Whether it’s just talking to the people, getting into scraps, finding loot or investigating something that caught your eye, the world is a dangerous delight to traverse. The other thing in favour for Divinity here is that just wandering around Rivellion, with the wonderful musical score accompanying your travels, is so pleasing. It Is clearly meant for co-op play -adding an almost D&D vibe to Divinity- but it works on your own too. It’s a really nice touch that develops your characters in a new and novel way. Ingeniously, you can argue and debate important decisions with your partner in game, with any disagreement being hashed out in a mini game that blends rock, paper scissors and Top Trumps (your ability in a certain skill determines how many points you get). It enriches the world in ways not normally seen in modern videogames. Something as simple as leaving a door open can create an entirely new scenario. Truly it allows you to actually role play your characters by shaping how they handle things dependent on your skills and your actions. There is never just one or two ways to complete a quest, there are many. Instead of going from point A to B and beyond, you have to piece together the shards of information you have in order to figure out your next move and are able to drastically alter the way you receive and approach missions many hours later thanks to your earlier actions. This could be a major detraction in any recommendation of the game, but Divinity makes it a pleasure more often than not. Your attention is required constantly in Divinity, to be ignorant is to fail. Missing a single conversation or failing to read just one letter or note could be the difference between spending hours on a quest or minutes. Even the very first mission is far from straightforward, giving you a marker to head for initially until the case opens up and what you have to do next is left rather ambiguous, and this routine is repeated in nearly every mission from then on. Tutorials guide you through the first hour just enough to teach you the basics of your inventory, combat, interactions et al, before taking the next step up, but this doesn’t prepare you for what the game throws at you. Still, it’s an overwhelming prospect from the get go. That may entice those weaned on simpler, more streamlined RPGs to at least dip a toe into Divinity’s vibrant world, but these small accommodations may annoy hardcore purists of the genre. It’s a far cry from being deemed ‘accessible’ in the regular sense, yet it’s definitely not quite as brutally oppressive as its forebearers were. That’s because Belgian developer Larian Studio’s deep RPG evokes those classic cRPGs of old, even if it does try to put a simpler face on it. As a result Divinity appears to be rather charming and twee on the surface, but give it half an hour and you’ll soon know that its core is a twisted, mean, complex thing that demands you give it your respect. It doesn’t stop there being a metric tonne of fantasy stereotypes and accents on display, but the very knowing, tongue-in-cheek manner in which they are portrayed leaves you rolling your eyes a lot less than you’d expect. It embraces the more ridiculous situations and helps to humanise characters in a land of wizards, orcs and zombies. Divinity plays like it knows its a videogame without resorting to a conveyor belt of in your face meta moments. It’s an interesting way of presenting storytelling, probably more so because we currently exist in an era of games that take themselves super super seriously or flat out silly, with little in the middle. There is a level of daft humour that continually permeates the sometimes serious nature of the task at hand. It’s standard fantasy narrative that doesn’t really pop on paper, but in game it makes good use of the threads running through it to really set your immersion in the world. That’s merely the introduction though, as the story soon reveals a far larger threat to not only Cyseal, but Rivellon and beyond. You play as Source Hunters, investigating a grisly murder in the town of Cyseal. The game a massively revised for console version of last year’s Kickstarted PC release, focuses on the land of Rivellon in a different era to previous games in the series such as Divine Divinity.
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