You lead a small party of adventurers through a fantasy story, clicking to move and attack while the action pauses so you can queue up spells and commands for everyone. It is an older-style game with dense text and a lot of menus, closer to reading a choose your own adventure book than a modern action game. Expect a slow start and a steep learning curve before the systems click.
Gameplay video
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Screenshots & review notes
Why it lands
A genuine piece of RPG history, and it's aged with more grace than you'd expect for something rooted so deeply in late-90s design sensibilities. Essential for genre historians.
How it plays
Real-time-with-pause combat takes some adjustment on a controller, but once it clicks, the tactical depth of the old Infinity Engine still shines through clearly.
Style and score
The isometric art has a painterly quality that's held up better than most games its age, and the expansions add serious bulk to an already sprawling world.
Who it's for
This is a long, dense commitment best suited to patient RPG veterans. Newcomers to the genre might find the interface and pacing a genuine hurdle.
Frames captured from the gameplay video above; notes are our own take on the game.
What it's like to play
You control a party of up to six adventurers from an overhead view, clicking or pointing to move them around the Sword Coast and pausing combat whenever you need a moment to issue new orders to everyone. Fights unfold in real time based on old Dungeons and Dragons rules, so success depends on understanding things like spell preparation and attack rolls rather than fast reflexes, and the pause button becomes your best friend the moment more than one enemy shows up. On a controller, menus are navigated with a cursor you steer with a stick, which takes some getting used to compared to a mouse.
Your goal across the included original game and its much larger sequel, Shadows of Amn, is to follow a long personal story about your character's mysterious heritage while recruiting companions, each with their own personality, agenda, and occasional squabbles with each other. Combat and exploration ask you to build a balanced party of fighters, spellcasters, and specialists, since relying on just one approach tends to get you killed by tougher enemies later on. Together the two games offer well over a hundred hours of content for players who explore thoroughly.
The rules underneath everything are genuinely old-fashioned and are not explained particularly well to newcomers, so expect some early confusion about why an attack that looked certain to hit actually missed. The interface, while improved from the original release, is still clearly built with a mouse in mind and never feels fully natural with a controller. It is best suited to patient players interested in roleplaying game history and long, dense stories, rather than anyone looking for a quick, approachable adventure.