CRPG Containment Zone

Aug 9, 2026 • UPDATED Aug 12, 2026

Tier List

9.0
Baldur's Gate 3
- Story
- Characters
- Romance
- Agency
- Combat
- Quests
- Build Diversity
- Exploration
- Atmosphere
- Presentation
- Replayability
Took a point off due to rushed & cut content in Act 3 leading to unresolved plot points. Also ran into a game breaking bug within that same Act which forced a 2 hour rollback.
7.0
Divinity: Original Sin 2
- Combat
- Build Diversity
- Romance
6.0
Disco Elysium
- Story
- Agency
- Atmosphere
- Presentation
Not a conventional CRPG, still interesting narrative-driven game.
6.0
Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader
- Story
- Agency
- Atmosphere
- Quests
- Build Diversity
Great game if you're into 40k, but at times tries its hardest to be annoying. Didn't feel any post-game interest or 'depression' like I did with BG3 and DOS2 - probably because the game takes you out of it so often.
5.0
Planescape: Torment: Enhanced Edition
- Story
- Atmosphere
- Romance
- Combat
- Quests
- Build Diversity
- Exploration
Picked up for hyped writing, but ultimately came out disappointed. All eggs in one basket and the basket just ended up being constant gigantic exposition text dumps. Similar to Disco Elysium but wrong execution.

Now playing: Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous - Enhanced Edition

Reviews

Planescape: Torment: Enhanced Edition

Pretty much the entire reason I picked this game up was due to how often I’ve seen fans of the genre revere its writing as the best of any game ever. While I do have a few things to get into now that I’ve completed it, I reckon it’s best to address that expectation immediately - it’s not.

The plot and the extent of it are, for sure, commendable. However, it falls short in actually letting the player experience it in an interesting, interactive, and engaging way. I suspect part of this is due to the game having vastly fewer maps than other CRPGs of the same era (like Baldur’s Gate) - but much too often I lost interest clicking through blatant exposition dumps, like a developer unloading pages of internal wikipedia through NPCs, with quirks sprinkled in between in an attempt to make it feel like you’re not just scrolling through infinite text files.

All in all, Planescape: Torment fails at one of, if not the most, important aspects of storytelling; show. don’t. tell. What it did show? Decent enough. But why am I sitting here looking at 8 different dialog trees, each leading into a trillion paragraphs of detailed answers and backstories, from an NPC who 10 seconds ago claimed they’d knock my head off if I didn’t leave them alone?

Beyond that, there’s other problems that land it at a 5/10 - which to be fair is still perfectly average. The biggest one being that combat was very obviously an afterthought - mostly non-existent, then supplied in short bursts with super janky difficulty spikes you were never encouraged to prepare for, until you just… randomly wander into a 1-way cave entrance and end up shuffling back and forth between boring fights and the rest area to heal and get your spell casts back (looking at you, Curst). You’ll also routinely run into pathfinding issues - interacting with anything while running multiple party members leads to characters constantly getting stuck, doing nothing.

Honestly, it’s hard to classify Planescape: Torment as a feature-complete CRPG, compared to others of the same era like Baldur’s Gate, Icewind Dale, etc. In that way, it’s very similar to Disco Elysium - albeit the latter mostly succeeded at not being a total fucking slog of constant exposition. Truth is, I just don’t think Planescape: Torment’s writing is that good when seen through the lens of a video game, or at least in the way in which it was executed. And that’s coming from someone who was there for Myst, Riven, Syberia, etc.

Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader

While some people might think a 6.0 rating is a little harsh, I think most don’t really consider the full range of a 10-point scale. A 6.0 is still above average, and while Rogue Trader’s overall quality stands out amongst its peers, there’s a loooooot of downsides that bring it down a couple points.

For starters, the combat is way too easy. By the time I got Sister Argenta a heavy bolter, I could one-turn nearly every encounter with Cassia + Argenta alone through extra turns and heroic acts, leading to 3 Argenta turns in a row for thousands of potential damage across, like, 25+ attacks. The armor mechanic is also mostly irrelevant, you can cross-map enemies with nearly infinite ammo, and Abelard can just run it down with god knows how many movement points. I never had much reason to care about buffs or debuffs on either side.

Then there’s Navigator’s Insight, which you need to travel between chart nodes and, you know, actually play the game. It kills momentum way too often. Either you burn through it early, before you understand how scarce it is, or you’re railroaded into repetitive in-between encounters that feel more like chores than content. Just let me play the game.

What disappoints me most, though, is the DLC model in an otherwise paid game. Owlcat seems to do this a lot: launch with a limited experience, then gate a meaningful part of it behind DLCs and Season Passes released over the next 2-ish years. The Infinite Museion landed just as I was finishing the game - as its introduction happens during the early acts, you can only really experience it properly from a fresh save. I wasn’t going to abandon my current playthrough, and I’m probably not starting another. It’s a bit cringe FOMO IMO. The DLC content itself isn’t the problem either - Void Shadows and Kibellah’s storyline (who I romanced) gave me some of my favorite moments in the game.

On that topic, romance triggers/flags bugging out seems to be as common occurence - ran into it myself and a bit of research showed it happens across multiple systems and encounters in the game. At the decisive point in Act 5, Kibellah makes her final decision regarding your relationship. Despite taking every correct action, she ended up dumping me in the name of duty because some jank “Etude” or whatever system never activated. That was the first time I ever went and got modding tools (Toybox) to patch a choice-driven game and get the correct outcome.

The story itself is good enough, so are the mini-stories and mysteries contained within isolated parts of the world. Most quests other than core (Main & DLC core quests) are forgettable at best, and the colony management system sticks out like a sore thumb (it’s shit, and distracting at best). Rumour system is also… not sure. Unimpactful? Uninteresting? An afterthought?

Also, pre-generated character frames in a game where you otherwise create your own characters is a bit of a head-scratcher - ran into the same thing with Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous. While you can upload your own, the whole point is for it to match your character. I really would expect the game to just use your main character with a couple filters and rendering tricks applied. Instead, I went ahead and fed ChatGPT image generation a picture of my character, a couple style references from the pre-generated frames, and asked it to make one of my character in the style of Rogue Trader. Worked wonders.

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