Crusader Kings III
I've become completely tangled up in Crusader Kings 3's plots and family trees. It's my jailer, keeping me far too busy orchestrating murders and becoming pen pals with the King of France to leave the flat. I should probably do something about that, but I've got this succession crisis to sort out. You know how it is.
There never feels like a good time to step away from Paradox's grand strategy RPG. You can't just go for a nice walk when your ruler is on death's door or the Byzantine Empire has just declared a holy war—there's always someone somewhere setting a fire that you're going to have to deal with. It's One More Crisis Syndrome and I've got it bad.
Anyone who's played Crusader Kings 2 should be familiar with the ailment and be well-prepared for the sequel. You are once again the head of an early medieval dynasty, and you'll try to keep it trucking for as long as you can by click, click, clicking on its elaborate map and stacks of menus. Your tools are diplomacy, intrigue, warfare and luck, and your goals are whatever whims your mind conjures up.
Like all grand strategy games, it's cursed to look incredibly imposing, but this is the friendliest of the bunch. It's shed none of its complexity, but it's much better at showing how everything is connected. On top of a serviceable tutorial that gets you started in Ireland, there's a tutorial menu that's accessible at any time, as well as a seemingly infinite supply of tooltips. Even the tooltips have tooltips. Getting advice is like stepping through a portal into a dimension constructed purely out of tips on how to lead a medieval dynasty, which turns out to be quite helpful.
Crusader Kings has always been about characters instead of nations, but they've never seemed so rich and so maddeningly real before. Each of them is full of agency and ambitions and will more often than not devolve into a petulant child when they don't get their way. Adopting them is a big responsibility. They might be greedy, cruel, pious, horny, perpetually drunk—if you're looking for an adjective, you'll find it. Everything has a root cause, something that the trait can be traced back to, like a childhood bully or a battle that went badly, creating characters moulded by their pasts.
Crusader Kings 3 is incredible. It's an irrepressible story engine that spits out a constant stream of compelling alt-histories, delightfully infuriating characters and social puzzles that I've become obsessed with unravelling. I can't imagine being done with it. I just subsist on digital drama now. Will Alfred finally leave the torture chamber and make a friend? What's Bjorn going to do now that he knows his wife is in love with his chancellor? And who's going to be committing patricide next? I need to spend less time writing reviews and more time with my dynasties.