine chapels and sell them on the globalised marketplace for $20 a pop.

I personally feel that games are the democratisation of art that visionaries like Alphonse Mucha so desperately wanted to see; art for the common person, not withheld for just those that can hoard wealth to afford it. As with all commercial endeavours, there are those that hope to generate wealth as a primary goal, and while we still live in a system that rewards constant growth and gain, that will continue to be true. For those, this "democratisation" is a means to industrialization, mass production, sterilisation, and distribution of the lowest risk assets.

I feel like a really important part of the lack of funding and lack of appreciation we're seeing in the games space is due to an inability to see video games as art, unable to see the pieces that come together to create it, and appreciate the artworks they become.

There is this leftover connotation and hold-over that games as a medium are to be consumed as a mindless tool of relaxation, and that it's about pressing buttons until the lights flash. We seem to be unable to bridge this divide. I feel like part of the problem is the inability to communicate, and how much we take for granted our own accessibility of games. 

While I was out on the showfloor at SXSW Sydney 2025, I was watching the Technology & Innovation lanyard wearers walk around looking at the games with a range of expressions on their faces ranging from detached bewilderment to bemusement.

They spoke openly about not getting it, they laughed and belittled, though a scant few made reasonable efforts to try to understand, and connect. For those few that did try, it was hard to show them something that they could access which they could effectively connect with. They did not have the mental mappings for the controls, the understandings of the core language of games, nor the history with the medium to understand the core mechanics or controls in order to begin to step into these worlds.

Most games come with some base understanding that the player has a history with the medium, has grown alongside it to know the trappings, how to walk, how to control, how to experience and parse the experience before them, how to immerse themselves and become part of the world that is created.

How do you bring someone into a world, a community, when they don't have the baseline skills and understanding to even be able to interact with it? Those games that are designed with low-bar-of-entry in mind often deliver very targeted experiences for niche audiences (such as VNs) or – much like the problem with learning to read later in life – are the equivalent of handing a Doctor Seuss book to a business person, which would be mortifying and belittling to be forced to try and navigate that before you could even engage with the stuff you could possibly be interested in, so why bother? If this kind of fundamental rift exists, how do we hope to rally politicians in local areas to increase funding for games projects?

Fergus: I did not expect this conversation to pivot around to politics so quickly but if we bend the conversation back towards opera for a minute I think there are still some useful comparisons to make between the two mediums when it comes to the problems you’re pointing at.

I’m not going to pretend to be someone with anything more than a passing interest in opera. All the same I suspect that if someone from the tech and marketing side of SXSW Sydney stumbled through the wrong door and ended up in the audience for a contemporary opera they’d likely struggle to engage in much the same way as they do modern indie games. 

I wouldn’t take it too personally though. Not all art is for everyone. That’s the case for video games as much as anything else. It’s not even necessarily a new problem, nor one unique to games. Opera is also niche and reliant on government funding in Australia, for instance.

The overall popularity or “art-worthiness” of a given medium may be less of a factor than you think. As with opera, it’s less to do with the number of people who think games are worth funding and more to do with making that argument to the specific individuals responsible for that decision. 

Game-literate or not, even the most cynical politicians are usually quick to align themselves with winners. After the success of Cult of the Lamb and now Silksong – which may well go down as one of Australia’s biggest cultural exports ever – and it’s increasingly difficult to not see a future where more and more politicians are willing to back local game development on the economics alone. 

Andrew: It is in this ideal that we necessarily need to talk about how our art-form is funded [and] how game developers may keep their ideas and principles uncompromised in the delivery of their vision. I think it's not an uncommon view to see that the wheels of bureaucracy turn slowly.

Silksong may possibly be our largest cultural export to date, though that same argument about cultural exports could have been made about Hollow Knight when it was released many years ago, as it has sold 15 million copies over its 8 year lifetime. Albeit, it wasn't as explosive a hit. It didn't make the same waves Silksong has, but the writing has been on the wall that games are an incredibly profitable, expressive, and desirable medium of entertainment and art for decades.

Cult of the Lamb was 2022, The Artful Escape in 2021, Untitled Goose Game in 2019, Bioshock Infinite in 2013, L.A. Noire in 2011, Fruit Ninja in 2010, Osu in 2007. We have a long and storied history as a global player in the video game market, so why haven't any of these previous hits (and any number of others) been the jumping off point for that change in perspective from the political field?

The cynic in me is asking, why would Silksong be different? Why were these hits of the past not winners? I feel like the root of the problem is from this broader cultural divide which has shown in our previous reluctance to invest in games both as a commercial asset, and as a form of art.

NSW's own funding of the games industry is relegated to a measly $30,000 for a project, and a handful of travelling funds. Screen Australia offers its games Production fund, in which participants can access up to $100,000 for a single project. In February of this year they accepted 18% of their 61 applicants, which amounts to 11 successful applicants. If they all receive the maximum possible funding (which they most likely didn't) then the available budget per application seems to hover at around $1.1 million, from which we can assume a roughly $2 million yearly budget.

The total government allotment for a NSW startup game development studio if you are successful in all of the funding is $130,000, which is barely enough to get a business of its feet let alone flourish. The history of labour in game development in this state – if not the country – has been to emigrate to find work. We are handing off our artisans and engineers to countries that do find this value, in both capital and as art.

You are right that it is becoming harder to see how this medium could continue to be pushed to the side, but the pathway of action for those who are advocating for games is thin.

The median age of our members of parliament, who are some of the "specific individuals responsible for [the] decision [of funding]", is 50 years old. For Local Government Legislators, the median age is 57. The average age of lower house members of parliament is 52.1, and only 12.3% is made up of members who are 40 or younger.

I brought up the fundamental communication and 'language' gap of our medium as the core driving issue that has hindered our progress in our ability for these policy makers to be viewed as a serious industry. One worth funding and investing in. Part of the discussion needs to not just be around having the politicians see the monetary worth in the games industry, but also understand it as a form of art: something that is not just for capital gain but also worth developing as an expression of human creativity.

This is helped by having more people who are part of the games industry, or even just keen about games. People who understand the medium and the needs of the local industry stepping up into government positions or advocating to their local members about the virtues of the industry and the art form [and] to push for more active government engagement in the industry. The NSW State of Play advisory board is a recent development on that front, and I'm keen to see stronger active advocacy for the independent games scene in New South Wales.

A fortnightly conversation about games.

While my desire to delve into Games Workshop’s sprawling sci-fi saga was relatively-genuine, my curiosity about RA Salvatore’s similarly long-running series about a drow named Drizzt Do’Urden was more morbid than anything else.

Just how much mileage can one author get out of a single angst-ridden elf?

Originally introduced in the 1998’s The Crystal Shard as one member of a larger adventuring party, Drizzt Do’Urden has gone on to inspire a trilogy of prequels and dozens of sequels. I wouldn’t say that my knowledge of the Forgotten Realms is encyclopedic, but I do think it’s notable that the popularity attached to RA Salvatore’s “OC” has seen him survive not just decades of real world time but multiple editions of Dungeons & Dragons. I don’t think it’d be the craziest thing in the world to suggest he’s the closest thing that “the world’s most popular roleplaying game” has to a protagonist.

As of 2026, there are 39 Drizzt novels in total – though that number does exclude the spin-off series called the Cleric’s Quintet plus a big pile of comic books. I didn’t bother too much with the extraneous materials though, my journey through Faerun started with 1990’s Homeland and ended with 2023’s Lolth’s Warrior.

After 65 books about space marines, you’d think a mere 39 about elves shouldn’t be too taxing. Here’s the thing though: the average Horus Heresy book is probably significantly better than the typical installment of The Legend of Drizzt. Maybe I’m just more partial to pulpy military sci-fi than I am its fantasy counterpart. Maybe the Black Library just has a higher bar for quality than Wizards of the Coast does.

In any case, the basic premise of the series’ titular protagonist is that he is a drow – aka a dark elf – born in the subterranean metropolis of Menzoberranzan. Drizzt grows up within a violent caste system but ultimately rejects its inherent injustices and sets out to forge a new life on the surface.

As far as backstories for a character in a TTRPG goes, this is all fairly stock-standard stuff. At times, the earlier Drizzt books almost feel like a novelisation of someone’s D&D campaign.

Even if it doesn’t make for the most riveting storytelling, I can absolutely see that consistency with the rules and fictional logic of Dungeons & Dragons being part of the appeal though. Back when Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves hit cinemas, there was an entire sub-genre of short-form video content devoted to analysing on-screen action and showing how it conforms to the simulationisms of its source material. More recently, things like actual play and litRPGs have continued to blur the line between game and story in a way that feels very much like downstream or descended from what’s happening at the beginning of The Legend of Drizzt.

OSR

The problem with this is that it doesn’t take long to reach the limits of what RA Salvatore’s imagination can do within that framework. It’s all too easy to imagine being on the other side of the DM’s screen.

The line from “Okay, so your elf with a tragic backstory has left their nightmarish homeland, the next step for them is learning to survive in the depth of the Underdark” to “Alright, you’ve learned to survive in the depths of the Underdark now you ought to ascend to the surface world and see what’s going on there” is extremely easy to follow.

Unfortunately, once Drizzt has successfully earned the respect of those living on the surface and is now being judged for his deeds rather than by the color of his skin, it feels like RA Salvatore really does run out of meaningful runway for what to do next with the characters and world he’s set up.

It will never not be crazy to me that two of the main antagonists/foils for Drizzt in the early books (Jarlaxle and Artemis Antreri) are both initially described as ”his equal in all aspects but one” – that exception being that they are more morally-dubious or, in the case of the latter, human.

And it should be said that while Drizzt is by far the most popular member of RA Salvatore’s Companions of the Hall, the vast majority of the books in The Legend of Drizzt are just as interested and invested in the lives of his comrades.

Once you get past the three Drizzt-centric novels that precede the Icewind Dale trilogy, the typical installment of the series involves an ensemble that those who have spent any time playing Dungeons & Dragons will find plenty familiar.

There’s the noble barbarian Wulfgar, the boisterous dwarf Bruenor Battlehammer, and the savvy halfling Regis. In typical 90s fashion, there’s also the one girl on the squad in the form of Cattie-Brie. Each of these characters rarely ventures beyond the broad, generic, anachronistic and oft-problemic archetypes they embody. Still, for what it’s worth, their perspectives are often a little more lively to read than those of Drizzt himself.

The only real storytelling trick that RA Salvatore has up his sleeve are the moody monologues that break up each major act of a given story – wherein a Drizzt of the future reminiscences about the events taking place. Regrettably though, the voice inherent in these philosophical musings is rarely ever made manifest in the present-day version of the character you’re spending most of your time with when you’re reading these books.

It should also be said that whenever the concept of gender or sexuality does rear its head in these books, it’s very clear that RA Salvatore is in way over his head. As you’d expect given the age of some of the earlier installments, there are a lot of off-putting references to sexual assault and a nasty kind of old-school fantasy racism in these earlier books that is really off-putting and cringe. Honestly, there’s so much weird stuff happening with the sexual politics of these books that it might be an entire separate article.

Despite Drizzt himself functioning as a vague but blunt allegory about race, often facing prejudice due to his drow heritage, RA Salvatore’s blindspots when it comes to this stuff are sometimes mind-boggling to behold. I think that anyone who complains about modern Dungeons & Dragons being too “woke” now should have to read this stuff to really reckon with how bad things used to be.

Full respect to Mr Salvatore though, it’s kind of incredible to have any book series run this long and – seemingly – achieve the level of pop culture presence that The Legend of Drizzt has accrued over the decades. It’s possible that the simple reason is that there are so many Drizzt books and that it became too popular and lucrative that there was every incentive to just keep writing them – even as the story itself reached one point of natural conclusion after another.

Once you get past that first quarter of the series, it really does feel like even RA Salvatore is getting tired of the whole shtick though. From Path of Darkness (Book 11) onward, it feels like Drizzt himself takes up increasingly less of the word count. The Sellsword Trilogy (which covers book 14 through to book 16) ditches him entirely for a Hobbs & Shaw-esque series of adventures with Jarlaxle and Antreri.

Orcs are people too

Fortunately, for RA Salvatore, the series eventually ran long enough to overlap with the release of the Lord of the Rings films. It cannot be overstated just how much the subsequent Hunter’s Blades trilogy (which covers books 17 through to 20) feels like it owes a debt to Peter Jackson’s take on Tolkien – with descriptions of the sweeping battlefields of orcs fighting humans, dwarfs and elves akin to those seen in Jackson’s films.

Prior to this arc of the story, the orcs of Faerun were far from top of mind for the likes of Drizzt. After it, they feature prominently as one of the major antagonists and threats.

What’s especially interesting about this pivot is that it represents something of a turning point for not just these novels and the version of Faerun they depict, but also mainstream fantasy writ large. A stark contrast to the old-school fantasy racism seen in the earlier Drizzt novels – which often depicts orcs and goblins as subhumans worthy only of extermination – the halfway point of the Legend of Drizzt sees their collective and individual humanity come into more focus. Having said that though, the “ideology” of it all is hard to look past.

Over the course of aforementioned Hunter’s Blades trilogy and the subsequent Transitions trilogy , Drizzt and his companions face an onslaught of orcish adversaries rallied under the banner of a leader named Obould Many Arrows – a fearsome figure whose main ambition is to see his subjects live in peace on the surface alongside the other races of Faerun.

Eventually, this storyline culminates in Drizzt and the Companions of the Hall accepting this premise and forging a new status on orcish terms. Overcoming internal agitators and their own prejudices, they sign a treaty with Obould that puts an end to the war in the belief that an unsatisfying but lasting peace is worth not just fighting for, but also compromising for.

It’s a conclusion that feels hard to pull apart from the vein of American liberalism running through it, but as far as a meaningful follow-up to Drizzt’s own individual journey to forge his own destiny there’s something to be said for it. It took almost a dozen books for RA Salvatore to lock-in on a larger thematic point, but we finally got there.

Unfortunately, we still have another dozen or so books left to go, so this tenuous peace doesn’t last nearly as long as you’d expect it would. The main reason why doesn’t have too much to do with RA Salvatore’s feelings about orcs though.

Books 23 through to 26 – AKA the Neverwinter saga – were released following the launch of the fourth edition of Dungeons & Dragons. As part of this, Wizards of the Coast moved the timeline for the Forgotten Realm forward by a century or so. This creates a lot of narrative complications for the Legend of Drizzt because while about half of the cast are long-lived folk like elves and dwarves, many are not.

The existence of magic does offer some wiggle room, but jumping the timeline forward so suddenly is a storytelling choice that leaves naught but destruction in its wake. For better or worse, the four books following this time skip deal directly with the fallout.

Over the course of these books, the Companions of the Hall are picked off one-by-one, often dying in the kind of tragic heroic fashion you’d expect. They’re no longer heroes in their prime but instead their twilight.

Following this, Drizzt is forced to move on and bond with a second party of adventurers. This includes both former adversaries like Anteri and new characters like Dahlia. The implied idea behind this gear-shift is that a drow adventurer would likely go through more than a few different adventuring parties over the course of their life.

The central concern here is both personal and meta-textual, can Drizzt – and the books being written about him – survive without the same ensemble cast that’s stuck around for decades to date?

The answer that RA Salvatore ultimately comes to is a firm no — which arrives in the form of The Sundering.

Book 27 is by far the most outlandish installment of the Legend of Drizzt writ large and the single book that explains why this saga stretches on for another dozen installments. In it, the original Companions of the Hall – Cattie-Brie, Bruenor, Wulfgar, and Regis – are reincarnated with their prior memories intact and forced to grow up in a Faerun that is no longer as safe or familiar to them as it once was.

It’s an extremely hokey setup, but the craziest thing is that it actually kinda works because it plays into the natural parallels of the Dungeons & Dragons tabletop. Some characters take advantage of this re-roll to explore new possibilities and multi-class while others speed-run their way to familiar destinations.

Frustratingly though, one of the core drivers of conflict during this stretch of books is that the orcs are at it again. A century or so on from the Transitions trilogy, the accord that brought peace with the orcs is seen as Faerun’s equivalent of the Treaty of Versailles. This is extremely problematic parallel to draw to begin with, but it’s made all the more troubling by the fact that RA Salvatore spills so much ink in having each member of the cast come to terms with the fact that — in retrospect — they probably should have just committed genocide against the orcs when they had the chance.

I have to confess, I don’t quite know what’s happening with this pivot. If you squint, I think it is possible that it could be read as a knowing and tragic parable about how even Faerun’s mightiest heroes aren’t immune to revanchism.

However, the more that this thorny topic came to dominate the thoughts and feelings of the characters involved the less likely that feels. I don’t think I necessarily need to agree with the underlying ideology of the characters in these books or anything, but it’s a bizarre and bold walk-back that undermines the thematic backbone that holds the larger series together.

The Legend of Drizzt goes from being an American fantasy story that’s held together by the idea that you should judge people on their actions rather than appearance to one that’s held together by the idea that an entire race of people should be exterminated. These contradictions are never quite satisfactorily resolved and I can’t really find much of an explanation for them beyond the most obvious one — which is that either RA Salvatore’s politics have shifted over time or that he simply doesn’t care or think that much about that larger theme.

Family matters

In any case, four books later, the stage is set for what feels like the last act of the Legend of Drizzt.

With the Companions of the Hall reborn, reunited and reintegrated into the series’ new and larger cast of characters, RA Salvatore’s focus finally returns to the subterranean city of Menzobarranzan and the fate of the drow writ large.

This thread ties together the Homecoming trilogy (which covers books 31 to books 33), though the events in the books themselves take place across far more than just the city where Drizzt’s saga first began.

Where the earlier installments of the series had to stretch even the most generic of plot-lines because they couldn’t come up with anything else, it feels like this particular arc has ideas to spare. Having now lived through an entire second life means that Regis, Bruenor, Wulfgar, and Cattie-Brie each come with plenty of new plot threads to unravel and there’s a genuine willingness on the part of RA Salvatore to explore the myriad of possible responses to this specific situation.

For as high-concept as all this is, it helps that if you’ve somehow persevered this far with The Legend of Drizzt, there’s a good chance you’ve bought into the sense of comradery seen across the cast involved. Over the long run, these books really do start to resemble the Fast & Furious franchise. Any villain that eventually sticks around long enough will eventually soften into a member of the main cast.

There’s no better example of this than Jarlaxle. The more I read of these books, the more I came away convinced that Drizzt’s eye-patch wearing counterpart is the real reason that RA Salvatore kept writing them. He’s by far the most entertaining character to follow and it’s no great shock that he graduates into the anchor character for the storyline in the subsequent Generations (covering books 34 through to book 36) and Way of the Drow (covering books 37 through to book 38) trilogies.

The latter trilogy is seemingly the end of the road for Drizzt though. At least for now. An interview from Polygon hints that RA Salvatore might have a book or two left in him. I’ll probably read those if they end up happening. However, like a TV series that’s ever on the precipice of being cancelled, more recent Drizzt trilogies have frequently felt like a final farewell on the part of the writer involved.

At this point, Drizzt isn’t just happily married, he’s fully grown into being a father – and that dynamic has changed the stories that occur around him. Book 37 (Starlight Enclave) is an incredible example of this in action, following Drizzt as he takes his daughter to a monk monastery while the rest of the cast venture into the unknown, discover a lost civilization of peaceful drow and briefly experience the plot of the movie The Road to El Dorado.

In a true sign of the times, this book ends with what initially appears to be an Infinity War-inspired TPK (total party kill) that leaves Drizzt to pick up the pieces in the two books that follow. I don’t know how RA Salvatore could ever top that, or even where the series has left to go at this point. Granted, I felt like that way about two dozen books back and here we are.

If I had to read either The Legend of Drizzt or The Horus Heresy again, I’d choose the latter in a heartbeat. For as much as the former does eventually drag on long enough to find its own intriguing ideas and act as a compelling time capsule of what the world of Dungeons & Dragons looks like, the fact that you are stuck with RA Salvatore for the full 39 books or so really does a lot to test your patience.

While the stakes do eventually get as large as the future of Icewind Dale or the city of Menzobarranzan, one of the key conceits of Drizzt’s story is that he is just a single and small adventurer in much larger world that has to act as a setting for the world’s most popular fantasy roleplaying game. The problems that plague Drizzt’s world can never truly be solved because they’re meant to act as quest hooks for someone else’s story.

The Legend of Drizzt has changed many times over the years, but no incarnation of the series has ever quite lived up the epic fantasy stories that have so obviously influenced it because I don’t think RA Salvatore has ever the ambition to tell a story that is more than just one tale of many within the shared setting of the Forgotten Realms.

Multiplier is back on Substack as of this week, so if you spy any strangeness with this most recent migration please let me know. My guest for this week’s issue is Tom Evans. Tom is a Nottingham-based tabletop and wargaming content creator.

Over the past few years, he’s released a ton of really comprehensive videos covering the development of iconic PC games including The Elder Scrolls: Morrowind, Medieval 2: Total War and the original Dawn of War. You can follow him and his work via YouTube .

Fergus: As someone who — until recently — has long been reluctant to spend the time and money required to properly get into Games Workshops’ grim dark miniatures game, the original Dawn of War was pretty much as good as Warhammer games got way back when. Originally released in 2004, Relic’s relentless spin on real-time strategy formula established by the likes of Starcraft and Command & Conquer brought the Warhammer 40,000 fiction to life at a scale few developers at the time had managed.

The base game only featured Space Marine, Orks, Eldar and Chaos but the subsequent expansions went on to add almost every major faction in the setting. Two sequels followed, contracting this roster but evolving the on-the-ground gameplay involved. Still, up until the arrival of modern releases like Sabre Interactive’s Space Marine 2 and Creative Assembly’s Total War: Warhammer trilogy, the legacy of looms large and the reality still holds up even today. Given that you recently caught up with a number of key developers who worked on the game way back in the day, I have to ask: why do you think that is?

Tom: When Dawn of War was originally announced, I had already been a Warhammer for several years, and a PC gamer for even longer, the former thanks to wandering into a GW store by chance as a kid, the latter thanks to a childhood filled with LAN games of Red Alert with my dad and brother. So when the game was finally released in 2004, I was eager to dive in straight away.

Right from the get go, you’re drawn in thanks to the iconic opening cinematic, giving you a glimpse into the ugly brutality of eternal war in the 41st millennium. The game established itself as a great RTS game that made the most of the IP’s setting and lore that fans knew and loved, whilst offering an introduction to the 40k universe to those who hadn’t experienced it before. As a 13 year old who at the time didn’t have money to buy tonnes of models, nor the skills to appropriately build and paint the ones I had, being able to move Space Marines into combat against Ork Boyz and watch this unfold in real time was a great way to immerse myself in the 40k universe and keep me interested in the IP.

Fast forward to 2025. Originally I had wanted to produce my “making of” videos to coincide with the game’s 20^th anniversary, but time was against me, and I wasn’t able to complete the project until much later. Regardless, it was a really rewarding experience to make my 2 videos on Dawn of War - The Game and The Animation.

When doing my initial research into the game, one thing that became clear to me was how beloved the original game still is 2 decades later, which in my opinion, isn’t all that surprising.

I think it’s fair to say that Dawn of War was released at a time when PC gaming was becoming more accessible to a wider, mainstream audience. PC gaming was slowly losing its geeky, lonely nerd perception and instead adopting a more modernized and streamlined persona, thanks to significant advances in 3D technology and game engine optimization, affordable hardware and an advent of games considered “cool” released around this time.

The market wasn’t quite as saturated as it is today, despite RTS games being very much the “in” genre back then, and PC gaming still held an element of innocence. It was coming into a new era, bereft of the negative “geek/nerd who lives in their parents basement” perception that preceded this time, and before the toxic elements of the internet and online anonymity sunk their fangs into fanbases.

With these advances in technology, it’s easy to place Dawn of War higher up the proverbial podium than some of the games that came before it. 3D gameplay, whilst not exactly brand new, had advanced certainly in the late 90s-early 00s, and Dawn of War offered a more modern look and feel to its visuals and controls. With absolutely no discredit intended to these games (especially as they are still to this day some of my favourites and I play them regularly), Dawn of War is a bit more polished in terms of both its gameplay and its accessibility (in the literal sense of how easy it is to open and play the game).

The 1990s saw a string of Warhammer games, some notables including: Space Hulk (1992), Shadow of the Horned Rat (1995), Final Liberation (1997), Dark Omen (1998), and Chaos Gate (1998) that whilst [they] have their merits, can also be a little limiting, clunky and outright difficult. I like to think this is somewhat largely down to them being products of their time. PC gaming was a bit more of a niche market for “serious” customers who could invest the time to setup and troubleshoot as well as playing these games, which I think by today’s standards can be very difficult games to play.

Dawn of War has much more of a drop in drop out feel to it. It doesn’t feel like an uphill challenge to get the game running smoothly, or even to feel like you’re being taken apart too easily by the CPU opponent.

Even back in 2004 I never remember my family PC struggling to run the game in any significant sense. Maybe the occasional drop in frame rate but honestly who was bothered by that back then? I think this casual gaming experience really helped open up the Warhammer IP to a larger audience, at a time when casual PC gamers with money to spend were broadening their horizons.

This being said, the game was not too casual in so far as to disillusion the long time Warhammer fan. The game stuck very closely to the established lore of the time and even with some of “out there” decisions from the game designers, these were explained away in a logical manner that fit in the IP.

In my interview with Dawn of War’s lead designer Jay Wilson, one memorable quote he used as a fulcrum to sell the game was “Space Marine’s aren’t chopping trees.” which I think is a brilliant way of allaying fears on the game mechanics. The need for gathering resources in RTS games is largely offset from Space Marines within Dawn of War, other than to initially capture strategic points, which makes sense narratively.

Beyond this, I think the game really does a great job of translating the tabletop experience into an RTS setting. The game designers were adamant that the game was not going to be a direct translation, but more an interpretation for obvious reasons. I think when you compare this intention to some of the games I’d mentioned earlier, which are turn based or more literal translations of their namesakes, Dawn of War really has a one up on them in that the pacing of the game is much more flexible, which in the eyes of the casual RTS gamer, is a much more enjoyable experience.

Despite only having four races in the base game, there was so much variety in unit choices. Each with their own distinctive look, feel and gameplay mechanics, as well as a wide variety of skirmish maps and a fleshed out narrative campaign, the game really embedded itself as a benchmark for what Warhammer PC games could aspire to.

This was a great springboard for the franchise and the releases of the expansion packs Winter Assault (2005), Dark Crusade (2006) and Soulstorm (2008) gave the fans more of what they wanted - fleshed out factions with a wide variety of tabletop models, unique gameplay mechanics and narratives.

I think one point worth noting on the game’s continued cultural relevance is that despite the countless 40K games that have come since 2004, none of them are quite the open book that is Dawn of War.

Many of these games will feature “unique” characters, settings or narratives. Dawn of War does have its narrative campaign, but being able to offer so much more in terms of other playable races and game mechanics is something I think is lacking a bit in today’s games. This isn’t necessarily a criticism of these games, more just my perception on what makes DoW stand apart from them.

Circling back a bit, the game was released shortly after GW had made a conscious decision to really pump its focus into what it considered its three main games: Warhammer Fantasy Battle, The Lord of the Rings and Warhammer 40,000. Prior to this time, GW had released various games that might be considered a bit too niche for a mainstream casual audience. Gorkamorka and Inquisitor are just two examples.

I can’t help but wonder that had GW not made this decision and continued to make “specialist games” at the scale it did back then, and still tried to produce Dawn of War we might’ve seen a very different game.

Whilst future games in the series deviated from the original formula, those who knew the value of the base game’s engine and its scalability have taken it up to 110%. Mods like the Ultimate Apocalypse for example have added in dozens of additional units that weren’t included by the game devs to really immerse the player in the grim darkness of the 41st millennium and really develop the experience.

Fergus: I totally agree. The modding scene for Dawn of War has done an incredible job over the years of extending that core experience that Relic built. It’s especially interesting to consider that in the context of where the series went past that first game.

I’m not sure where you sit with Dawn of War 2 and Dawn of War 3 but while I did appreciate the willingness to break away from the original, I found that the additional tactical complexity and improved fidelity wasn’t really worth the tradeoff in scope, scale or diversity. Even if my moment-to-moment enjoyment is 20% higher, it doesn’t make up for the downsizing in gameplay diversity and replay value that came with a much smaller roster of playable races and units. The juice wasn’t worth the squeeze, so to speak.

This is a common problem you still see nowadays with strategy games from publishers like Paradox Interactive, developers like Firaxis and even Games Workshop itself. Whenever Warhammer 40,000 itself graduates to a new edition, fans of this or that faction can wait years for their army of choice to finally get a proper upgrade to play nice with the new rules.

In a funny way, you could make a case that this is just another example of Dawn of War’s commitment to offering an authentic Warhammer experience but the difference between it and its tabletop counterparts is that the sunk costs involved make it a lot harder to jump ship to a new miniatures game than it is a digital adaptation of one.

Games Workshop has a history of getting away with it. Relic ultimately couldn’t and I think that failure really ate away at the series’ success over time.

It’s impossible to talk about 33 Immortals without talking about raids.

While gaming writ large has trended towards being a more accessible hobby – both in terms of physical hardware involved and the amount of extraneous nonsense you need to keep track of – the concept of “the raid” has endured.

The term itself is malleable enough to cross games and audiences, but remained mysterious enough to hold an almost mythical allure. It’s like a dungeon but harder. The raid is the endgame area with the best loot. It’s where you go if you’re looking for a real challenge. It’s a boss battle with more advanced mechanics.

None of these definitions quite encapsulate what makes raid encounters unique or memorable and even as the player count has shrunk from the forty-man brigades seen in the heyday of Everquest, it remains difficult to articulate the allure of the raid to someone who hasn’t tried one before.

33 Immortals is the most accessible incarnation of this idea to date. Developed by Thunder Lotus, this co-operative action RPG blends the gameplay of Hades, the run-based format of Elden Ring: Nightreign, and the epic boss battles and high player-counts usually only seen in MMORPGs like World of Warcraft.

Each run of the game’s three maps begins the same. You spawn into hostile territory, and under assault by legions of demonic denizens. Slashing away at them will see your XP bar begin to fill up before long. However, fighting for your survival will also see you acquire Bones – which can be used in various ways throughout your current run but are lost at the end of it – and Eternal Shards – which are used to upgrade your character and unlock new cosmetics between runs.

Once a decent number of players have joined your session, a set of small dungeon-like encounter rooms will unlock on the map. Clear these, and you’ll be free to ascend to the final boss battle. These boss battles see you fight alongside as many as 32 other players to deal damage, dodge damage and complete any other sub-objectives that are required of you. The details change but the rhythm that comes with rotating between damage and mechanics is easy enough to find a groove with.

If you’ve done any raiding in games like Destiny 2 or World of Warcraft, you’ll be right at home. If you’re more of a novice, you’ll probably find yourself following the wisdom of the crowd. When your teammates pull back from a boss, you can probably bet there’s a good reason for it. When your allies pile-on, it’s probably a good time for you to do the same.

During both the bigger boss battles and more mundane minion clearing, 33 Immortals makes good use of an old-school combo meter that gives you a multiplier on your DPS that grows ever higher with each hit you land. Keeping the pressure up allows you to augment your overall damage to increasingly-dizzying heights.

The flip-side of this is that while your in-game avatar will grow stronger the more you play, it doesn’t take that many hits to take you down. The first time you perish, you’ll turn into a small wisp that can be resurrected by a nearby teammate but your maximum HP will be significantly reduced. If you die a second time though, you’ll be out for good.

This is perhaps the one area where 33 Immortals deviates from the template of the raid for the worse. It is inevitably irritating to fight your way through 95% of a boss fight and then get killed by a stray AOE at the final hour. Within the context that raids usually occupy, this isn’t as much of an issue because if the rest of your team rallies and makes it through to the end, you’re still be able to share in the rewards.

In 33 Immortals, a single mistake or a bit of bad luck can often see you smacked back to the in-game lobby without much fanfare and with ample frustration. This area – called the Dark Woods – acts as a staging ground for you to customize your character and chat with a number of NPCs inspired by figures from Dante Alleghiri’s Divine Comedy. Here, you can spend your hard-earned Eternal Shards on various character upgrades.

Similar to Hades, you start with access to one weapon of possible different weapons. However, once you start earning shards, it doesn’t take too many to unlock the rest. There’s no color-coded loot system to collect in 33 Immortals, but each weapon can be upgraded to augmented with up to two runes that modify their traits.

Before long, you’ll also start picking up perks that improve your own baseline capabilities. One might increase the number of Bones you earn while another might reduce incoming damage. These can be upgraded as well, but you can only have a certain number equipped at a given time.

Things like the number of runes you can equip, your health and baseline damage, can all be improved by completing various achievement-like quests. Most of the time, these objectives are usually what you’d already be doing as part of a normal run but sometimes they help incentivise and lead you towards engaging with alternative weapon loadouts or builds.

33 Immortals features three major maps: Inferno, Purgatario, and Paradiso. Each offers a slightly different variation on the same format. You load in, level up by fighting monsters across the map, complete a set number of challenge rooms, and then ascend to the final boss battle.

While I cleared the first two maps in a handful of attempts, the third proved to be much more of a sticking point. Part of the reason for this is that while earlier bosses are fairly intuitive when it comes to mechanics, the one found at the end of Paradiso runs against the grain in that it’s both more complex and more lethal.

More likely than not, you’ll end up having to read up on how to resolve each of its various phases either online or using the in-game compendium. Annoyingly though, you can only do the latter after losing to it at least once.

The other thing that has made Paradiso more of a slog to work through is that it is built for significantly fewer players than the number in the name of the game. While I’m confident that certain aspects of the experience do scale with the headcount, fewer players makes the cost of losing anyone feel that much more meaningful. It can make the chaotic challenge rooms much more of a chore to complete and make the cost of a small misstep feel that much more meaningful.

At higher difficulties (and on that third map especially), 33 Immortals can feel less like Hades and more like a bullet-hell game. There remains a real magic to the experience of wandering the game’s vision of the afterlife and fighting your way up to a big baddie, but doing so with fewer people inevitably means doing so with less momentum.

Still, as I feel deeper down the rabbit hole with 33 Immortals, I couldn’t help but be driven on-wards by the desire to see and experience this game as it was intended to be experienced.

Right now, the game has just launched and – more often than not – it doesn’t take too long for your game to populate with players itching to take down whatever boss lies at the end of your run.

To help speed things along, Thunder Lotus have this nifty system set up where each map will get temporarily amped up with extra experience points for an hour or two every day. I often jokingly referred to this as happy hour and it proved a great excuse to jump in and try and get a few good runs in while I could, though finding randoms to fight alongside in Paradiso outside of this window sometimes proved more dicey.

Even if it’s not as overtly positioned as a live-service experience in the same way as something like Marathon is, your experience with 33 Immortals is inevitably going to be contingent on finding another 32 players to fight alongside. Perhaps as the initial interest fades and the player counts fade, AI bots will join the fray. Once I clear the boss that lies at the end of the game’s third and final map – Paradiso – I doubt I’ll stick around for too much longer.

It’s intuitive and obvious to say that a game doesn’t exist without the work of the developer that makes it, but as online games have become increasingly ephemeral, I often find myself thinking more about how games can’t exist without players either. When you buy a board game, you do so not for the experience it will offer you but the experience you can have with other people. If you can’t find people to play it with, then all that is for naught. The gap between that copy of Vampire: The Masquerade Blood Feud gathering dust in my wardrobe and the likes of 33 Immortals might seem large now, but it might only take a month or two for it to shrink.

33 Immortals might be a marvel in that it makes the experience of the raid more immediate than ever before. However, like all raids, the dedicated players that make it possible to experience as intended seem destined to eventually move on to the next one.

As of this week, Multiplier is back on Substack. While I stand by most of my earlier criticisms, here’s the short(ish) explanation of why I came back to the platform anyway.

While I did enjoy my time using it, Ghost was often an ill-fit for the scale of publication that Multiplier currently occupies. With several hundred subscribers, It’s large enough to not qualify for the free tier but too small in scale to really justify the expense of the higher pricing attached to the other ones (especially over time). When I made the switch last year, I did not realise that you have to pay for the full $35 USD/month for access to your own analytics1 is insane to me and that discovery in particular did a lot to make me think about changing things up again.

It’s not all about the money, but my commitment to keeping Multiplier free though, and that does put a ceiling on just how much I’m willing to throw money at it. It’s no secret that spare cash has become increasingly hard to come by over the past year and while I remain critical of it, the fact that Substack’s free tier is so much more generous than the alternatives is hard to ignore.

Substack’s growth engine is also difficult to discount. In the time since I moved my newsletter off this platform, the account here continued to accrue subscribers at a rate ten times that of what I experienced once I had fully set up everything over on Ghost. It’s possible that fully closing this account could have helped alleviate that issue but having a signpost from the old version of the newsletter felt like the right move at the time.2

I missed the sense of community and solidarity amongst the gaming side of Substack. It’s cool to support other writers on here and while having my own little island over on Ghost had an appeal, it did get a little lonely.

The reality is that I’m moving into a new phase for this project. These days, I have a few more creative irons in the fire and after (almost) two years, I am itching to change it up. I remain incredibly proud of the body of work now attached to this masthead (and still have a few great ones coming down the pipe) but think there’s a lot to be gained from shifting to a slower but more thoughtful cadence.

Multiplier will march on, but going forward I want the project to act as a better billboard for not only the work that goes into it but also my other endeavors. To that end, the homepage now includes a sidebar of links to my recent freelance work. The archives now also include a ton of my older reviews (republished with permission now that they’ve been scrubbed from the internet) & game of the year write-ups from across the years. Not to brag too much but I think it’s incredibly cool that you can click on the reviews button on the navigation bar and then scroll back through the years.

Speaking of reviews, I think that this is something that you’ll likely see a bit more of on Multiplier going forward. In a moment of retrospection earlier this year, it dawned on me just how much I missed writing them and practicing that specific aspect of my craft. Since these don’t really align with the original promise and mission statement for Multiplier, I’m reluctant to start slinging them at your inbox without permission though.

For now, the classic Multiplier interviews will still be the only thing that goes out via email. They just might include a few extra links to whatever else I’ve been publishing on the blog side of things.

Anyway, I hope nobody on the internet gets too mad at me over this walk-back. I will continue to advocate that Substack get its shit together (fewer Nazis, more dedicated gaming categories) and — for what it’s worth — I did look at a number of other Ghost-alternatives. However, when I ran the numbers, returning to the place where this project ultimately made the most sense.

As always, I hope you remain as excited to see where this project goes as I am.

~ Fergus Halliday

My guest for this issue of Multiplier is Vee Hendro, a game designer and freelance graphic designer based in Sydney. Vee is one half of the dynamic duo known as Storybrewers Roleplaying. You can follow Vee over on Bluesky and follow the upcoming crowdfunding campaign for the second edition of Good Society over on Kickstarter.

Fergus: At this point, it feels safe to say that Good Society is the most well-known tabletop system in the Storybrewers catalog. It’s got a ravenous following, has won multiple awards and was even featured by Dropout’s Dimension 20 several years back.

Back in 2022, the game got a reprint via Kickstarter which absolutely obliterated its funding goal several times over. Now, it’s getting a full-blown second edition. While more mainstream RPGs like Dungeons & Dragons or Pathfinder have gone through several incarnations. Most indie RPGs like those produced by Storybrewers tend to only get one bite at the apple, so to speak.

So the most obvious question to begin with is to ask is why? What prompted you to take a second swing at Good Society? How has the game’s long tail success and fan following shaped its upcoming reincarnation? How has time changed the way you feel about the original, which was first published almost a decade ago now?

Vee: Great question! Good Society first came out in 2018, and it was our second release as Storybrewers. 

Since then we've played, observed, or heard about thousands of games of Good Society, and have come to a deeper understanding of how people play and interact with the game. We've grown as designers alongside a lovely community of Good Society players who are generous, kind, and encouraging; and ultimately, we wanted to make a version of the game that really reflects how the community plays and what they love about it... which is why we're cheekily subtitling this version as the "Ton Edition"! 

For it, we've been able to combine our personal experience of the game and its players, with direct feedback from hundreds of people kind enough to fill out our surveys, and I feel like we're really well placed to make changes that will improve players' experience. It has been an honour and a privilege to see our humble game outgrow us and come alive in the hearts and minds of so many others. 

Truly, if you'll indulge a metaphor, if first edition is our floral arrangement, second edition is a community garden that exists because so many have poured their time and energy into it. 

On top of that, regency has been more popular than ever as a theme, and we're about to get some very mainstream queer regency with Bridgerton s5. I feel like people want to play a queer yearning, emotions-first regency TTRPG now more than ever!

Fergus: That’s a lovely metaphor and the last point is, I think, a really interesting one to unpack. Firstly – why do you think regency has become more popular in recent years? What itch does it scratch that more mainstream genres like fantasy or sci-fi don’t?

Also, on the queerness of it all, how has that conversation changed? When you look at the first edition of Good Society, are there parts that feel very of its time in terms of the language it used or the perspectives it privileged when it comes to gender and sexuality?

Finally, in a wider sense, I think the tabletop gaming audience is becoming a bit more accustomed to or comfortable with the idea that romance has a place at the table. Although there are some definite perils to be wary of when it comes to this stuff, I think that the success of things like Critical Role and games like Good Society have done a lot to make it less of a taboo topic. Right now, Darrington Press are gearing up to launch a romantasy supplement for Daggerheart. Has that shift figured into the revisions you’re making with the new edition of Good Society in any way? 

Vee: I think the wider change we've seen is more in the demographics and interests of RPG players than it is with us! We've always been queer and emotions-first in our games, and of course, lovers of romance, drama and scandal. When we started in RPG, that was a demographic that was hugely under-represented. Romance and drama didn't feel like the mainstream, but as always, there were folks making games that spoke to them and their interests.

For example, we had Emily Care Boss' Romance Trilogy in 2016 and Alex Roberts' Star Crossed later in 2019 and over the years, feels-first actual plays, along with a greater visibility of alternative story types, have brought more diverse people into RPGs so there are now simply a lot more people playing who enjoy these themes.

Romance and relationship dramas aren't always easy to play in RPGs because of the trust it takes at the table. It can be a very vulnerable thing to really lean into the emotions of a story that is collaboratively being built. Yet, I feel the regency gives an ideal setting for people to explore these kinds of themes in their game.

Austenesque tropes provide a set of structured expectations for the kind of stories you might tell that helps to give direction and definition to the exploration of complex relationships.

There's a particular journey that I love seeing in new players to emotional roleplaying: the ones that start by emulating the tropes of the genre, often silly and humorously playing out a story that doesn't take itself too seriously, but then, as these players become more comfortable with handling emotional stories at the table, they start to put more grounded emotions into their roleplay. Their character becomes less a caricature and more fleshed out, more real. The tone shifts, more earnest, more heart-wrenching. Emotional scenes aren't played out for laughs, they're played out so the feelings land. In a way, this backdrop of increased understanding of romance and feelings at the roleplaying table means we can approach 2nd edition a little differently.

While maintaining its identity as a great beginner game for folks wanting more drama and emotions in their RPGs, we are also making revisions that support more intermediate and advanced players who love this style of RPG.

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I first started reading the Horus Heresy about twenty years ago, but I didn’t get very far. This sprawling space opera kicked off in 2006 with Dan Abnett’s Horus Rising. My initial attempt to hop aboard the saga would have happened maybe a year or two later. Then, in 2023, I decided to take another stab at the sprawling series.

For the unfamiliar: The Horus Heresy is a series of books that covers the civil war that leads into the grim and dark status quo of Games Workshop’s Warhammer 40,000 miniatures games. Over the course of the past forty years, the world of “Warhammer 30,000” has gone from being background lore to a book series and now its own miniatures line. 

For my purposes, when I hear people talk about the Horus Heresy though - it’s usually in relation to the novels. No less than 64 additional installments of the series have been published over the past twenty years, culminating in 2024’s The Death and The End: Volume 3. Arguably, the series continues today under the new moniker of The Scouring – which follows many of the same characters and plot threads left in the aftermath of the Horus Heresy’s climax. 

All this is to say that this series’ is not one for the sound of mind or the faint of heart. Much like the miniatures games attached to the franchise, it’s one for the sickos. There’s no better litmus test for this than this unofficial reading order graphic for the series.

It’s all very daunting and complicated from the outside. When you get down to it though, it really is about family.

Galaxy in flames

The Horus Heresy is a series that took me years to read. However, there are some that might argue that I never read it all. The truth is that I listened to audiobooks for every installment – which are available via Audible and the Black Library website. These are really well produced and to be completely honest, I wouldn’t be shocked if that’s how most of the people who do make it through the entire Horus Heresy do so. 

I can’t blame anyone for falling off the wagon though. For as strong as the opening three books – or even the first ten novels – are, the dozens that follow become increasingly disparate in terms of both their individual quality and their significance to the larger narrative.

At a meta-textual level, The Horus Heresy is a story about scope creep. It’s a prequel that explains “what happened” to the Imperium of Man seen in the world of Warhammer 40,000 and all the messy questions that entails. 

The short version of this set up is that it’s the 31st millennium and the Earth is the seat of power for a godlike monarch who styles themselves as the Emperor. To help conquer the stars, the Emperor “creates” twenty sons – referred to as Primarchs. However, something goes wrong and these offspring are scattered across the stars onto various planets. 

From there, the Emperor ventures out into space to collect his sons. Because Warhammer 40,000 is a very maximalist science fiction setting, there are no less than twenty of them. So the story goes, each of these children contain some measure of their father’s greatness. No matter the planet they end up on, they quickly find themselves on a trajectory towards either violence, glory or both. 

Eventually, their father shows up to bring them into the fold and the crusade rolls ever onward. Standing on the front-line of this imperialist agenda are the space marines, who are genetically-enhanced warriors derived from each of the primarchs in a similar way that those sons are descended from the so-called Master of Mankind. 

At a certain point, “something else happened” to two of the Primarchs. To date, Games Workshop refuses to elaborate or explain quite what the deal is but don’t worry too much. It’s not important or all that relevant to the events of The Horus Heresy, aside from the fact there are now only 18 sons of the Emperor you need to keep track of.  

Anyway, some time passes. Eventually, the Emperor retires to earth to work on his hobbies and leaves one of his sons – Horus – in charge. The crusade rolls ever onward until Horus is fatally wounded by an unusual weapon. He makes a recovery, but afterwards he isn’t the same. One thing leads to another, with Horus rebelling against his father – splitting his legion of siblings right down the middle. 

A seven-year civil war follows, eventually culminating in a showdown between father and son that leaves one dead, the other broken beyond repair and a galaxy-spanning empire in decline. If I was to explain the plot of The Horus Heresy, the above is usually how I’d do it. However, the main thing that’s missing from the above explanation is the sheer volume of it all. 

Let’s start with our principle cast of characters. You’ve got the Emperor. You’ve got eighteen sons. Each of those sons – and the emperor – have their own supporting cast of confidants and counselors. There’s also a half dozen or so recurring characters of the more mortal variety and each book in the series also introduces a few new players and/or antagonists. 

This can be a lot of information to digest, let alone grapple with. But the bigger consequence of this enormous number of characters is that it truly takes an incredible time for any given plot thread to develop into something meaningful that pulls the story forward. 

Of course, the thing with the Horus Heresy is that it is not just long, it’s scattered throughout time. The order in which these books were published is not the order in which they chronologically occur. Some books move forward, others go backwards. The anthologies – which happen every eight or nine installments – usually do a little bit of both. As with most prequels, it’s often less about the destination so much as it is the journey. 

The thing about The Horus Heresy is that the vast bulk of the pitch I just gave you really does just cover the first three or so books. The fifty-two that follow that initial trilogy make up the bulk of the 7-year period that the series stretches across. The final ten are branded as The Siege of Terra but are Horus Heresy novels in all but name in much the same way as The Scouring is. 

Given how easily I skipped over it during the synopsis above, you might be wondering just how much happens in that 52 book run between Galaxy in Flames and The Solar War. The short answer is not a lot. The longer one requires me to talk about Gundam.

The battle rages

Not long after finishing the Horus Heresy, I found myself embarking upon the odyssey that is Mobile Suit Gundam. To aid me in my journey through the iconic but at-times incomprehensible anime franchise, I began listening to a little podcast called The Great Gundam Project. I can’t recommend it enough but the main reason that I bring it up is that there are countless episodes of Gundam where not a lot happens. Whenever this is the case, the hosts usually just rely on the simple shorthand of ‘The battle rages’.

The Horus Heresy has a lot of this phenomenon going on in it. Sometimes, there are entire books where lives are lost but very little is gained or learned. If you were to cut out all the filler, I reckon you could boil this story down to a more reasonable number of volumes. I don’t have a specific number in mind but I reckon more than ten but less than twenty. 

Back when I was in it, it didn’t take very long to become clear that the series is in no hurry.  If you’re reading it contemporaneously, you also have the benefit of knowing exactly how many books remain between you and the Siege of Terra at any time – which doesn’t really help.

So, if nothing happens for dozens of books at a time, why stick with it? Why read even The Horus Heresy? Why write this review? Is this a review? How do you even render a verdict about a decade’s long narrative like this one? The answer is that the story of The Horus Heresy is not really one the plot matters all that much. The final destination – the grim darkness of the 41st millennium – is always written in stone. With one or two exceptions, things can only move in that direction. 

Despite this spectre of predestination, the thing that keeps you reading – or at least the thing that kept me reading – was the kaleidoscopic sense of texture to the story and world. The Horus Heresy is just as often science fiction by way of military story as it is detective story as it is period piece as it is Greek tragedy. The unprecedented volume of plot and characters in the series inevitably yields a level of variety and specificity that other science fiction stories can’t quite offer. 

All this is to say the whole saga is a slow-motion train wreck and there’s no chance of the Imperium pulling itself out of that nosedive, so you may as well settle in and enjoy the spectacle. The reason there are so many books in this series is because there are so many characters and it’s easy to invent stories that fit into the nebulous window between the betrayal at Istvan and the final battle for Terra. It’s rare to see a science fiction series fully leverage the fact that space is so big a canvas for storytelling.

Of course, one of the most important wrinkles to this is that some authors are simply better than other authors and some characters are simply more interesting than other characters. I don’t want to name and shame or drag anyone in particular, but there were definitely specific authors who I felt were less engaging. There are others who can make the most one-note members of the cast sing. That’s not a shock though, any book series with this many authors naturally contains multitudes. 

If I had to shortlist my favorites, here’s what I’d highlight.

• Battle for the Abyss by Ben Counter

• Nemesis by James Swallow

• A Thousand Sons by Graham McNeil

• The First Heretic by Aaron Dembski-Bowden 

• Angel Exterminatus by Graham McNeil

• Betrayer by Aaron Dembski-Bowden 

• Vulkan Lives by Nick Kyme

• The Unremembered Empire by Dan Abnett

• Pharos by Guy Haley

• The Master of Mankind by Aaron Dembski-Bowden 

• Wolfsbane by Guy Haley

On the flipside, there are dozens of the Horus Heresy books that you could name and I could not tell you a single thing about them. Perhaps part of that might be down to the fact that I listened to them as audiobooks and often back-to-back. However, I don’t know if that’s the same thing as not enjoying them. 

Sure, some of them definitely felt like chores – but for many, it felt akin to pulp fiction. The stakes don’t matter, I’m just here for the space battles, the epic speeches, the familial melodrama, and the vivid descriptions of close-quarters chainsword combat. Case in point, I can tell you approximately three things about Battle for the Abyss. 

1. The title refers to a big ship called the Abyss. 

2. It’s the start of a larger arc of books that covers the war between the Ultramarines and the Word Bearers. 

3. There’s a tremendous monologue where someone raises the question of whether the pain of betrayal can be quantified on a mathematical level to an unsuspecting victim before turning on them. 

In large part, the reason why this book is on my shortlist is because that sudden-but-inevitable betrayal absolutely sings. Writ large, the Horus Heresy is littered with little gems like this. They might be scattered throughout the series in a way that defies chronology or plot progression, but they’re there to find for those who dare to seek them out.

It only ends once

I don’t know if I will ever read another book series as long as The Horus Heresy, but I don’t doubt I’ll continue to look for one. To me, there’s something endlessly fascinating about stories that defy the narrative structure of a more traditional ending. It’s why I like Doctor Who. It’s why I liked Homestuck. It’s why I like Gundam. It’s why I like World of Warcraft. It’s why I like Critical Role. It’s part of why I like Star Wars. I’m just broken like that.

When any story goes on for long enough, it drifts so far from conventional story structure that weird stuff starts to happen. You don’t even need to read the entire Horus Heresy saga to see that in action. The series starts with a 55-volume run, before pivoting into the further 10 books – the last three of which are technically a single story. 

To be honest though, if the entire Siege of Terra sub-series was not as strong as it is then I probably wouldn’t be writing this. The Horus Heresy isn’t about the destination, but it doesn’t hurt that the tail-end of the storyline is the strongest stretch of books in the entire endeavor either. 

Ultimately though, as I said before, this is a story about family. That family might consist of a megalomaniac father and his equally-fucked up warlord sons and it might be complicated by the existence of ontological evils within the cosmos, but at the end of the day it is still about the web of relationships that bind or pull each member of that family in a given direction.

The joy of the Horus Heresy is that it is a canvas upon which no amount of "if only" will ever be enough.  It only ends one way, and it only ends once.

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My guest for this issue of Multiplier is Jordan Turner, the game director of Samurai Unicorn at Its Got Stealth. I caught up with Jordan following year's SXSW Sydney to chat about the studio's debut title: a sci-fi survival horror title set in Sydney called Samurai Unicorn. You can find the game over on Steam

Fergus: There was a ton of variety at SXSW 2025's Game Festival, but Samurai Unicorn caught my eye almost immediately. I'm a sucker for a good survival horror game, but that's far from the only thing that got my attention here. There's the cyberpunk angle, the old-school look, and – of course – the fact that it's set in Sydney of all places.

How does Samurai Unicorn fits into the broader nostalgia for PS1 horror, how have you approached setting a game in this specific corner of Australia, and what are your general takeaways about the local game development scene in the aftermath of SXSW Sydney? 

Jordan: Samurai Unicorn was originally conceived as an animated series that took my love of Metal Gear Solid's art style and tried to approach it in a way that demonstrated the power of low-poly models and pixel textures to create complete worlds with a defined aesthetic.

When we eventually got the announcement trailer out, there was a lot of interest coming from the PS1-Horror scene on Twitter and that kind of dug up old ideas for how the series could work better as a game and probably find an audience more in-tune with our goals in the process.

From the very start, Samurai Unicorn has never been about making a purely nostalgic experience or using the art style to excuse a lack of quality. We are firm believers in the appeal of the aesthetic and the ability it has to enhance the atmosphere of games with horror themes, but the PS1-look of the game also ties into the world more directly, Samurai Unicorn is set in a 90s vision of a cyberpunk dystopia. So the hope is that it gets players into the right headspace for the tone we are trying to hit with the story.

It feels like Australian media is often mischaracterised by international audiences and typically falls into a very narrow vision of the country. By setting the game in a dystopian Sydney3, it seemed like an opportunity to tackle what life in Australia really is through a twisted lens that takes the charm of the 90s and interprets the current reality in that heightened way you can only achieve in genre-fiction.

As we continue work on the project I think the authentic nature of Sydney3 is going to only become more pronounced as we move past iconic landmarks like the Opera House and get onto the streets to interact with the people who populate the city.

SXSW Sydney was a great opportunity for our small team to get a taste of what it's like to be a part of the local game scene. As a team made up of remote workers or people dipping their toes into development for the first, it can be hard to properly experience what it means to be in the Australian games industry, but we met so many talented developers who made that door into the broader community feel very open to anyone willing to stick it out in NSW and try to make something great.

Fergus: That’s a fascinating origin story. How much of the narrative and storytelling in the game still remains from that earlier incarnation of the project as an animated series? Did those beats form the backbone for the story in Samurai Unicorn or are they treated more as background lore that informs the action? 

In either case, it’s interesting that you cite Metal Gear Solid as a specific inspiration. What about that series connects with you on an artistic level? What was it doing that more recent releases have left behind? 

Another question I have is what exactly you mean when you’re talking about what Sydney is really like. Although the low-poly look and 90s-style moniker are definitely the most eye-catching thing about Samurai Unicorn, I do think that the representation of Sydney is particularly noteworthy. Looking beyond the usual landmarks, are there many other specific slices of the city that those with a relationship to Sydney should expect to see in the game? 

Jordan: Samurai Unicorn has always been so heavily inspired by games and even earlier drafts of the project dabbled with more of 'fake game' style presentation, so actually I found the narrative to be quite easy to adapt into the medium.

In many ways Samurai Unicorn's story and world has always been more suited to a game thanks to all the other avenues that narrative can be conveyed ie; environmental storytelling, NPC conversations, and lore notes as well as the expected cutscenes.

Ultimately we have always viewed Samurai Unicorn as a very story-driven game, but we want cutscenes to be a way to establish a scene or move through major story beats and let the rest of the player's experience be guided by their own play and investigation of the world. Because of that goal, we try to avoid excessive breaks of control from the player and have avoided Klo talking to herself when exploring the main mission locations.

In regards to Metal Gear Solid, I think it really comes down to aesthetic and tone. Kojima has always walked the line of serious characters in a bizarre world and while there are often moments of a comedic nature that revel in absurdity, they never lose touch with the heart of the story and its characters.

We don't want to make a game that plays like Metal Gear Solid and we aren't particularly interested in retreading the story or setting, but the tone and atmosphere that was possible through the art style is such a foundational part of what we're hoping to achieve when people see the characters interact and the way the story unfolds.

I guess that kind of ties into our own setting. Sydney3 is supposed to be our attempt at bringing the 90s cyberpunk aesthetic into Australia and imagining familiar landmarks and smaller moments through the lens of this low-poly, retro-futuristic aesthetic. So for us, when we say we want to capture the real Sydney, it's about always asking ourselves is there something from the city or a personal experience that we can actually pull from when thinking about worldbuilding or environment art? Do we really need a sci-fi prop for this street corner or would it feel more authentic and unique to our game if we found a specific thing from the real city to build around.

One of the more exciting parts of the game for people who know Sydney is probably going to be small street area that you will be able to explore, it's a sort of composite of some areas around the CBD that have been rearranged in a very Sydney3 kind of way, but still, once you realise what the area represents I think it will land for those more aware of the different suburbs in the heart of the city.

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Battlestar Galactica has aged more gracefully than those still stewing in their angst over the rebooted space opera’s infamously spiritual conclusion would likely care to admit.

Much of what resonated about the series back when it was first airing, from the tension between military and civilian factions bubbling along within the titular battlestar to the space dogfights happening outside it, still hits. Given that, it’s not all that shocking that the series is getting a game adaptation all these years later and even less of a surprise that so much of what works about Battlestar Galactica has been made the jump into Scattered Hopes.

A rogue-like fleet management game developed by Alt Shift, Scattered Hopes is loosely-set during the backdrop of the miniseries that sets Ronald D. Moore’s re-imagining of Battlestar Galactica into motion. 

The Cylons have attacked in force, leaving the twelve colonies uninhabitable. In the aftermath of this atrocity, you take up the task of leading a small convoy of survivors fleeing through the cosmos in a bid to reunite with the fabled Battlestar Galactica. 

To do that, you’ll need to first pass through twelve “sectors” of space. Each sector contains both points of interest for you to investigate and supplies for you to acquire – which you’ll need to maintain your fleet during its long journey across the stars. 

Scattered Hopes offers up four different fleets to play through the game as, with each offering a slightly different experience. Regardless of whether you succeed or fail in your bid to reunite with the Galactica, you’ll accrue fate points – a meta-currency that can be spent on upgrades that give all your subsequent runs a better chance.

Naturally, over the course of each run, fresh complications emerge to drive the narrative within the various that comprise your fleet. As with the TV series, you’ll have to balance your reputation with both the working class, criminal underworld and military factions within your midst.

During these sequences, Scattered Hopes shifts gears, adopting an isometric perspective and stripping away its strategy game trappings to become something closer to a visual novel. These conflict-resolution interactions are often episodic in the same way as the source material is.

These narrative beats aren’t quite procedural, but the systems underpinning them are surprisingly reactive to your earlier choices. If you keep choosing to prioritise the interests of the military over your civilian population, the subsequent resentment will eventually bubble over into more dramatic issues. Each complication comes with unique consequences, and a timer by which the issue needs to be settled one way or another. 

Of course, like the show, these side-plots are often likely to get sidelined when the Cylons eventually show up. The bulk of what you’ll be doing in a given run is fleet management, either in terms of resolving the narrative encounters described above or engaging with more crunchy elements like managing your pilots and upgrading your fleet. However, in order to make the jump from one sector to the next you’ll have to hold out against an all-out assault by your inhuman assailants. This gives each sector a natural narrative arc not unlike the average episode of the source material.

Like the TV series it draws on, Scattered Hopes understands that less can often be more impactful when it comes to space combat. During these climactic and cinematic confrontations, the game shifts gears yet again – becoming something closer to a real-time strategy game. You’ll deploy your fleet's limited roster of combat-capable ships to buy time by shooting down both enemy fighters and torpedos. Your flagship also has an array of powerful weapons that can be deployed to turn the tide of battle in a pinch, though these are often limited by cooldowns. 

Each run of Scattered Hopes is a gauntlet, but individual systems are so bite-sized and digestible that it’s effortless to tell yourself that you’ll play just one more sector before bed. The sense of relief you get when the countdown hits zero, your fighters scramble back into the safety of the docking bay and you jump to the next sector right as a fresh wave of Cylons show up is as desperate as it is deliciously addictive. 

As series' veterans might suspect, the aforementioned space dogfights are far from the only close encounter you’ll have with the Cylons in Scattered Hopes. About half way through each run, you’ll discover that your fleet has been infiltrated by your adversaries.

At that point, you’ll unlock the ability to begin investigating the ranks of your own pilots to try and discover the saboteur in your midst. This aspect of the game is very well-realised and feels very true to the tone of the TV series. It's not any more complicated than it needs to be but it does do a lot to ratchet up the tension as you get deeper into a given run.

As opposed to the now-delisted Battlestar Galactica Deadlock, Scattered Hopes opts for a more stylised look that changes depending on the mode the game is in.

Whenever the “camera” zooms into one of the interior locations within your flagship, you’ll get a pixelated perspective on the action. During dialogue, more realistically-rendered character portraits bring the game’s crew of pilots, politicians and misfits to life. Finally, the violence space battles are visualised in voxel form. This melange of art styles blends together to great effect, and are complemented by both the soundtrack and music cues drawn from the TV show. 

The Bottom Line

As someone with a lot of fondness for Battlestar Galactica, the thoughtfulness with which Scattered Hopes seeks to not just emulate the setting but also the specific vibes that give it staying power was something that’s easy to get on-board with.

All told, this is just about the best adaptation of the source material you could hope for. It nails the tone and manages to strike a great balance between being complicated enough while not getting so caught up in the details that it loses sight of the series’ more straightforward appeal. It’s rare to find a fleet management game that finds the middle ground between flavorful narrative moments and slick space battles, let alone that does so with the clockwork efficiency of its TV counterpart.

Like Battlestar Galactica, Scattered Hopes is the rare journey that I feel destined to start over the moment I reach the credits. 

💡

Disclosure - Code for this game was provided by the publisher

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Arriving after several years, handful of documentaries, and just as many lawsuits, it’s perhaps appropriate that Zero Parades: For Dead Spies is a story about striving to escape the gravity of past disgraces. 

Developed by ZA/UM, it’s billed the official follow-up to Disco Elysium. To describe it as such would be to simplify a very complicated situation though.

As alluded to above (and as chronicled more comprehensively elsewhere), many of the developers behind 2019’s award-winning detective RPG have scattered to wind, spun off to do their own thing, are actively suing one another, or some combination of all three. In the midst of this messy situation, more than a few titles have tried to lay claim to being the spiritual successor to the critically-acclaimed communist detective RPG.

It's all very Reign of the Supermen for my money, but that comic book comparison inevitably poses the question of where Zero Parades fits in relative to games like Hopetown and Tangerine Antarctic – besides just being the first post-Elysium project to make it over the finish line. The most obvious place to start when it comes to answering that question is to point at the brand on the back of the metaphorical box.

Of the many titles looking to lay a claim on the legacy of Harry Du Bois, Zero Parades is the only one to bear the name ZA/UM on it. While it is true that the studio as it currently exists is a long way from the one that made Disco Elysium, this pseudo-sequel has far more than just brand power going for it.

Even if figures like Kurvitz or Rostov have long since parted ways with ZA/UM, the opportunity to leverage the tech stack, art style and underlying systems that the studio kept in the divorce does a lot to aid Zero Parades in its bid to make a positive impression.

Zero Parades wastes no time in peppering big proper nouns throughout its dense dialogue trees, which might rub some the wrong way but does help bring you up to speed on the situation fairly quickly. Like its predecessor, the game is set in a fantastical alternative version of history that’s as drenched in political ideology as it is the contradiction those beliefs invite.

You play as Hershel Wilk – a disgraced communist spy who goes by the code-name CASCADE – dispatched to the town of Portofiro on a mission that promises to make good after your past mistakes and misdeeds saw you sentenced to years of penance in espionage purgatory. That initial set up goes off-the-rails fairly fast though – leaving you to suss out and salvage the situation by chasing up a few leads, recruiting local assets, and get the job done however you see fit. 

The close tension between the triumph of redemption and the despair of self-destruction was also a major element of Disco Elyium, but these themes are lent extra heft here by the meta-narrative surrounding Zero Parades.

Like Hershel, it feels like ZA/UM is looking to pursue its own redemption arc and prove itself a worthier steward to the goodwill and fandom that its first game inspired.  All this is to say that Zero Parades doesn’t try to reinvent the wheel.

Much like Disco Elysium, it’s essentially a point-and-click adventure with dialogue trees, skill checks and an inventory system that lets you tilt the odds in one direction another. The shift in genre from detective story to espionage thriller does a lot to breathe new life into that framework by comparison – even if some elements have been lost in translation. 

While the isometric environs aren’t necessarily as striking as those in Disco Elysium, the satisfaction of watching the map steadily expand as you get deeper into the adventure remains more-or-less intact. Like Revachol before it, Portofiro is scenic to behold, dense with details to appreciate and populated by dozens of fascinating NPCs you can whittle away the hours chatting to. Whenever you run up against the edges of a situation or conversation, you’ll usually be be able to make a skill check to steer yourself towards a better outcome.

Zero Parades offers a significantly smaller roster of skills than Disco Elysium did, but that subtraction in size does little to diminish the larger appeal. Fundamentally, it remains fun to roll dice to see what happens next and even the zanier and more niche skills in the game – like being good at poetry – are cleverly integrated into the main plot. The writing is also fairly good at making failure interesting enough that you won't necessarily save-scum your way out of the consequences whenever the dice don't go your direction.

As with Disco, your skills will also talk to you – embedding additional color to both larger scenes and smaller interactions. Zero Parades' take on this quirk is more minimalist than its predecessor, with only one voice actor embodying the various voices in your head. 

In contrast, the shift away from having a formal partner – a la Kim Kitsuragi – is a more noticeable change. Left largely to their own devices (and guilt), Herschel may be less of a walking-disaster than Harry Du Bois but she also comes across as a much lonelier figure as well.

The flip-side of this is quickly made clear though, with the roster of assets you accrue over the course of your adventure picking up some of that slack and filling out the world that you inhabit with color, personality and history. There are some real standouts in the cast here, though few approach the hall of fame status afforded to the likes of Disco Elysium's Kitsuragi and Cuno. It’s hard to know how much of that more subdued sentiment is down to the relatively sparse selection of scenes and characters with voice-acting in them though.

Those who played Disco Elysium after it received the Final Cut update have only ever known the version of that game with the luxury of full voice acting. Time will tell whether Zero Parades merits the same treatment, but for now the split between scenes with and without VO can sometimes be a little abrupt and disorienting.

The soundtrack is another weak link. It's moody enough when it needs to be. However, like many things in Zero Parades, it doesn't quite reach the highs set by its predecessor's arsenal of evocative ear-worms.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Zero Parades is also a lot less nihilistic by comparison. Nevertheless, the dialogue does zig and zag between tragedy and comedy with the same sort of reckless verve seen in Disco Elysium. Most of the time, the writing in the game balances to sticks the landing. However, there are a few spots where it tries a little too hard or visibly strains against the boundaries of its own genre.

Every so often, the game seems to forget that the archetype of the detective and the spy sometimes overlap but are not necessarily interchangeable. At its best, Zero Parades feels like an interactive episode of Slow Horses or Burn Notice. At its worst, it can feel like one of the off-seasons of True Detective.

As a follow-up to Disco Elysium though – and especially given how much more central the big picture geopolitics of the setting are this time around – I was a little disappointed in how the Zero Parades approached the looming specter of communism. 

Zero Parades might cast you as a communist spy, but doing that political ideology justice is fairly far from the top of its mind and it didn’t take long for that one line from Disco Elysium to drift back into my mind.

“Capital has the ability to subsume all critiques into itself. Even those who would critique capital end up reinforcing it instead.”

Where its predecessor wore its politics on its sleeve, the various idioms and arguments that Hershel spouts can't help but ring as more hollow by comparison. Maybe I'm just more jaded than I was in 2019, but where the ZA/UM's first communist RPG felt like it more authentically channeled the zeal and perspective of its creators the presence of this same subject material here comes across as more of an obligatory fan service or part of the broader aesthetic than anything particular radical.

It’s a similar story with the more nuanced substance abuse mechanics in Zero Parades. Herschel isn’t necessarily as much of an addict as Harry Du Bois was, but as you move through the world and dialogue encounters unfold, you’ll take damage on three fronts: anxiety, fatigue and delirium. Addressing those deficits can be done with drugs, but alleviating is a delicate balancing act.

Pushing Hershel beyond her limits will result in permanent damage to her stats, but when the alternative is to wait out the clock by sending your saboteur to bed early it doesn't take long for you to start pushing your luck.

As with the skills and substance abuse mechanics, the day-night cycle aspect of Zero Parades feels like another elegant evolution of the one seen in Disco Elysium.

Most of the time, the lackadaisical locale and lack of a hard deadline on your investigation makes your time in Portofiro feel like a slice-of-life adventure in a city abroad. From time to time though, you do sometimes end up having to kill the hours separating you from an NPC that'll only show up or speak to you at night – which can be quite tedious. This is fairly predictable outcome, but you could say the same for many of the quality of life changes that have been made in Zero Parades.

For the most part, the tweaks that ZA/UM has made to the moment-to-moment gameplay are smart and straightforward improvements. There's now fast-travel and a more useful set of in-game maps that automatically track failed checks that you might want to reattempt. Meanwhile, the revamped riff on Disco Elysium's Thought Cabinet that lets you accrue significant modifiers to your stats for as long as you comply with the meaningful restrictions that Conditioning places upon your play-style.

The other big addition to the larger experience that Zero Parades makes comes in the form of more action heavy sequences called Dramatic Encounters.

These moments are similar to the shootout seen in the final act of Disco Elysium. Where the tension in a given scene boils over and you’re given a variety of options as to how you want Hershel to respond. These do a great job of spicing up the usual diet of exploration, dialogue and skill checks with higher stakes and more cinematic staging. 

While I do suspect that less is more when it comes to the way that both Disco Elysium and Zero Parades deploy violence, the latter left me wanting more from these specific moments – both in terms of their complexity and frequency. Random encounters might be overkill, but I would have liked these dramatic ones to be a little less rare. To be honest though, these are smaller gripes that pale in comparison to the technical issues that I encountered during my time in Portofiro.

I remember Disco Elysium being fairly buggy at launch as well, but hopefully Zero Parades cleans up its act sooner rather than later. I ran into at least one broken quest chain, about half a dozen crashes, and managed to waste about five hours trying to work out why I couldn’t advance a given quest chain due to the game's somewhat-obtuse quest log. 

The Bottom Line

After spending almost 30 hours striding up and down the streets of Portofiro, the sense I’m left with is that – of the many games claiming to be spiritual successors to the misadventures of Harry Du Bois and Kim Kutaragi – this might be the one least interested in that larger legacy and more interested in doing its own thing. 

If you’re going to take the bones of that breakout hit and try to make something out of those pieces then you could do a lot worse than the espionage epic that this new incarnation of ZA/UM have put together after a couple of false starts. Even if the studio has lost much of the luster amid the lawsuits, there’s still a ton here for those who appreciate intricate world-building and the satisfaction of picking away at a knotty mystery or two over a couple of dozen hours.

Zero Parades loses the edge of its inspiration, but it's still more than good enough to sustain its contradictions. It's easy to linger on the fact that the team involved had little to do with Disco Elysium and lose sight of the reality that lack of connective tissue ultimately makes this game all the more impressive.

If you're going to draw a line between the incarnation of ZA/UM responsible for Harry Du Bois and this one then it's hard to deny that this isn't a hell of a debut by the latter.

Much like the troubled spy it centers on, Zero Parades is haunted by its history but hungry for redemption all the same.

💡

Disclosure - Code for this game was provided by the publisher

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My guest for this issue of Multiplier is Renee O'Flynn. O'Flynn is an Australian freelancer who has covered the local gaming scene for Qualbert, The IndiEXP and Player2.net.au. To find more of their work, you can follow them over on Bluesky.

Fergus: A lot of the magic of modern video games is built on not knowing how the trick comes together. It's not uncommon to hear game design framed as the art of giving players interesting decisions to make, especially when it comes to board and tabletop gaming. 

At a surface level, the uncertainty of playing to find out what happens next in a video game is similar. Where things get tricky is that the underlying reality is that any choice the player might make is almost always one that the developer has to have anticipated and accounted for. 

Every possible player choice has to be one that the developer has implemented ahead of time, so that freedom is a little meaningless at some point. You’re not forging your own path so much as you are picking something on a menu that you can’t see. While the industry has moved on from the times when that illusion of choice was a central selling point, the valorisation of player agency by players has stuck around.

From critics and consumers, there’s something of an assumption that more player choice is always better than less and the casual omission of the caveats that come along with it. When it rarely takes more than a quick Google to find out how thin and shallow most implementations of player agency are, you have to ask if the concept of player choice is losing its luster?  

Renee: While some of the greatest moments in games can come from player agency, this is often isolated to multiplayer games where players generally have the freedom to do silly things that the developers may not have expected them to do.

In a narrative driven game, it can be hard to anticipate what a player may do when given choices. One of the easiest ways to do this is to limit the options, such as dialogue in games like Mass Effect. However, this can lead to feelings of being stifled or become ridiculously obvious in their alignment when perhaps the player may have wanted to choose a more nuanced option. 

More egregious than bluntly obvious dialogue is perhaps the illusion of choice: something that was employed in the new Pokémon Legends ZA game. This is where [Game Freak] give the player two options, but unable to progress unless they select the right one. It's rather insulting in that they wasted not only the player's time, but also their own coding and writing this dialogue.

Thankfully, [Game Freak] have also allowed players to have more options in how their trainer responds to questions, meaning they can make their player a walking bag of sass. Small things like this can often make large differences in how players approach a game, while allowing the game to continue to tell its story. It's a step in the right direction for Pokémon as it quickly leaves the illusion of choice behind and allows players to mould the trainer to their preference. 

One of the best examples of player agency done right is probably from the game Spec Ops: The Line. The game is well known for many reasons, with the most popular being the only way to truly win is to not play at all.

At one point in the campaign, the game asks players to choose between a rock and a hard place. Either you shoot a hanging man to alleviate his suffering or he will be strangled to death. I chose to shoot the man, but I later found out that other players had done different things like shooting the rope to free the man. Normally this wouldn't be an option, but the developers had anticipated it so they coded it in.

The idea that there were other options besides the two provided blew my mind. I think there is still a place for player agency such as in Spec Ops: The Line, but sometimes that agency can completely ruin a narrative. 

Fergus: I totally forgot about that moment in Spec Ops: The Line, though reading your description of it the thing that stood out to me was the way that agency gets deployed reads very differently depending on what a given player is looking to get out of a given game. Specifically, whether they are more interested in playing a game or playing a role. 

Unless you’re talking about something more procedural or player-led like No Man’s Sky or Dwarf Fortress, all gaming narratives come with some set of constraints - sometimes narrative, sometimes technical. I think when I was younger – and knew much less about the realities of game development – I was more critical of whether player choice mattered in a gameplay sense. Nowadays, I think I’m more open minded about what it means for that agency to exist at all.

Giving the player agency isn’t necessarily about breaking those constraints so much as about giving them ways to flavor the role that the game casts them as. Shooting, saving or leaving the hanging man in Spec Ops to his fate doesn’t necessarily need to change the larger narrative to have value to a player if the thing they’re looking for is the opportunity to express themselves in the world. 

Renee: That moment may not change the narrative at large, but it is definitely a moment that will stick with the player. It's one of the first times when the player is confronted with the fact that things aren't what they seem. I believed it helped drive home the message that Spec Ops: The Line was trying to portray.

Obviously, there are constraints as players probably couldn't shoot themselves or their teammates: Unless you can and no one has tried yet!

The main argument about player agency being a negative thing, at least to me, is when it interferes with the narrative. This wasn't such a huge point of contention for me once upon a time and it was encountering a pivotal moment in The Last of Us that absolutely ruined the entire game for me that brought it to my attention.

I was excited for the game as I had enjoyed the Uncharted games and had high expectations for it. Instead, I found the gameplay to be average and was only continuing to complete the story as I was now invested. I'm going to spoil the ending so if you haven't played, skip it.

When Joel is confronted with a doctor who wants to use Ellie's brain to find a cure, he is supposed to shoot the doctor dead. How do I know this? Because I shot him in the foot and the doctor keeled over dead. Any interest I had in the story up to that point evaporated.

Why not just make it a cutscene? Why give me the ability to shoot elsewhere if the result was going to be the same regardless? If they wanted to tell this narrative, why allow the player to move the gun? They could have made it so that the gun was pointed at the doctor, but they still had to pull the trigger. Instead, they allowed me to make a decision and then informed me it was the wrong one. It absolutely ruined the series for me. 

My experience with The Last of Us taught me that there needs to be balance between a narrative and player agency. Including it for no reason other than because they can, could lead to the story becoming warped or having negative impressions on the player. Games have often played with difficult and emotive stories, railroading the player into doing something they may not want to because it gives the emotional impact it requires.

I'm going to use Spec Ops: The Line as another example, but you can also use Golden Sun or several other games as well. 

The white phosphorus scene in Spec Ops: The Line is infamous for a reason. The only way to progress is to use the white phosphorus. Even after your teammates have informed you that the use of the chemical has been banned by the Geneva Convention, you either you use the banned chemical or you turn off the game.

In a way, this is still player agency but in a more restrictive sense. If the player chooses to continue, the next scene will devastate them, knowing they made a conscious choice to continue.

Spec Ops: The Line used its constraints to tell the story and evoke the feelings it wanted by limiting the player. It didn't give the player multiple options and then told them it was the wrong option. I really think that ultimately the narrative should take precedence over player agency otherwise the story may not be told how the developers intended, possibly ruining it. 

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It’s easy to get dramatic when you walk about a Marathon, but it’s even harder to avoid talking about the contradictions. It’s a new installment in an old franchise, given a second lease on life by a mainstream-friendly(ish) take on a notoriously niche subgenre. The game is both Bungie’s last hope, and yet also the start of a new era for the company under Sony. 

It’s difficult to imagine that Marathon wasn’t always geared to be a game about cynical corporations throwing expendable assets into adverse environments in pursuit of exponential returns on that investment. Still, it doesn’t take much to draw a line between that premise and the increasingly uneasy relationship between Bungie and its parent company.

There’s a lot of lore – both within and outside the game itself – to consider, but it comes underpinned by a premise as dead-simple as these things get.

Picking up almost a century after the events of the original Marathon, Bungie’s new extraction shooter sees you take on the role of a contractor in a synthetic body sent down to the surface of Tau Ceti IV. Your mission? Grab what you can and get out.

Make the trip a few times, and you soon find yourself on the radar of Marathon’s many sinister corporations — who are all keen to sub-contract your services to meet their own ends. Each of these entities asks you to approach the game’s core loop differently — but these complications do little to diminish the awesome appeal of raw simplicity involved.

The maps and the names of your teammates might change, but the in-game action always turns on the same axis. Each match, you’ll have to get it, grab what you can — be in salvage or intel or scalps — and then get to the exfiltration point before time runs out. A standard run gives you around 25 minutes to work with, but you can move towards the exit signs after just five if you’re looking for a shorter stay on the surface of Tau Ceti IV. 

The maps here aren’t huge and while the computer-controlled robots roaming the ruined colony are dangerous enough in numbers, their ability to deter you from getting more ambitious is short-lived. It doesn’t take long for you to start pushing your luck, and as you spend more time exploring each of the game’s three major maps the possibilities of what you can fill that time-limit will steadily expand.

As lean as the premise above is, there’s no shortage of intriguing variables in the mix. Even something as mundane as the weather or your spawn point can do a lot to change the larger arc of a given run. While some missions will ask you to complete a number of objectives in a single run, others are more generous and allow you to chip away over several matches.  You can only have one mission active at a time, but most are scoped to be completed within a single successful run or two.

One of the smarter decisions Bungie has made here is to reward every player on your squad for helping achieve each sub-objectives. In practice, this elegant incentive does a lot to encourage your teammates to work together and get the most out of every run. You’ll still get the odd renegade who wants to run off on their own, but more often than not you’ll quickly find yourself working as a unit bouncing between locations as you try to get the most out of each run. 

Completing missions in Marathon will increase your seasonal rank, as well as your standing with each individual faction. Gaining influence with each of the game’s six sinister corporations will score you free items as well as new in-game cosmetics.

There’s also a skill-tree of smaller and more passive bonuses that can add up to make your in-game avatar a little more capable, though these gains are undercut by the reality that they expires at season’s end. If there’s one thing that I would change about Marathon — it might be this. I understand the underlying desire to keep the game dangerous for players who hit the ceiling on that progression earlier than expected, but it feels very demoralising and disrespectful of my time.

In addition to the rewards that come with completing missions, each run will likely see you pick up loot in the form of implants for your character, new weapons and mods for those weapons. If you escape Tau Ceti intact, that loot will get moved to your vault — where it can be sold off or used in future runs. Loot is color-coded as you’d expect, though the amount of iconography in the mix can sometimes be very difficult to parse. 

It should be said that, relative to the bar set by Destiny, the inventory management and itemisation in Marathon is much more restrained and sensible – though the game’s commitment to hostile interface design sometimes makes that reality harder to grapple with than it ought to be.

Although the loot you bring to a run can matter in a pinch, your choice of shell is usually the more consequential decision when it comes to your in-game load-out. 

These are Marathon’s equivalent of character classes. The roster here is not quite as charismatic as what you’d get from a hero shooter like Overwatch. Still, each shell does come with passive and active abilities that help you cohere as a team. The triage unit can deploy a healing drone. Meanwhile, the recon can temporarily cloak themselves to escape danger or sneak up on other players. It’s all fairly familiar, though I found it quite difficult to keep track of under pressure or the midst of a firefight.

While the PvP aspect of Marathon is an integral part of the experience, the reality is that you’re much more likely to come across NPC enemies in most runs. More often than not, it’s best to clear these automated footsoldiers out, do what you need to do and then make haste to your next waypoint as soon as you can — because if the noise of a firefight doesn’t attract more predatory players then the inevitable robotic reinforcements will do almost as good a job.

I’d sometimes go multiple runs without encountering another human player, aside from my squadmates. Of course, in the months since Marathon launched, the number of players sticking with it has steadily declined. It’s hard to blame too many for bouncing off the game though, given all the choices it makes – from the unforgiving gunplay to the ephemeral progression to the maximalism of the aesthetic and the sometimes openly-adversarial interface. 

There are a lot of choices in Marathon that feel like artfully hostile design, which aligns well with the corporate-sponsored morality baked in the premise. The fact that you have to wait a few seconds for your loot to be “decrypted” whenever you open a container or crate is just the tip of the iceberg.

However, the line between those qualities and areas where the user interface and experience falls short is a blurry one. Many of Marathon’s myriad UI micro aggressions are magnified when playing on a console, with the main menu’s cursor-based interface merely an appetiser for the many annoyances that await those who want to sink their time into trawling Tau Ceti IV for fun and profit. 

Yet, these friction points add a lot of the flavour to the experience. At first, the music and aesthetics here are abrasive but it doesn’t take long for them to get under your skin.

I don’t think it’s as simple as saying that Marathon is optimised for hardcore players. The more I play it, the more I think that the many hurdles that Bungie asks you to jump over are designed to trick you into becoming a self-described sicko for this game. 

All of this is to say that, there’s a clarity of vision here that helps Marathon it defy a lot of the headwinds bent against it. It’s so easy to imagine a version of this game shipping with fewer sharp corners, more micro-transactions, a less aggressive aesthetic or a more conventional narrative. An unwillingness to compromise might be what kills this game in the end, but the commitment to the bit is a big part of what keeps me coming back for just one more run. 

That being said, if these queue times get any worse, my nightly trips to Tau Ceti may prove to be short-lived. It might sound sacrilegious, but sneaking a few AI-controlled “players” into the mix would do a lot for making this game a little easier to find a groove with. It’s fairly common practice in the mobile gaming space, and given the low player-count for each match, it wouldn’t take much of a nudge to make the matchmaking queues that much tolerable.

It’s easy to be cynical about the supposed expectation that Marathon might be the next Fortnite, Halo or even Arc Raiders in the making. You have to squint so hard to imagine a world where this game has mass or mainstream appeal, and that’s before you even consider the brutal realities of the modern live-service gaming landscape. Even if the context might prime Marathon to act as an embodiment of everything that can go wrong with the larger multiplayer gaming space, the reality is a stark reminder of just how much can go right as well. 

Bungie’s extraction shooter is full of contradictions and drenched in cynicism, but if you can see past that then the clarity of this vision of what a multiplayer shooter can be will likely get its hooks into you before long.

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It’d be easy to see Lord of Hatred as just another Diablo expansion, but the follow up to 2024’s Vessel of Hatred doesn’t have to try hard to sell itself as a more significant milestone. 

Lord of Hatred is also the first time that the series has taken players to the Isles of Skovos – the homeland of Diablo 2’s Amazon – and the only time since 2001’s Lord of Destruction that not one but two new classes have been added to the roster at once. Despite earlier failed attempts, this is the only instance where Blizzard has successfully developed and released a second expansion pack for a given installment of the Diablo franchise.

More than anything else though, Lord of Hatred is the third act of the larger narrative arc that began in the base game's campaign. It’s more than just more of what you know and expect from the series – though there is plenty of that. 

Blizzard’s second expansion pack for Diablo 4 is a triumphant maturation that learns from the past few years of live-service experiments and fine-tunes the game’s larger vision of what it means to vanquish your demons.

Set in the aftermath of Vessel of Hatred – which saw the ancient demon Mephisto escape his prison and possess the body of a long-dead prophet named Akarat – Lord of Hatred sees you pursue the false messiah across the seas to the isles of Skovos. On arrival, you’ll find that not only have the masses turned against you, but that defeating Mephisto once and for all will require you to make an uneasy alliance with the devil you know. 

Resurrecting Lilith only a single expansion after her defeat could feel like a cheap indulgence, but it quickly proves itself a savvy bargain.

Although bringing Diablo 4’s big bad back into the fold offers plenty of juicy lore for longtime fans, the real gain here is an emotional core that helps the Lord of Hatred’s campaign stick the landing where its predecessors merely got the job done.

Where Vessel of Hatred and the base campaign saw me skip through dialogue more often than not, I quickly found myself slowing down to enjoy the cut-scenes a little more this time around. From Lorath to Lilith and even Mephisto himself, Lord of Hatred puts in the work of bringing these characters full circle. Maybe I’ve just spent long enough with these characters that the sense of dramatic tension that Lord of Hatred is chasing is more attainable, but it really does feel like the writing team really locked-in and got much closer to the more cinematic vision of Sanctuary that underpins this particular incarnation of the franchise. 

The Isles of Skovos inject fresh flavor into Diablo 4’s open world, spicing up Sanctuary with new Amazonian architecture, volcanic environs, plus a dozen or so new dungeons to delve into.

When compared to Vessel of Hatred, it’s hard to shake the sense that the design team has simply gotten better at making these zones. Whether you’re moving through them at a slower clip and slaying every monster you come across or zipping through them on horseback, Skovos is not just nicer to look at but splendid to spend time in.

It probably helps that there is a little more variety this time around. Rather than trudge through patches of similarly dense jungle, you’ll zig and zag between populated urban areas and more Mediterranean mesas. There are even larger battlegrounds, where you’ll fight against demons alongside the Amazonian army – bringing a sense of scale of the on-screen conflict that the series has rarely been able to fully-realise in the past. 

At times, it almost feels like Lord of Hatred’s single player campaign is a farewell to this version or era of Diablo writ large. It seems unlikely that further expansion packs won’t be on the cards given how well things seem to be going for Diablo 4, but it almost feels like Blizzard Entertainment could put a bow on things and call it a day here.

In any case, this new act is easily the best in Diablo 4 to date – balancing slower narrative beats, bigger set-pieces, rewarding reveals, and more satisfying boss fights. 

Even the side-quests are better this time around, with Blizzard hedging on quality over quantity. If you call it quits after finishing the campaign, it genuinely feels like you’ll be missing out on some of the best story beats in Lord of Hatred.

Of course, the end of the story is only the beginning of Diablo 4’s endgame progression.

Lord of Hatred learns from several seasons of experimentation and delivers the strongest version of that experience to date. In ways small and large, the expansion does a lot to unify the sizable roster of post-campaign activities into a more cohesive offering. 

It no longer feels like you have to go on Reddit to get a sense of what to do once you finish the campaign, and it always feels like your character is growing in power as you spend more time accruing rare items, glyphs and other build optimisations. 

New activities are unlocked as you move up into higher difficulty tiers, but there’s far from a shortage of things to do. Lord of Hatred’s first addition to the gauntlet of endgame activities comes in the form of Echoing Hatred. This is a faster but more furious take on the horde mode gameplay challenges available elsewhere – with longer survival times yielding better rewards. 

The real game-changer here is the new War Plans system. This feature lets you queue up a sequence of endgame activities and complete it like you would a quest for improved rewards. Then, as you complete more activities, you can alter what those challenges look like via a set of skill trees associated with each.

If you’re spending a lot of time running Nightmare Dungeons, you’re going to start getting even better rewards for doing so – and so on. It’s not entirely unlike the adventure mode that debuted in Reaper of Souls, but an evolved version of that idea that successfully melds together Diablo 4’s myriad endgame options into something more approachable.

In addition to deepening the endgame experience, Lord of Hatred also broadens it with two new playable classes. The Paladin is very much inspired by the Diablo 2 class of the same name, though it does incorporate some elements from Diablo 3’s Crusader. Much as you’d expect, the Paladin is a buff-heavy bruiser that can deal out holy damage to enemies and provide powerful boons to allies. 

Meanwhile, the Warlock is a new caster that veers in the other direction by turning the dark powers vying to bring you down to your own ends. I can imagine no greater compliment than to say that this class reminded me a lot of Hellgate: London’s cabalist.

As with Vessel of Hatred’s Spiritborn, both of these new classes are a little bit busted in terms of balance at the moment – but that’s honestly part of the fun with a new expansion at this point. As things settle down, it's easy to see how they fit in as a natural expansion of the existing roster.  

If anything, the only aspect of Lord of Hatred that inspired genuine ire from me was the way that the game now handles in-game micro-transactions.

Several seasons back, Blizzard revamped the way that battle pass rewards work in Diablo 4 to resemble the more modular approach seen in Helldivers. Although this change does vaguely offer players who don’t spend money more, the amount of friction it brings to the interface was a frequent and massive drag on my enthusiasm. I’d sometimes be waiting 10-15 seconds just to see what rewards I could unlock, then even longer for those transactions to resolve. Diablo has always been in a battle to find the right amount of friction, but this particular front feels completely out of sync with the rest of the experience.

This is not necessarily an argument in favor of more or "better" micro-transactions, though the new World of Warcraft raiding skins are laser targeted at my brain. It’s more of an observation that where the rest of the game is firing on all cylinders, this one specific tab in the main menu is a bit of a garbage fire by comparison. 

I was also a little bit frustrated by the performance. Lord of Hatred is the first Diablo 4 campaign that I played through primarily on Steam Deck, and while I got through most of the new act without issue the more chaotic on-screen action of endgame activities quickly saw crashing become more of a regular occurrence. Obviously, there are technical constraints to the experience that the humble hardware of a handheld can offer. 

Still, the ability to run games like Diablo on leaner hardware without major technical issues has always been a value that I respect about Blizzard’s broader approach to PC gaming. With any luck, some post-launch patches will bring with them some optimisation and technical tweaks. However, if you’re keen for a cleaner experience, your patience will likely be rewarded before long.

Even so, Lord of Hatred is easily the most compelling Diablo 4 has been to date. Even if this particular take on Diablo might not sate the specific appetites of those better served by earlier incarnations, Blizzard still manages to offer a timely reminder of why they are the masters of the expansion pack.

Diablo 4’s second major add-on offers more than you’d expect on multiple fronts and helps the series’ biggest installment reach new heights worthy of that moniker. 

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The original Demeo didn’t have the Dungeons & Dragons brand attached to it, but the influence of the world’s biggest tabletop roleplaying game was easy to see. Released in 2021 and developed by Resolution Games, it offered a rules-light version of the experience of moving your miniatures around a battle map that played out in virtual reality.

That formula proved popular enough to merit a follow up, as well as non-VR support. Given that D&D is now being run less as a game and treated more like a franchise by Wizards of the Coast, it’s little shock that an official crossover between Demeo and its biggest inspiration has ended up happening.

Released in late 2025, Demeo x Dungeons & Dragons: Battlemarked is exactly what it sounds like. It’s Demeo, plus a few gameplay improvements from its sequel and a big bag of nouns pulled from the world’s most popular roleplaying game.

You’ll create a hero, based on one of seven iconic D&D classes and take them through either a one-off adventure or a series of adventures structured as a campaign. You can play with up to three friends or work your way through the game’s two solo campaigns in the game by relying on AI companions.

Most adventures will involve entering a location and resolving the objective, though other more dungeon-oriented endeavors play out across multiple maps. Sometimes you can talk your way to a solution, with the success decided by the dice. Most of the time though, the answer is violence. The two campaigns in Demeo x Dungeons & Dragons are meaty enough, though I did find that the game had started outstaying its welcome a little by the end.

Don’t let the screenshots fool you, Battlemarked owes far more to Demeo than it does Dungeons & Dragons when it comes to the moment-to-moment gameplay. There’s no rolling for initiative here. Each of your party will get to make two standard actions before passing the turn over to your adversaries. 

Although moving and making basic attacks are always available to you, the bulk of the strategy here comes from Demeo’s deckbuilder elements. Each hero has a deck of cards, each of which corresponds to special abilities that allow them to light up the board in their specific way. These include things like AOE spells, buffs and even cards that generate additional actions-per-turn. 

Beyond the baseline imagery of moving miniatures around a board, these cards are where you’ll find more of the D&D flavor in Battlemarked – with classics like Fireball, Vicious Mockery and Divine Smite all appearing in their respective class decks. 

Although some cards – like potions – are consumed upon use, others will cycle back into your deck eventually. Unlike most deckbuilders though, you don’t draw at the start of each turn. Instead, you’ll accrue additional cards by slaying enemies, looting bodies and opening chests. Discarding unwanted cards will also do the trick, though that option is obviously a little more inefficient. 

The action economy of fifth edition is here in spirit if nothing else. Short-term tactical considerations like flanking or line of sight simply don’t matter as much as the juggling act of keeping your long-term options open. Success in Battlemarked is just as much about solving any given combat puzzle as it is setting yourself up to be in the best position for the next one. 

As each member of your party slays enemies and completes quests, they’ll build up experience points. While you don’t level up as you would in a traditional tabletop experience, these points can be spent on a variety of upgrades. These include passive bonuses like extra damage or health or modifications to your cards as well as additional cards for a given heroes’ deck. 

Battlemarked generously lets you spend these as you earn them, rather than wait until you’re between adventures – which I appreciated. Nevertheless, I do wish the benefits were a little more exciting or the skill trees were a little deeper. I had pretty much maxed-out my party by the end of the first adventure so the second felt like a bit of a grind by comparison.

Even so, a big part of what kept me keen to continue with Battlemarked was the aesthetic. Rather than hew towards realism, Resolution Games have opted to go for a more cartoon look and the results add a lot of staying power to the overall experience. Animation is minimal, but that constraint mostly works out in the game’s favor as it helps embody that fantasy of moving highly detailed miniatures around a tabletop. 

While these vibes have plenty of staying power, I quickly found myself wanting a little bit more from Battlemarked. The tactical combat here is admirably approachable, but it feels like it’s often caught in a middle ground where it’s too easy to fail but not all that exciting to succeed at. The game tends to throw waves of enemies at you until you reach the exit of a given level or complete the chosen objective, which can make it a bit of a slog to tackle things in the most tactical way. 

It didn’t help that controls and interface in Battlemarked often felt a little floatier than I’d like. Where something like Fire Emblem or X-COM offers a satisfying snappiness to the strategic decision-making, the inputs, outputs and motions here felt finicky and a little bit too loose for my liking. 

Where the storytelling in the game was concerned, I can’t say I was all that starstruck either. The writing in the game often feels generic enough that it comes across like it was written by AI.  Even so, as someone looking to learn a little bit more about the Forgotten Realms, Battlemarked mostly scratched that itch.

I just wish it had some sort of level creator because I’d love to see what else could be done with the formula here beyond a basic jaunt through the tundras of Icewind Dale. If this game got the Total Warhammer treatment – or even just a Planescape DLC – I’d be back in a heartbeat. Additional in-game cosmetics for each class would probably do a lot as well.

The Bottom Line

If you’re looking for the next Baldur’s Gate 3, you won’t find it in Demeo x Dungeons & Dragons: Battlemarked – but that standard might be an unfair one to apply. If you’re coming to tabletop gaming for the experience of moving minis around for an evening, this is a fairly friction-less way to do that with friends – and it’s a whole lot less of a hassle than physical miniatures are. 

Battlemarked nails the fundamentals of what it’s trying to do, it’s just held back a limited imagination.

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My guests for this issue of Multiplier are Dinosaur Polo Club's Casey Lucas-Quaid, Lucy Weekley, and Dylan Richardson. I caught up with the trio following the low-key launch of the New Zealand studio's new cooperative game RTFM earlier this year. You can follow Dinosaur Polo Club over on Bluesky and download RFTM on Itch.io.

Fergus: If you had asked me what to expect next from the makers of Mini Metro, a lo-fi asynchronous multiplayer game about tech support would not have been anywhere on my bingo card.

RTFM is quite a stark departure from the studio’s previous work and while the text file that comes with the game name-drops a few of the influences, can you talk me through where this project came from? What is it that drew you to this specific style of multiplayer experience?

Lucy: While I can't speak to the initial spark as the project was already beyond the "ideas" stage by the time I came on to do the voice work, I will say we have a lot of horror fans in the office! So while something kind of creepy and like sitting on a computer terminal in a liminal office space isn't something one would expect from Dinosaur Polo Club, as individuals we have a huge range of interests and inspirations that were able to come out due to the game jam format – which makes the inaugural launch under our "DPC Labs" name extra exciting, as we now have a dedicated place for our more off-beat little projects!

It's also been nice to see that the departure from our usual formula has been met with surprised-but-pleased reactions as opposed to total confusion. 

Dylan: It wouldn’t have been on my bingo card either to be fair! For me at least though, the departure is very much intentional. We’re currently working on the next iteration of the Mini franchise and I’ve been living in that clean, minimalist world for some time now. So when our yearly Creativity Week came up I was excited to game-jam with some of the team on something entirely different. 

I liked the idea of something that was a bit silly, something entertaining to watch and play together, and also something that we could achieve pretty quickly as our other projects tend to spend quite a while in the oven. That’s why we embraced small, bite-sized puzzles for the core of the game which meshed really well with an obtuse manual and better yet, one you couldn’t see and needed to be relayed to you by a friend. Very much inspired by Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes!

Casey: Our game jam that year was actually themed around communication, so an asymmetric co-play game was a fun riff on that theme because communication ends up being most of the gameplay. While I was sketching up narrative ideas, I kept coming back to the concept of “if the game is about effective communication, what are some scenarios in which preventing effective or truthful communication is a social goal?” 

The very first idea that came to mind ended up becoming the inspiration for our Manual: redacted old Cold War documents. Apart from having a cool aesthetic, there’s something about a redacted document dump that gets people’s curiosity and creativity kickstarted. A certain type of nosy person who’s of a certain age and way too online will remember stuff like the Leveson Inquiry document dumps, all the files Wikileaks posted, all the wacky old declassified files from the US’s CIA and nuclear programmes.

While the rest of the team was working on the puzzles themselves, I tried out a few narrative ideas for what the puzzles might represent, and eventually hit on the concept of data processors working on encrypted data packets that are being routed or sorted somewhere without actually knowing the contents. They can see this manual that hints at some really sinister stuff but the nature of the job means you never get to peek behind the curtain.

Atmospheric horror is a lot more effective when you never show the monster on-screen, so to speak, so we left it vague while dropping a lot of hints. Not that there's monsters. Probably.

Fergus: Fingers crossed. In any case, it’s genuinely awesome that you’ve got the opportunity to shake things up and experiment with new ideas each year. Does Creative Week run every year? How does it work? It reminds me a lot of Amnesia Fortnight, but I imagine it’d be a slightly smaller scale affair. 

Dylan: Yup! Roughly once a year but of course the exact timing depends on what else we’ve got going on.

The how is a funny one because there aren't really any set rules. It’s a time for dinos across the studio to try something a bit different. Maybe you form a crew and gamejam a new concept as with RTFM. Maybe you continue that course you started a while back or study something new. Maybe it’s simply R&D or a time to catch up on the little things that can get lost in the heat of development. We like to leave it pretty open-ended. All that said, I love the mention of Amnesia Fortnight because we definitely were somewhat inspired by that when the opportunity to release RTFM was floated.

Fergus: The challenges of funding at the moment are likely part of the story, but I do think there’s something to the recent shift we’ve seen towards smaller projects in general. 

That’s brought with it new questions, I think. Only a few weeks ago, there was an online discourse about how smaller-scale projects like those that Aggro Crab publishes are not really compatible with the expectations that larger live service games have set when it comes to post-launch support. Do you feel like there is an implicit expectation that any successful game should receive the same kind of support as a live-service title? Does something like DPC Labs let you sidestep that conversation? 

Lucy: If it were like our standard releases I’d say yes, but ideally DPC Labs will allow us to release our smaller, experimental projects without the pressure to do frequent updates. We are a small studio but are working on no less than three games at any given time, so we don’t really have the bandwidth to provide full support for DPC Labs titles – aside from any essential patches, of course!

Dylan: Speaking more broadly, I don’t think it’s a given that every successful game needs a lengthy roadmap of new content into the future, though I can see how that expectation has developed over time. It really depends on the game and the studio.

We take a lot of pride in how long we continue to give back to our players but I’m also very aware of the impact it has on our studio in terms of overall output and how quickly we can get our next big thing out the door. Personally, I’ve really come to appreciate a small “one-and-done” experience that doesn’t wear out its welcome.

Casey: I think expectations from an audience are going to be there, especially if you’re lucky enough for your games to have a large audience, but part of being a successful indie studio is building a good rapport with your players so that they trust your intentions and don’t feel abandoned if you opt to do something slightly different. Or more-than-slightly different in RTFM’s case, haha.

Dylan: I’m not sure it’s about sidestepping the conversation so much as setting a clear expectation with our players. As a designer I often think about what we’re promising our players and whether or not the game they eventually play fulfills that promise. Which is to say, if we promise them the world but deliver an experimental little side-project the likes of which we’ve never made before, well then it might backfire. So in my mind, DPC Labs is a way to ensure we’re on the same page as our players. A way to say “hey, this is a bit different to our usual stuff but we think it’s fun, wanna have a go?”

Fergus: More generally, do you have any plans to do more with it? RFTM was released for free, but is that going to be the same for any future releases going forward? Was there another developer that inspired the idea or did it come from elsewhere? 

Lucy: RTFM is out in the wild as-is, but if there were a huge push to release a larger, paid version of RTFM, then we would definitely have the conversation internally if that’s something we could rearrange some teams slightly to get resources for.

Our software roadmaps are planned years in advance so that’d be a grand undertaking! But we hope that RTFM is the first of many DPC Labs releases!

Casey: I’m sure other developers have done this sort of thing but this conversation happened totally in-house.

We wanted to release RTFM out into the world and mooted a whole bunch of different release plans. This one ended up being the correct-sized release for the team size we had and the place our other projects were at the time. Plus 1st April falling within the release window was pretty tempting from the jump. I think you can set a lot of player expectations in a reasonable place with an April Fools release.

The “joke project to real project” pipeline is a thing gaming audiences are aware of, but I can’t think of any cases where it’s been “joke project to real project to years-long live service game.”

Big ups to any developer that tries that one, though! 

Fergus: Are there any older Creative Week ideas that you might look to launch under the label?

Dylan: We’re always making stuff so safe to say probably! Regardless of which projects end up there, it’s nice to know that if we’re messing around with something and we think it’s cool but for whatever reason it isn’t going to become a Dinosaur Polo Club release, then that still has a home.

It reminds me of when we cancelled our Magic School project but released a lot of the work the team did for the world to see. Our industry is notoriously secretive but I love knowing that whether it be artifacts of projects gone-by or smaller experiments like RTFM, our dinos can still celebrate their creativity and hard work.

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Once marred by a reputation for releasing buggy RPGs that bit off more than they could chew, Obsidian has recently entered something of a renaissance period. Even as its parent company seems perched on the precipice of a new dark age, the studio has only gone from strength to strength in recent years – releasing crowdfunded CRPGs, pint-sized survival sandbox games, monastic murder mysteries and satirical space operas. 

Even so, Avowed represents an apex for this arc towards triumph. In a post Baldur’s Gate 3 world, I doubt it’ll ever get the props it fully deserves. However, having played through the PlayStation 5 version of the game, I have nothing but praise for Obsidian’s open-world fantasy RPG.

It’s not quite a revolution, but Avowed is still a right-sized RPG that delivers on all fronts.

A whole new Eora

Set in the fantasy world of Eora, Avowed is a first person roleplaying game that casts you as a figure known as the Envoy. After creating this avatar, you’re assigned by the sovereign of the distant Aedyran empire to investigate unrest – and cryptic reports of a strange plague – in a remote region known as The Living Lands. 

Upon arrival, you’ll complete quests, fight monsters, acquire various crafting materials and progressively-better loot. Over the course of your adventure, you’ll learn more about the powers that be and problems that occupy those residing in The Living Lands – many of which seem enigmatically-tied to your own mysterious origins. 

Entering a situation like the one presented above as an outsider has been a trope that stretches as far back as the likes of Fallout, but Avowed pushes on this aspect of the experience.

Rather than arrive as a blank slate, your reputation precedes you – and most of the time that's not a good thing. More often than not, the first impression you make with the denizens of The Living Lands is as a coloniser. You’re here on behalf of an empire that’s tried, failed and is gearing up to try again to conquer once more. As a representative of that agenda, you often end up being a punching bag for the various grievances that those living in the region have with Aedyr at large and the tension that situation evokes isn’t one with all that many easy answers. 

The Playstation 5 version of Avowed introduces a bunch of new options like new playable species, a dedicated photo mode, custom difficulty modifiers, additional weapon types and more. When you hit the credits, there’s now even a new game plus mode.

In addition to all the usual benefits of a year of post-launch patches, you’re just getting a lot more for your money here than those who picked up the game when it originally launched did – though many these upgrades are also available on those platforms as part of the recent Anniversary Update.

The critical path in Avowed will keep you on your feet for a solid fifteen or twenty hours as you zig and zag across the Living Lands in search of answers. If you stop to enjoy the smell of the Adra, you’ll probably be able to lose plenty more of your time to the game’s sprawling open-world environments. There are four in all, plus more than a dozen dungeons of various sizes. This segmented set up is the one area where the sales pitch doesn’t quite hold up, but in practice I found that I didn’t mind all that much. 

There’s no escaping the comparisons to Skyrim, but what’s here doesn’t feel like a compromise. The quartet of regions you explore in Avowed are more than large enough to lose yourself within and filled with plenty of nooks and crannies to dig into.

These environs are diverse, detailed and often feel like a natural extension of the world seen in the Pillars of Eternity. At times, it almost feels like you’re getting a fresh perspective on the action seen in Avowed's isometric predecessors.

A lot of what works here is built on the foundation that Obsidian laid out in The Outer Worlds but Avowed soars so much higher than its sci-fi counterpart or its sequel. I can’t help but suspect a big part of the reason why is that this particular RPG manages to hit the sweet spot of being complicated enough on pretty much every front.

The world isn't the only aspect of Avowed that's been scoped to respect your time. The lore isn’t overwhelming, but there’s plenty to chew on. The skill tree is deep and not overly-crunchy. The crafting system is rewarding but not required.

Best of all, despite my pre-launch concerns, the combat in Avowed is largely a highlight. In-game conflict is fast, furious and open-ended enough to avoid overstaying its welcome. At least, not too egregiously. Although I had begun to tire of it towards the end of my time with the game, I relished how rewarding it felt to brawl with the various baddies I encountered.

Regardless of whether I was scrapping with the  kobold-like Xaurips, spooky skeletons, big spiders or even just regular old bandits, there’s a weight and dynamism to the combat that kept me on my toes. It’s rarely just a matter of clicking on your foes until their HP hits zero. 

Avowed expects you to  manage your stamina, take advantage of elemental interactions, and put pressure on your enemies until their Sekiro-style poise bar breaks. Depending on your build, you’ll care more or less about some of these factors. Even so, that last one does a lot to make even bigger bosses in the game feel less like damage sponges and more like a fair fight.

In the end though, it’s the writing that really carries things over the finish line.

Where Outer Worlds and Outer Worlds 2 are held back by the extra baggage of having to orient you within an entirely new setting, Avowed cuts right to the good stuff and isn’t afraid to meet you where you are. 

While asking Obsidian to make their take on Skyrim was always going to be a tough ask, the benefits of leveraging the Pillars of Eternity lore to bootstrap the narrative involved quickly become clear.

You’ll definitely benefit from having played Obsidian’s CRPG and its sequel, but the character, setting and events of Avowed take place far enough away that the action is still relatively approachable.  Lore-hounds will find more than mere crumbs within the many documents and dialogue trees you’ll encounter, but that world-building never gets in the way of the core narrative threads pulling you through the experience at large. If you’re looking to keep things simple though, the bounty boards found in each major town offer up a more straightforward diversion from the main plot.

Past that, there are dozens of side quests in each region. These are all fully voice-acted and often introduce new perspectives on the central conflict driving the main plot. It’s been a long time since I played a game that offers genuinely juicy moral choices in the way that this one does. Obsidian’s writing chops are well-established at this point but this aspect of Avowed too stands on the shoulders of the studio’s past work as much as any other.

The Bottom Line

If you didn’t already consider Obsidian to be one of the industry’s premier developers of big budget roleplaying games, Avowed is poised to push you off that particular fence. It’s rare to play an RPG with this much of the good stuff in it, let alone that makes me consider a second play-through before I’d even reached the credits.

It might be heresy to admit it but Avowed is so good that I’d take a sequel to it over a third Pillars of Eternity. 

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My guest for this installment of Multiplier is former Kotaku Australia editor Alex Walker. Fortunately for us all, Alex still writes from time to time. You can find him on Twitter, BlueSky and Threads.

Fergus: It’s been four years since Microsoft first announced its bid to acquire Activision-Blizzard and just over two since the transaction formally closed. For now anyway, the $69 billion acquisition still holds the title of the largest corporate purchase in the history of video games. 

At the time, a lot of ink was spilled about how Microsoft’s failure to stop major franchises like Halo and Gears of War from sliding into irrelevance meant such a move was necessary to compete with the likes of Mario and…*checks notes*... The Last of Us? And yet, for all that consternation, Microsoft’s reputation and market position within the sector seems to have only slipped in the years since it added Diablo, Candy Crush and Call of Duty to its portfolio. Even the latter – once framed as a key sticking point for regulatory approval – seems to be in a state of crisis following poor sales.

It feels like enough time has passed to look back on the biggest transaction in the history of video games and ask the question of who, if anyone, came out the other side in a better place?

Alex: If anyone has come out ahead, it's certainly not the Xbox brand. Its reputation has declined, not just amongst the wider industry at large but internally too. 

Consider just the last 2 years. Around 1,900 jobs were cut from the gaming arm of Microsoft in early 2024, only a few months after the transaction was formally completed. A handful of ZeniMax studios were cut a few months later, and then another 650 staffers got the cut in September. If that wasn't bad enough, there is already intense speculation that the major tech giants might be looking at further cuts to help redirect spending towards investment in AI.

And cuts elsewhere have already begun. Mobile developer Playtika announced it was laying off up to 800 staffers back in December, although in financial filings it looks like that was revised down to around 500 developers (about 15% of the company) last week. Meta cut a bunch of its internal teams, including award-winning studios that were championing AR/VR games for the Meta Quest, and from what we know publicly there's at least 200-plus devs affected by that. And to top it all off, Ubisoft is now accepting applications for another 200 voluntary redundancies after its recent restructuring which saw Ubisoft Halifax close and 71 staffers lose their jobs.

So Microsoft/Activision-Blizzard devs are losing their jobs. And since every company cutting jobs always provides corporate cover for others to do the same, it's likely more cuts will follow. Those devs will then be sent into a market that is already flooded with good people who can't find work, adding the complication of second-order impacts ranging from pushing wages down (because more qualified devs now have to accept lower roles at worse pay) to the wholesale destruction of institutional knowledge for studios as people leave the industry entirely for jobs and companies that offer more stability. 

Nobody wins from that. The sell behind the Microsoft acquisition was that it had Game Pass and the Xbox brand and all this wonderful resourcing that would allow developers to make the games they wanted to make, freed up from traditional publishing models. But Xbox has cancelled so many games that it's now talking about "being more selective", aka. greenlighting fewer projects. Fewer longshots, more remakes.

You could argue that Microsoft is still a net-winner thanks to the IP it's acquired, the developers left over and the potential for licensing. But the brand has taken an enormous nosedive since the Activision-Blizzard acquisition. You have the substantial Game Pass price hikes and the restructured tiers, which locks the most popular titles and their launch day access behind a staggering $35.95/month paywall, which makes Adobe's pricing strategy look reasonable.

And it's not like the Activision-Blizzard stable has had a great run lately. Diablo 4 and World of Warcraft are both stable, although the latter is on a long structural decline that must be awkward to explain to shareholders against the platform behemoths of Fortnite and Roblox, not to mention the continued successes of mobile-first live service games.

Even Bobby Kotick has pointed out that Call of Duty sales are down by 60 percent year-on-year, although that doesn't tell the full picture of the franchise given the success of Warzone and Call of Duty Mobile.

We should also mention the staffers, teams, players and organisations who all rode the wave of Activision-Blizzard's esports ambitions only to get completely rinsed once COVID-19 hit. California's sexual harassment lawsuit caused some big brands to walk away sooner than they otherwise might have, but the pandemic was already the final blow for a lot of teams and brands in that world.

The only winners, really, are Bobby Kotick and Activision's long-term institutional shareholders. The former Activision CEO squeezed an enormous premium out of Microsoft that finished up as an all-cash, $US95 a share deal, and he inserted a clause along the way that ensured he'd receive a life-changing amount of money regardless of what happened. 

Fergus: I totally agree that there’s little doubt that Kotick (and Activision’s other long-term shareholders) came away the biggest winner from the transaction, but I don’t know if I’d say it’s the sole silver lining. 

For all the turmoil and turnover in California’s gaming sector, there’s some solace to be found in how unionisation efforts within Activision-Blizzard have accelerated. It’s hard to argue counterfactuals, but it’s easy to look at the neutrality agreement that Microsoft signed with the CWA as part of its negotiation strategy for the acquisition and see the line between then and now. As of 2024, the entire World of Warcraft development team is now a wall-to-wall union. I don’t think Microsoft necessarily deserves credit for this per say, but at the same time I don’t know if things would have played out the same had the acquisition been denied by regulators.

I think you could look at something like Overwatch and end up in a similar place. Blizzard’s team shooter seems unlikely to return to its heyday in terms of popularity but has somewhat-stabilised over the past few years. Could the team responsible have done that while Activision was still public? We’ll probably never know for sure. Similarly, it’s more than plausible that the twenty-second installment of any franchise –  even one as popular as Call of Duty – might always have had the odds stacked against it by the law of diminishing returns. 

All the same, it’s hard not to think about the many veterans who successfully kept the Call of Duty hype machine alive for this long who were likely let go in the wake of the acquisition. Microsoft might have staunched the bleeding for the Blizzard brand but, to date, I don’t think we’ve seen any signs that they’re willing to make the big bets that have defined the company’s most historic successes. 

Alex: It's apt that you mention Overwatch, because it does seem that one outcome of this whole saga is a return to some obvious, logical solutions that worked in the past. Overwatch 2 is now just going to be Overwatch. StarCraft is, once again, getting a shooter spin-off. And you're right in that the unionisation benefits are perhaps the strongest of them all because those impacts aren't just being felt within the Acti-Blizzard-Microsoft camp.

But even then that unionisation play is also still resulting in mass layoffs elsewhere; Ubisoft Halifax ratified their union on December 18, and Ubisoft closed the entire studio down in the first week of January. Rainbow Six Mobile doesn't launch until February 23; Ubisoft wouldn't even keep the studio open long enough to ship the product they were working on.

You almost have to revel in the corporate bleakness of it all, because a lot of this also stems from a very real, executive-induced fear. Platforms like Call of Duty will keep carrying on to some degree because, despite the many attempts to steal its thunder, there is still nothing to match the pace and adrenaline high of a CoD lobby. Similarly, and more problematically for Microsoft, there is also nothing that quite replaces the breadth and depth of Minecraft, or Roblox, or what Fortnite offers.

Studios have been unable to crack the nut of consistently converting players from those "forever" games, and that's especially difficult if you spent a small nation's GDP on IPs that like Diablo, World of WarCraft, Call of Duty – forever titles in their day, but ones that have been battling structural decline ever since. And that's what made Blizzard so special amongst all of this. They were built around the value of taking that grand risk to create something that could reshape genres and industries around it.  Microsoft doesn't have the appetite to do that; maybe they never really did. But you're not going to move millions off GTA 6, let alone Roblox, Fortnite or any of the other major players by pumping out remasters from your back catalogue. 

Fergus: To put a coda on this one and acknowledge the bleakest elephant in the room, Microsoft just overhauled its entire executive leadership for Xbox. Phil Spencer and Sarah Bond are out. CoreAI’s Asha Sharma is in. If the past is precedent, we’ll probably eventually find out the full story via a leaked memo or two something like that. Until then, we are awash in interpretations but bereft of any real sense of what the future looks like for any of the constellation of studios sitting under the Microsoft banner, including Activision-Blizzard.

There’s so much you can say about this particular shift in the gaming landscape, but I think the main feeling I’m left with is a sense of inevitability. Back when Microsoft acquired Activision-Blizzard, I’ll admit to being one of the many who saw that change in ownership as one that could only be an improvement for the stewardship of the storied franchises involved. From the outside, that seems to be true in a cultural sense. Discourse is inevitable, but we’re certainly not seeing the same dire and dramatic headlines from a few years ago. However, from a financial and business perspective, consolidation under a company as big as Microsoft was probably always a disaster waiting to happen. 

For all that Games Pass gets compared to Netflix, I can’t help but wonder if it winds up being more of an analog to Disney Plus. As more and more kids and teens are eschewing traditional gaming consoles for mobile, live-service and free-to-play, perhaps the only place for the Xbox brand to pivot is towards elder millennials and other generations who are willing to pay the premium to revisit the games they grew up with. 

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At this point, more than a few games have tried to fuse together the frictionless thrill of Vampire Survivors with the dark fantasy tropes of Diablo. Halls of Torment, Tower of Babel, and Conquest Dark all fall into this nascent niche and it's all too likely there even more than I don’t know about.

Skull Horde fits neatly into this corner of the Survivors-like subgenre, but distinguishes itself by with a greater appreciation for minon-heavy archetypes like Diablo’s Necromancer than the hack-and-slash action of the Barbarian. Despite that inspiration, there isn’t much of a story or narrative to speak of here. This is definitely one of those games that let the visuals do the talking.

Categorically speaking, Skull Horde is a run-based dungeon crawler where you play a floating enchanted skull that commands a company of skeletons. Each run sees you complete a short of levels.

As you delve deeper into each run and defeat enemies, you’ll accrue various currencies that can be used to acquire either upgrades for your skull and other benefits for your minions writ large. Then, between levels, you can spend acquired currency to replace, upgrade and reinforce your roster of minions accordingly. 

In this specific respect, Skull Horde draws on more than just Diablo. The most obvious influences here are auto-battler games like Teamfight Tactics.

Your horde is compromised of six slots, each of those slots can be filled by a different type of minion. Between levels, you get access to a shop where you can buy new minions. Some rarer or higher quality minions have synergies that make them stronger if you use them together. You can to spend in-game money upgrading the shop to make those minions more likely to appear. Finally, if you acquire stacks of the same minion, they’ll merge into a single upgraded version of that minion. 

If you’ve spent much time with games like the aforementioned Teamfight Tactics, this setup will likely sound very familiar to you. However, it's far from the only thing that separates Skull Horde from the many other Survivors-likes mentioned earlier.

The game also stands out from the crowd by virtue of its crunchy pixelated graphics. The playful aesthetics in Skull Horde plays right into the ridiculousness of its premise in a way that quickly wins you over, and the subtle CRT-like distortions of the screen transitions will likely see the game stay in your good graces from there.

These elements do add up to something that is immediately enjoyable and eminently original in terms of putting a fresh spin on the familiar. Having to balance the twisting bullet hell challenge of keeping you skull safe while also thinking about the big picture strategy of your build is something that I haven’t necessarily encountered before. Unfortunately, that novelty proved shorter lived than I'd like.

While completed runs do unlock new dungeons and skulls to play to complete, your main gain for doing so is experience points. These can be used to permanently upgrade your skull with new abilities, effects and bonuses that carry between runs. There isn’t a huge amount of build diversity on offer here. It’s mostly passive bonuses and the tree itself is much smaller than those seen in Skull Horde's biggest inspirations.

For a game that is so fast to get its hooks into you, I found myself wishing Skull Horde offered just a little bit more. Across every axis where the game strikes you with a strong first impression, it quickly revealed itself to lack depth in ways that led me to tire of it. The more time I spent with Skull Horde, the more it left me unsatisfied.

To start with, your skull has a single ability – which can be used to rally and buff your minions when needed. It’s on a very long cool-down timer and can sometimes make or break your ability to overcome a particularly difficult fight. Between uses though, there’s not a huge amount for you to do other than dodge projectiles or enemies who try to track you down. Other skulls have different abilities, but quickly run into the same problem.

Meanwhile, when it comes to minion management. I found that Skull Horde’s streamlined approach just didn’t really do it for me. I would have liked a little variety, depth or even just volume in terms of the options at my disposal. I’d clear the shop and max out my roster way too fast most of the time, and I rarely had to think about more than just the rarity of a given minion.

For as much as Skull Horde steals from the autobattler genre, it’s odd that it hasn’t inherited the strategic synergies system seen in most other iterations on that particular formula.

While the five dungeons in Skull Horde do offer escalating challenges and additional complications on the core play, the underlying procedural generation doesn’t really do much to improve or change the experience from run to run.

Most levels of most runs in most of the dungeons feel kinda the same in terms of both layout and pacing. Sometimes you’ll get an elite enemy you have to defeat to advance further. More often, it feels like you're just going through the motions. Most rooms are either empty or have a shop in them, which is rarely much of a boon because levels aren’t that long to begin with so you’re never all that far away from the chance to splash that cash.

The Bottom Line

Skull Horde nails the necromantic niche that other hack-and-slash hybrids have failed to even consider, which may make it a great fit for those who prefer to let their in-game pets do the work. It's very pick-up-and-play friendly and the aesthetic does distinguish it from its contemporaries. Even so, I can’t help but suspect it may leave those who prefer the crunchier end of things may find it an unsatisfying echo of its biggest inspirations.

If you’ve tired of your current Survivors-like of choice and are after one that puts a slightly different spin on the subgenre, then Skull Horde will likely scratch that itch. Just don’t expect it to spin any heads.

💡

Disclosure - Code for this game was provided by the publisher

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