Despite playing and reviewing adventure games from the German development studio Daedalic Entertainment for quite a few years now, I’ve been mostly acquainted with their comedic titles. So a story driven point and click adventure game based on a historical novel wasn’t something I expected much from. Especially since I’ve not read, or even heard of, the said novel or the seemingly well received TV miniseries based on it before playing the game. Well, I was very pleasantly surprised.
The events of the game (and the novel it’s based on) take place in the 12th century England during the times usually known as “the Anarchy” and, sadly rarely for game stories, span across several decades and generations. The story itself is fictional, of course, but tries to be grounded in history and reality, showing lives of very different people as they deal with both personal issues of relationships, hopes, faith as well as events bigger than they are, involving politics, wars and the church.There are dreams, promises, accidents, plots, murder, betrayals, revenge and forgiveness, all centered around an unlikely town of Kingsbridge and it’s cathedral. And it is all written and told really well.
Now, I wouldn’t know how much of the game is just quoting the book, since I’ve not read it. And from a quick check, it seems that the developers did have quite a lot of creative freedom with how the story would develop based on the player actions. It does seem possible to have the story almost completely recreated to what it was in the book, yet in my personal case it went a very different route instead (though, of course, not completely different). Every chapter feels well put together and contained, telling a necessary story arc, while also being a good story driven adventure game to play. Switching between character view points never feels confusing and makes the storytelling much more interesting than it would’ve been otherwise and there is genuine feel that you influence the story in little, but very meaningful ways, all the time.
It’s not great all the time, of course. The little minigame for “action”-ish bits feels a bit silly and out of place, where the rest of the game always seems to fit the storytelling really well, for example. The cutscenes/dialogue are not properly skippable, which can be annoying if you do fail one of these minigames in specific points, which lead to a game over. There are very few, but still present weird positioning annoyances, where the character needs to walk around to trigger an action, even when they should, by all logic, already be doing the action from where they are. And while the game almost never felt like it wasn’t really clear what to do or how, there were a few moments where it was hard to understand what the game was expecting you to do to progress.
But all of those happened so rarely while the ever evolving story was so gripping and well told (and acted) that it’s easy to forgive the game some of its missteps. I loved my time with Ken Follett’s The Pillars of the Earth and if you love a good story and/or are interested in medieval history, you absolutely must play this game.