Greedfall: A Hidden Gem of Last Gen

If the Game Awards were to give out an award for Publisher of the Year, the 2019 winner undoubtedly should have been Focus Home Interactive. The French independent publishing house gifted us with several fantastic games from lesser known developers and last year these titles included engrossing new IPs like A Plague Tale: Innocence and sequels to new franchises like The Surge 2. But the most memorable for this gamer was easily Greedfall. Sony just announced it’s PS Plus free games of the month for January 2021 and fortunately for those who missed out on the fantastic medieval RPG from Spiders, Greedfall is one of those games.

I admittedly held out on Greedfall for quite some time. As a huge fan of inspiring franchises like The Witcher, Dragon Age and The Elder Scrolls this new game from Parisian developer Spiders seemed right up my alley. However the game was heavily publicized and subsequently reviewed as “not a triple-a RPG”. The graphics appeared dated and the movement looked stiff and restrictive. Nevertheless I finally took the plunge earlier this year and came away with one of the best RPG experiences of this generation.

Greedfall’s story is steeped in inspiration from real world imperialism and colonialism. You play the role of a diplomat on behalf of the Congregation of Merchants and are tasked with forging alliances with neighboring nations and finding a cure for the deadly disease known as the Malichor. The tale takes our protagonist to an island nation known as Teer Fradee – a new world who’s native inhabitants known as the Yecht Fradi are struggling with invading colonists. The game’s narrative draws its strengths by having all of the major factions crossing paths with vastly different interests and putting you as a diplomat smack dab in the middle.

Further to this, the game does an excellent job of presenting differing points of view of each of the factions to make each seem equal parts evil and just in their actions. The Bridge Alliance is primarily made up of scientists and explorers who use ingenuity and discovery to drive their agenda. Though their methods often mean harming the environment that the natives have a spiritual bond with. Theleme on the other hand are guided exclusively by their religion and closely resemble the historical Crusaders. They attempt to use their spiritual influence to coax the Yecht Fradi into their faith and resort to unsavory and secretive means when met with resistance. Add in the soldiers-for-hire that make up the Coin Guard, the privateers that are the Nauts and your very own Congregation of Merchants to make up a sand box that is very difficult to play nice in.

Each of these factions are represented within your own party of allies. The game starts out with your loyal side kick Kurt who is a hired soldier from the Coin Guard. Soon after landing in the new world capital known as New Serene, you team up with Vasco from the Nauts. Before long, you’ll be able to party up with other members each from one of the major groups. As you progress through the main arc, your allies will each be whispering in your ear to try and sway you towards aiding their own factions interests. Decisions along the way can have dire consequences that can make or break relations between the Congregation that you represent and the warring factions. And like a true diplomat, you can’t make everyone happy.

Being a small development studio, Spiders’ limitations do show in the fragmented areas of exploration. Rather than having a vast and sprawling open world, areas to the north, east and west of New Serene are segmented and connect the capital to settlements run by Theleme and the Bridge Alliance. But what this creates are smaller and more focused areas of exploration. Discovering the New World never felt overwhelming but rather accessible and practical. While you will spend a lot of time loading into different areas, the developers cleverly made the best use of this time. Each loading screen is masked by a travel pause where you can converse with your party members, manage inventory or trade with a merchant.

Greedfall’s combat perfectly balances strategy with action. Smaller mobs of less threatening enemies can easily be taken out with a barrage of real time gun fire, bomb hurling, magic casting, or sword slashes. Tougher enemies and bosses, however, will require players to utilize the game’s combat pause system. This allows you to temporarily stop time, weigh your options, and carefully choose from ranged attacks, healing or buff inducing potions. Thankfully, your party members are generally capable enough to keep themselves alive, save for the occasional revive when tanking a boss. Additionally, the game allows for a number of different specializations for your own character. My personal choice was to focus on ranged gun fire, traps, and agility to quickly dodge out of danger. After several hours of levelling up, my trap expertise turned into a deadly arsenal of bombs. This allowed used of magic, fire, poison damage, and even stasis explosives to stop enemies in place. Builds can also be tailored to more up close and personal playstyles with larger two handed maces, swords, massive health pools, and heavy armor. Your party members each have different skills and abilities to compliment whatever style you go with. For the majority of my own playthrough I stuck with Kurt for his tanking and Siora for her healing.

Another aspect of Greedfall that felt spot on was its foraging and crafting systems. So many games of this genre throw a ridiculous amount of crafting materials at the player, many with the same or no purpose at all. It all amounts to an insane amount of clutter that results in spending an inordinate amount of time managing inventory and trying to understand what use all of the different items have. However, much like the explorable areas in Greedfall, this aspect of the game also has a degree of focus and takes a ‘less is more’ approach. Throughout your 30-40 hour journey through the main story, players will find only a small handful of crafting materials. What this means is it will only be about 10 to 15 hours into the game that you’ll know exactly what a raw material does and what potion or bomb recipe it is used for. For me, this meant less time in menus trying to organize everything into junk, potions, bombs, and ammo and more time quickly whipping up valuable resources to help in battle. It seems like a small thing, but I couldn’t but help and appreciate this less cluttered approach to crafting and material management.

With Greedfall being featured as one of the free PS Plus games of the month, I certainly hope more gamers will be able to experience this fantastic role playing experience. It’s a testament to a smaller developer efficiently using their resources to produce a ‘double-A’ RPG that can easily stand toe-to-toe with the big boys of the genre. Boasting an engrossing narrative with conflicting relationships, diverse character customization, a varied combat system, and crafting mechanics that won’t make you pull your hair out, Greedfall or any subsequent game from Spiders shouldn’t be missed.