![]() First up on your docket is looking into the brewing civil war between factions in the Overlord’s squabbling army, a dispute causing problems in the effort to subjugate the last free refuge on the map. As befits the game’s malicious leanings, you take on the role of one of Kyros’ top servants, a freelance judge and executioner called a Fatebinder. This enigmatic immortal never actually appears in the game, but she (or he, as nobody even knows if the tyrant is female or male) looms over everything as kind of a cruel god that has steadily conquered the entire world. The setting is the fantasy realm of Terratus, which has been wracked by war for centuries due to the ambitions of the monstrous Overlord Kyros. Add in stellar roleplaying depth, constant opportunities to make decisions that affect the entire game world, and brilliant tactical combat mechanics, and you’ve got one of the best RPGs of this-or any other-year. It’s only when you look back at what you’ve done that you realize how monstrous you’ve become in service to the idea of, well, a tyranny. You’re often killing to expand the locked-down order of your empire and avoid more bloodletting and chaos, so even the most heinous actions somehow come off like justice being served. The game makes it all too easy to relate to evil acts, as the typically bleak circumstances depicted herein frequently make atrocities seem necessary. Yet even though I found all of this deeply unsettling, the mature and realistic handling of the dark side of humanity drew me into what has to be one of the most thought-provoking games that I’ve played in ages. The old Hannah Arendt phrase about the Nazi banality of evil ran through my mind constantly as I played through the campaign, doing my bloody duty over and over again to prop up a conquering empire. ![]() But what really sets this game apart from the crowd is that you play more of a cog in a machine instead of the usual capital-V villain. Such atrocities would qualify Tyranny as one of the most disconcerting games of the year all on their own. right after he recounted how he had to murder them both to achieve his present position. I even got to listen to a soldier ally tell me how much his parents would be proud of him if they could see him now. At another, I was given the option of tossing a captive off a tower to deliver a message to friends far below. How wicked is it? Well, at one point I was encouraged to murder an infant by the tyke’s own grandfather, no less. While I’ve sided with demons, robbed innocents, and even slaughtered many a bystander just because I felt like it in other RPGs, the nasty stuff is taken to another level in Obsidian Entertainment’s latest opus. Being evil is not a new concept to role-playing games, but Tyranny takes playing the bad guy further than I’ve ever seen before.
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