The original GreedFall was something of a balm for people starving for a particular flavor of sub-BioWare action role-playing games (RPGs) – games about reading lore codices and speaking to party members about their unresolved family drama.

The other big shift is in your perspective: the original game cast you as a member of a noble house from a Europe-inspired industrialised nation, as it’s in the middle of colonising a new world of feather-wearing, magic-infused natives with a culture built out of thoughtlessly mashed together indigenous stereotypes.

Presumably in response to criticism of their poorly handled parable of the colonisation of North America, Spiders has taken the bafflingly ill-advised decision to make it all an allegory for the transatlantic slave trade instead.

Troubled waters

In The Dying World, you play as a member of a tribe indigenous to the fantasy island of Teer Fradee who is quickly ripped from their home by soldiers and shipped to the mainland in a prison ship. It’s a bold opening for a developer that doesn’t have a great track record for handling this sort of thing with any degree of sensitivity or consideration.

Luckily, creative cowardice wins out, and you are immediately sprung from prison by a woman who is really very sorry about her job being to help ships bring back captured natives for cultish human experimentation. The rest of the game feels very much like a tour of apologism, as we find out that it’s actually only a few bad apples – and not the entire colonial apparatus – that has a penchant for human slavery and torture.

It’s a shame how familiar things are, how quickly the player character becomes second fiddle to more traditional RPG stories starring your roster of deeply uninteresting party members. There is no opportunity for righteous fury at what all of these people have been doing to your homeland. You can’t go on a revenge rampage. You can’t assassinate business leaders.

You just stumble along, being helpful and small while hoping someone in a position of power feels enough remorse to assist you in rescuing other captured natives or find a way home. The best you can hope for is for some official to possibly consider, maybe one day, looking into the whole slavery business.

The lack of player agency can sometimes reach comical levels; you would think a party member becoming a captain of her own massive ship would be a solid ticket back home for the island natives. Raising it as a possibility makes the rest of the party act as if you’re being completely unreasonable to demand such an expensive and time-consuming diversion. It makes far more sense to help everyone else with whatever lingering lifelong mission they’ve been on first.

It’s a bizarre decision for the studio to double down on the biggest weakness of the original game and flub the blank slate they had given themselves. There’s a game about a cool pirate lady going on adventures that they could have made, away from the baggage of the bad ideas they’d had. They’ve ended up with the worst of both worlds, lacking the conviction to focus on the indigenous storyline but also tarnishing the attempt to make a fun RPG about finding lost treasure and killing inexplicable packs of rabid monkeys in the countryside.

The trying world

The combat is also a step back. With GreedFall and Steelrising, it felt like Spiders had finally settled into a comfortable place with its attempts at real-time, vaguely soulslike combat. Here, it has looked at the success of Baldur’s Gate 3 and the rest of the computer role-playing game (CRPG) revival, and tried something more tactical – ending up with a system very close to Dragon Age: Origins.

Exploration is done via a traditional third-person camera, but at the press of a button, the camera pulls out to an almost isometric view, and time freezes – allowing you to get a handle on the details of each foe, queue up individual actions for each party member, and position them for defensive or offensive purposes.

Unpausing keeps you in the tactical view, letting you monitor how things play out and decide when you need to pause again and adapt to the battle as it unfolds. Not that you’ll ever be really surprised by anything.

Most encounters play out the same way; the same way they do in most CRPGs – sending out a tank to draw enemy attention away from your preferred assortment of spell casters, archers and thieves who all chip away at enemy defences or hit them with afflictions or cast favourable buffs on the tank. Sometimes there’ll be an explosive barrel.

It works fine. The studio has done a genuinely commendable job at mapping this sort of thing onto a console controller – you never feel like you’re struggling against the absence of a scroll wheel or a keyboard. You might find yourself struggling to stay engaged in your third, drawn-out battle against a dozen rabid monkeys in a row – as you find yourself pausing and pausing to carry out the same tried and tested tactics you’ve been relying on for 20 hours.

Outside of a few standout bosses, the game rarely throws you a curveball or forces you to think outside of the box.

Fortunately, The Dying World features some robust difficulty and control options – letting you do everything from making it so that a single badly timed or placed spell can result in wiping out your own party or turning the game into a third-person autobattler with infinite health.

If the combat ever starts to feel like a slog, you can essentially make it play itself while you enjoy exploring the world or furthering the narrative. Or if you prefer to turn it into something like a 90s computer classic, you could play the entire thing like it’s a real-time strategy with a fixed isometric camera as you click your way around the environment.

As a Spiders fan in general, this is ultimately a deeply frustrating experience. There’s a lot to be appreciated here. The towns and cities of the continent are a densely packed delight to explore, once you’re finally given the freedom to do so.

There’s a calming quality to being able to sit back and consider your options as you look down on the battlefield. But there’s only so long you can spend clicking on the same combination of skill icons in battles that all overstay their welcome. Only so many times you can grimace as the writing constantly trips over itself.

It’s heart breaking to say, given the effort involved – and knowing there’s a strong likelihood this could be Spiders’ swansong – but this is a world they should have let this world die in peace.

Should I play GreedFall: The Dying World?

Play it if…