YMMV / Pathfinder: Kingmaker

• Anti-Climax Boss: While his tomb is considered a great dungeon-crawler, Vordakai himself is a disappointing boss. With the staple party buffs, he'll usually go down in a few rounds. The only thing that might give you difficulty is Tristian abandoning you halfway through the fight, if he was your only healer, and even then he's kind enough to blind Vordokai on his way out, likely letting you clean up without trouble.
• Catharsis Factor: Don’t like a character? Odds are there’s an option to kill them, no matter how relevant or important they may be. At worst, there’s generally an option to banish them. Even better, there’s no penalty aside from a laughably small alignment shift to Chaotic Evil so long as you don’t abuse it, since there’s no single irreplaceable character.
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome:
  • An unusual example, in that it's more of a problem for people familiar with the 3.X game system, but the Kineticist class, which both of the DLC companions have, is very outside-the-box compared to the rest of the game, requiring a very different mindset and resource management attitude. It can unlock great power in the right hands, but it's tempting to either ignore it or just take the boring powers that enhance its skills or basic attack.
  • There are a huge number of possible types of favored terrain and favored enemies ranger party members can take, and everyone only takes Forest, Plains, Urban, and eventually First World for the former and Humanoid (Human and/or Giant), Undead, Fey, and Magical Beast for the latter. Most of these show up in large numbers all game and/or tend to start showing up at the breakpoints where rangers are getting new choices anyway.
  • Any PC/mercenary who's a Deliverer (subclass of Slayer) will almost certainly be Lawful Good, as Deliverers inflict extra damage on enemies who aren't the same or adjacent Character Alignmentinvoked, and the vast majority of enemies in this game are Chaotic and/or Evil.
• Complete Monster: The Lantern King is one of the Eldest, ancient and powerful Fey, and the cruelest of the lot. When Nyrissa, a young Fey, tried to form a kingdom for herself and her friends, the Lantern King tore away her emotions and demanded she destroy a thousand kingdoms before being allowed to atone. The Lantern King views all mortal life as a form of entertainment, ruining and destroying the lives of those who earn his ire, while also raising the stakes to destroy the kingdom and those within to make it more "exciting". Should Nyrissa be given the Apology too early, the Lantern King will imprison her, without emotions, friends or family, to rot in captivity for all time.
• Creator's Pet: In an odd example of the "pet" being the creation of someone other than the developers, Darven, the pirate protagonist of the widely-loathed "Deal with the Devil" quest, was written by a Kickstarter backer who paid $4,000 for the privilege. For those who haven't done the quest, he is pretty unrepentantly evil (he even admits to having a "kill on sight" list), killing merchants and ruining livelihoods, yet the game tries to make him sympathetic despite there being no excuse for his actions. He tries to bribe you off at the end of the quest because he's terrified of anyone stronger than him, and killing him is considered a Lawful Evil action, not Good or even Neutral. What is Lawful Neutral, however, is working with him and killing a guard captain that wants him dead. And worst of all, despite being a sidequest this entire situation is not optional. Your normal options for ending a quest prematurely (such as arresting, banishing, or outright killing the quest giver) are either conspicuously absent or just don't work, and once started it spawns event cards that penalize you and cannot be solved by any of your advisors period. Your only solution is to do the quest, which makes the events go away. In addition the rewards offered for completing it one way vastly outweigh the other rewards; siding with Darven nets you up to 70,000 gold (plus lots of Hellknight gear to sell off), a new town on the map with merchants with very nice merchandise, and assistance from Darven in the finale. Siding against Darven gets you a useful but really expensive Kingdom project, but only if you let Linxia's Hellknights freely assault your citizens and pick the exact dialogue options that don't make pissed off at you, otherwise you'll just get insults and a promise of Chelaxian invasion from her, plus whatever you loot from Darven's town. To top it all off, if he lives, he becomes your very best friend ever (you have no say in this), and you get an ending card that amounts to women falling backwards over themselves every time he visits your capital. Doesn't stop players from killing him out of spite.
• Critical Backlash: While he's not necessarily going to be anyone's favorite character off the rip, some players have looked at Darven in the aftermath of the firestorm of hate and argued he and his questline aren't that bad; siding with him isn't necessarily more out of character than some of the more questionable and confusing artisan quests and the game does establish his Chelish enemies are bad enough people that trying to side with them is probably a bad idea.
• Crosses the Line Twice: The conversation between the illusory Maegar and Cephal in Varnhold's Lot. By now you've been with them long enough to know they argue about literally everything Like an Old Married Couple, so it's completely in-character... but not only are they basically arguing about kingdom management, they're trying to decide whether to build a hospital on a cursed graveyard or in a plague-ridden wasteland.
• Demonic Spiders: Plenty, especially in the lategame.
  • Dimensional and Primal Spiders begin appearing in the third chapter. They have a permanent blur effect (20-50% miss chance), a nasty venom, and often appear in packs that surround your party from all sides.
  • Swarms in general are annoying because they basically require friendly fire to deal with, but the Mandragora Swarms take the cake. On top of being a swarm, they drain large amounts of Strength every round (in a system where being ability drained to 0 is an insta-kill condition, and unlike in tabletop undead and elementals aren't immune), and this stat drain explicitly ignores protection spells that work to prevent stat drain in literally every other case in the game to this point. They further have Fast Healing and very high saves; their weakest save is Will, which is inconsequential because as plants they're immune to most Will-affecting effects anyway. Only your spellcasters/alchemists or fire kineticists have any chance of dealing significant damage to them, but on the flip side those classes also do not have the Strength or Fortitude saves to last long against them.
  • Wild Hunt. Their Wild Gaze, which is usable at will, inflicts either Frightened, Confused or Paralyzed to your entire party simultaneously, and while Frightened or Paralyzed can be countered with the right spell Confused cannot. On top of this they have their ranged touch-attack crystals, who deal Damage Over Time, resistance to two elements and immunity to a third (only acid and sonic affect them normally), high HP and saves, and damage resistance against things that aren't cold iron; cold iron weapons being remarkably rare in the system. They're also in stealth by default, and due to their high HD and Dexterity it's very rare to spot them before they attack.
  • Ghostly Guards/Sentinels tend to congregate in groups, are stealthed by default (again, high Dexterity and HD), can Sneak Attack, can drain Strength, and use an area-of-effect scream that causes Frightened, which might cause your party to run headlong into a different group. They also have Evasion and Unholy Grace, a very nasty combination that makes your area-of-effect spells a sad joke against them. Your only real hint that there's a band about to ambush you is the environmental sounds they occasionally make before your spellcasters get instantly wiped. Most packs of these are not even properly in stealth in accordance with game rules. Instead, they are spontaneously spawned on top of your party when they enter specific regions, thereby bypassing stealth detection and spells like True Seeing.
  • Owlbears at lower levels. They're extraordinarily nasty at the levels you encounter them at, capable of one-shotting all but the best-made custom mercenary with a lucky critical hit, having more hitpoints than anything in their respective areas, and getting multiple attacks at an absurd attack bonus. Their only exploitable weaknesses are their lack of a ranged attack and their relatively poor Will saves. The latter isn't readily exploitable by a lower-level party either, as most low-level enchantments either have a hit-die cap (which owlbears exceed) or only work on people. Fortunately most of them are optional.
  • Anything with regeneration. Figuring out what kind of damage you need to kill something with Regeneration ranges from fairly standard (most fantasy gamers know a troll's weakness) to obscure (crag linnorms, mentioned in a loading tooltip) to Guide Dang It! (the primal shambling mound, which isn't mentioned anywhere beforehand). There is a function for pulling up a monster's stat block if the characters can meet the skill thresholds to identify it, and every character has an ability called Coup De Grace that can kill an enemy outright even if they're regenerating, but the dice gods can be cruel, and it's not exactly the most intuitive thing in the world to find either, especially since it's a full round action and not every such enemy obligingly takes on the party alone. Then there's making sure you actually have it available when you need it. Most people eventually just keep something with ability damage or level-draining capabilities available, as both bypass Regeneration's death immunity.
  • A lesser example would be Dweomer Cats. Though not very difficult to kill, these guys will make a beeline right for your spellcasters, and their teleport ability allows them to nicely bypass the wall of frontline fighters you've put between them and their prey. Plus they can make multiple attacks per round. And they come in packs. If you're not careful, they will make mincemeat out of your squishy wizards.
  • The Summer and Autumn Golems you face at the House of the Edge of Time. Like all Golems, they hit really hard and are resistant to all kind of damage and immune to many debilitating effects. They also have the nasty habit of hanging with the Wild Hunts mentioned above.
  • Ankou. While they’re thankfully rare and are frail as wet tissue paper, they fly and are stuffed to the gills with instant death spells that they love to toss at you. Especially earlier on (chapters six and seven), if you didn’t know they’re coming, odds are you didn’t have spells to negate their instant death up.
• Designated Evil: One of the issues with the game's alignment system is that what qualifies as evil can be questionable and forced. It makes sense being a tyrant or an Ax-Crazy murderer would be the evil options, but sometimes options are labeled Lawful Evil when they feel like they shouldn't be. For example; arresting Sartayne is considered Lawful Evil, but said character was cursing weapons and putting people's lives at risk out of revenge just because their boss is kind of a dick, making it odd that punishing a criminal activity is being labeled as "evil" only because it's going along with the questline of a Lawful Evil (but non-violent) character.
• Difficulty Spike: If you've been breezing through the game, The House at the Edge of Time throws a lot of tanky, powerful enemies at you that would slaughter you without the best min-maxing or lowering the difficulty. To make matters worse, regardless of whether you think this is good or bad, it’s at the tail end of a hundred-plus hour game, and none of the difficulty is genuine.
• Disappointing Last Level: Regardless of whether you get the Tricks of Time joke ending (which ends the game in chapter 7 at The House at the Edge of Time) or the other endings that have you go through chapter 8, consensus is that the endgame is pretty weak and really struggles compared to the rest of the game.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Nok-Nok joins the latest of all companions (Chapter 3) and has little story-role beyond being a Plucky Comic Relief (whose jokes mostly come down to 'stabbing people'). Despite this, the fanbase adores him for his ridiculously optimized stats as a Knife Master Rogue and endearingly enthusiastic personality.
• Game-Breaker:
  • Animal companions. An animal companion is essentially a seventh party member in a game balanced for six and makes certain aspects of the game much easier. In the earlier stages of the game they make excellent fighters and have a good deal of durability if you cast a few spells to protect them. The dog is especially popular due to its enormous Strength bonus once it grows bigger, which means it can hit respectably often and respectively hard plus it gets a free Trip attempt every time it lands a blow, keeping it relevant in combat longer. Or the smilodon, which has 5 attacks, while in PnP it only has 3! In the later game they're not so effective in combat, but they have a lot of health and can't be killed permanently which makes them great for soaking up extremely threatening attacks. They also add to your party's carry space as if they were a party member, which lets your 'pack dog' continue to be useful even after their combat performance drops off.
  • Sneak attacks also count. Since maneuvering characters to flank enemies by keeping your characters at opposite end of their friend would be fiddly to control in a real time with pause game, especially since you're controlling multiple characters, Owlcat decides to bake the Gang Up feat into the game mechanic, which makes getting sneak attacks ridiculously easy since you only need 2 friendlies (or 1 if the rogue or Vivisectionist is also in melee) adjacent to enemies to be considered flanking. Combining that with some Advanced Rogue Talents like Crippling Strike ^note -2 Strength on enemy per sneak attack, no save, or Opportunist Talent with feats like Combat Reflexes, and Outflank or Seize the Moment can be extremely devastating. Also, unlike PnP version, Owlcat's Gang Up also works for ranged attacks, so ranged sneak attackers gets the benefit too! ^*In PnP they'd have to use some method to flatfoot their enemies, but most of those methods aren't implemented in the game so ranged sneak attacking would be impractical without this.
  • All natural weapon attacks in the game (except unarmed strikes) stack on top of any existing sources. This means if you have a race with a natural weapon like the motherless tiefling (has an innate 1d6 bite attack) who's also a Dragon Disciple (which grants a permanent 1d6 bite attack) use the Dragon Form spell (grants a 1d6 bite attack), that character will have three bites at full bonus and damage, all of whom benefit from the buffs from Dragon Disciple and Dragon Form. Worse, a Good Bad Bug in the interactions between a natural bite attack and a temporary bite attack from a polymorph effect can cause the added bite attacks to not go away at the end of the spell, allowing, say, a tiefling druid to repeatedly Wild Shape back and forth and add a new bite attack every time they do so. There is seemingly no cap to how many times this can be repeated. Now, add the Cloak of the Winter Wolf (+1d6 cold damage and a free trip attempt to every bite attack) and you have a character who will masticate armies to death if allowed to close to melee.
  • The seventh level Druid spell 'Creeping Doom' summons several swarms of spiders. These spiders, due to being a swarm of Diminutive size, are immune to all physical damage, Status Effects, and as allies can share in your buffs like Energy Resistance to remove their Achilles' Heel. While some foreknowledge of what you'll face is necessary to use them, the spider swarms can essentially tank close to 75% of the game's foes while inflicting Death of a Thousand Cuts on them.
• Goddamn Bats:
  • Similarly to its spiritual predecessor, any foe or trap that inflicts Level Drain, like the specters and traps found in several mid-game dungeons like Vordakai and Armag's tombs, and Nyrissa's Stolen Lands headquarters. Unlike the Demonic Spiders above they are rarely dangerous to your party, but they have a nasty tendency to spread the drain across your party and require a Restoration spell to remove.
  • The Faceless Sisters you begin encountering in chapter four are your first foe able to inflict permanent ability drain (as opposed to temporary ability damage from things like poison), and do so with a party-hitting gaze attack that activates instantaneously and drains up to four points from 1-3 random stats in every member of your party at once. Like with Level Drain, only Restoration will remove the ability drain, and only from one stat at once, meaning a single encounter may require anything up to 18 Restoration spells for you to recover.
  • Low-level random encounters become this eventually, serving only to waste time while traveling from place to place. While an encounter of two bandits, three kobolds, or a lone skeleton might have been a problem at level 1, or level 2 on Unfair difficulty, they quickly become nothing more than an all-too-common nuisance as you move around your barony.
  • Will O'Wisps. Once you know their tricks (they go invisible at will and attack using area-of-effect electric-damage spells or touch attacks, and are immune to most magic) they can be countered with a selection of relatively low-level buffs and debuffs like See Invisibility, Glitterdust and Mass Resist Energy, but if you wander into a pack of them unprepared you will face some hurt. Some of the more advanced versions often have fear spells as well, which can scatter your party and make them wander away into other encounters... which can be countered with a first-level spell that you can hoard a gazillion scrolls of quite cheaply. Candlemere Tower in particular is infamous for having them ambush you with several at the same time, and can wipe your team out in two rounds if the player isn't aware of them being a threat there.
• Goddamned Boss:
  • Tartuccio at the end of the Old Sycamore Mines isn't outright hard, since he doesn't have a lot of HP, his minions aren't outright super dangerous, and he moreso just relies on a Zerg Rush to overpower the player. However, Tartuccio almost always opens the fight by casting Fireball, seemingly aiming specifically for the Player Character. If the player rolls initiative wise higher than him, he can be dealt with quickly, but if not, he can wipe out your team in one turn without much you can do about it. The only saving grace is that he can be baited into wiping out his minions and himself if someone gets into melee range of him, but he can still be an extremely frustrating fight if the player can't do anything to prevent him from casting Fireball.
  • The Duel Boss in Valerie's quest isn't a hard foe by most metrics, as it's a simple Mighty Glacier Paladin character, but having to fight him with just Valerie makes it extremely frustrating, as she can barely hit or damage him enough to win the fight. On top of that, he can heal himself, and also reduce Valerie's AC, making her easily fall if the player wants to win. Since you don't have to win, losing doesn't effect her outright, and it is optional, but it borders on being outright unwinnable for many players, even when giving her buffs and building her as optimally as possible.
• Good Bad Bugs: At one point in the game, a picnic is organized for Ekundayo, and all of the Baron/ess' companions attend this picnic; This includes Kalikke and Kanerah, though this event was programmed before they were added to the game. The thing is, at this point in the story only one of the sisters could be on the material plane at a time; The programmers seemed to realize this and apparently intended for the player to be able to choose which sister would attend the picnic. Instead, there is no such choice and both of them (technically) attend the picnic, they're just both occupying the exact same spot at the same time!
• Hilarious in Hindsight: Octavia turns out to be the Heroic Bastard of a minor noble family. In Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous, her voice actor plays another, more significant noble: Queen Galfrey of Mendev.
• Hollywood Homely: While it’s not for a lack of trying, Valerie doesn’t look that much worse after she has the scar on her face.
• It's Hard, So It Sucks!:
  • The game's encounter balance and Early Game Hell has been considered frustrating to some players, especially those who are new to the Pathfinder ruleset or isometric CRPGs in general. The game does have adjustable difficulty, but even on Normal mode you can experience a few sudden Total Party Kills. Even someone experienced with the tabletop system won't have much luck; comparing the stats of any given enemy to its stats in the original adventure path reveals the game's version to be farcically overpowered. Enemies that average 5-10 damage in tabletop deal 20-30 here, even on Normal. On top of that, you only start off with four party members in total, and getting a full party requires fighting very difficult fights for the party's level and size.
  • The Kingdom Management mode can be extremely challenging even on "Easy" if you get a series of bad rolls when resolving events and don't invest almost all of your energy into raising advisor stats.
• Les Yay:
  • Amiri and Nilak are overtly affectionate with each other, with Nilak in particular considering Amiri to be an inspiration, and she was devastated when Amiri left the tribe without so much as a goodbye.
  • If you romance Octavia, at one point she'll flirt with Amiri to test your reaction. Amiri will in return get flustered and comment that Octavia is beautiful and almost seem seriously tempted by the offer until she remembers about you and Regongar and then tells Octavia to be satisfied with both of you instead.
• Low-Tier Letdown: Valerie has very sub-optimal stat allocation for a martial character. Despite being a Fighter, her Strength sits at 14, her Charisma (usually a dump stat for Fighters) at 15, and her Constitution at an unnecessarily high 19. While she would seem to be meant to act as a Stone Wall ^note Her Constitution score and initial feat selection pretty much prepares her for Stalwart Defender, the lack of aggro drawing mechanics in Pathfinder makes such a role unreliable. It's almost necessary to multi-class her into something else to make her usable, even though doing so may not fit her character. Adding to the annoyance, her absolute best multiclassing option — Kineticist/Kinetic Knight — is only available as paid DLC. One of the more popular mods for the game goes so far as to make her the Vindictive Bastard archetype from Paladin, simply because it better fits her stats and background than Fighter.
• Obvious Beta: At release the game had bugs to put Obsidian titles to shame, including constant crashes, an "automatic" Kingdom Management setting which would fail to complete events (leading players to inevitable game overs), and broken level geometry which could make the final act almost impossible to navigate, to name a few. Months of patches have left Kingmaker in a significantly more stable state, although the wild swings in difficulty and near necessity to use a guide to complete several quests continued to indicate an apparent lack of playtesting. By the time the game reached its "Enhanced Edition" in 2019, though, the game had largely escaped the shadow of this, and especially with some additional help from a fan modification or two, came to be considered one of the better isometric RPGs of The New '10s.
• The Scrappy: Darven is by far the most hated character in the game, owing to his status as a Official Fan-Submitted Content character who reeks of Creator's Pet from the person who created him. The issue largely is due to the game railroading the player into agreeing to help him, despite him being a pirate who constantly lies and is working with a powerful devil, yet choosing to go against him is treated as the morally wrong thing to do. This is already annoying, but the game fully expects you to like him in spite of this, as the game treats him as a friend of the player character without the ability to really do anything about it. He's written in an unironic way too, so his actions and flaws aren't meant to be viewed as funny or intentionally silly to at least make it easier to tolerate, making it harder to ignore the self-insert nature of his writing. Due to these factors, nobody likes Darven as a character, and many players were happy when Wrath of the Righteous avoided any form of important Official Fan-Submitted Content like him.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • The encumbrance system. Unlike most other RPGs (including most of the D&D-based Spiritual Predecessors) which track the weight and volume of carried gear loosely if at all, Kingmaker follows Pathfinder rules-as-written on carry weight and imposes penalties for overloading your inventory. It's very easy to collect only a handful of loot that over-encumbers your party, leading to some penalties that can be detrimental in combat or travel and, at overencumbrance, prevents you from leaving the area. Special mention goes to camping supplies, which — while realistically heavy — don't translate well to casual video gaming. This one is especially annoying because the original Adventure Path module pointedly gave the party horses to carry things after the first combat encounter to avoid this very problem (and the icon for moving around the map is still a horse), and then when you actually get your barony, your capital has visible pack/riding horses and a stable for them on the area map. But nope, you gotta schlep all that junk around yourself, including your camping supplies. And if an individual party member's equipment becomes too heavy for them to wear (most commonly due to a plate-wearing tower-shield user like Valerie getting Strength damage) then you can't leave the area until that character is under their new weight limit. Bags of Holding are available to alleviate this, though they are implemented by having a negative weight value rather than being an inventory-inside-your-inventory.
  • The lack of crafting also is an annoyance to Alchemist fans; neither an Alchemist Baron/ess, nor any Alchemist companions, can craft potions for you. You have to build a workshop for a Court Alchemist regardless of your own class. Since potion-making was a decent part of the Alchemist kit and part of the point, this can be a bit immersion-breaking for some. (A very well-featured crafting mod came about in 2019 that largely dealt with this problem, but it is still a third-party solution.)
  • The alignment system.
    • The Lawful Good alignment for Paladins is extremely strict. To Be Lawful or Good needs to be done in equal measure, otherwise they can fall by picking "Good" too many times since, unlike the tabletop version of the game, the AI keeps meticulous track of what options you've taken, while most GM's would show leniency. Thankfully, later on Owlcat decided to implement buyable-if-expensive Scrolls of Atonement so any alignment-restricted class that fell out of their alignment can get their powers back, and during the Wrath of the Righteous Kickstarter, the Owlcat leads admitted this wasn't handled especially well and that in Wrath, a lot of morality options will be single-axis to prevent Paladins from having to be Lawful Stupid to maintain their alignment without intervention (although the nature of the alignment chart in Wrath resulted in the problem recurring anyway).
    • Also, many dialogue choices are overly restrictive: in one of the craftsman sidequests, there's a legitimate argument to be made that trying to arrest the villain should be a Lawful Good option under the circumstances rather than Lawful Evil, to say nothing of situations like brokering peace between both the mites and kobolds and later the Aldoris and Surtovas requiring a Neutral alignment on at least one axis: certain conversation options are locked, requiring a specific alignment to select them. Worse, some of those alignment-locked conversations determine whether several important NPCs, even potential advisors, live or die. Want to save both Jhod and Kesten but aren't Lawful? Want to recruit Vordakai but aren't Evil? You're screwed, even though in some cases there are valid reasons for why it shouldn't be as restrictive.
  • If hundreds of angry reviews are any indication, many players dislike the Kingdom Management system in general for being a luck-driven shell of a 4X mode, where success has little impact on the campaign's difficulty or plot (until very late into the game), while failure ends the game entirely. This was made fun of in Varnhold's Lot, where late in The Very Definitely Final Dungeon, the PC runs across fey illusions of Maegar and Cephal arguing about building placement.
  • Every main quest and several sidequests are on timers, some of which are hidden. If you take too long to resolve main quests specifically, your kingdom starts getting beset by increasingly harder Problems related to the main quest. Combined with the already-painful Kingdom Management system, this creates a snowballing Vicious Cycle where you flounder due to the influx of Problems, so your kingdom suffers, which makes you flounder more, which eventually leads you to a Game Over. While fans acknowledge that it makes sense for your enemies to not sit on their asses until you come to them, it's still frustrating to have to reload a save several months back because you prioritized kingdom management over advancing the main quest—or worse, because you wanted to advance but the advisors you needed to do so were already tied up with a Project.
  • Gaining the masterpieces from your Artisans is nothing but one huge Guide Dang It!. They have to be recruited early, their personal quests solved, and your kingdom must reach the highest mark on multiple stats, all on a time limit. Do their requirements too late and you won't have enough time to receive their masterpieces during later chapters. And their personal quests also often involve some of the game's most egregious general alignment weirdness. While most of the masterpieces are indeed quite potent if the player has characters who can make use of them, many aren't made with any of the named NPCs in mind at all and require very specific character builds to come online. This means several are Better Off Sold on the average playthrough: hardly a worthy reward for all the effort.
  • Reasonably high Perception skills are needed to spot lootable objects or new areas on the map. If you fail, you can't retry until you gain a level or bring a new party member with you. Seriously, how hard is it to notice a huge chest lying in front of you?!
• Slow-Paced Beginning: The entirety of the game leading up to the Stag King is the least interesting part, and the game picks up once you finally get your own kingdom. Unfortunately, it takes around twelve hours to actually get to that point.
• Strangled by the Red String: A criticism of Nyrissa's romance. While the Baron/ess learns about her tragic backstory, they don't actually spend a significant amount of time with her after Chapter 1, and in that chapter she was lying to and manipulating them. Outside of Chapter 1, she almost never carries on a civil conversation with the Baron/ess, acts completely in an adversarial role, and unlike the other love interests, there are months or even years where they don't see each other. Yet somehow, those scant interactions are enough for them to decide they're in love.
• That One Level:
  • The House at the Edge of Time - filled to the brim with both Wild Hunt members and Ghostly Guards, as seen under Demonic Spiders. Not only that but it's full of Guide Dang It! puzzles and has two identical copies that exist in different dimensions, and solving the puzzles requires hopping between them and fighting even more Demonic Spiders. It's full of mobs that love to dish out Status Effects that can't be prevented like Blindness, Confusion, and stat damage and will spam them so often that you will eventually roll a one regardless of your stats, necessitating lots of resting, which turns the whole level into a massive test of patience. While the theme and story of the level are great, the mechanical aspects are widely despised.
  • Special mention to the basement of the House at the Edge of Time. It include all of the horrors mentioned above, but also wild energy zones which cause 50% of failure when casting spells. And yes, that include scrolls and potions.
  • Talon Peak. Not because the area itself is anything special but because it takes such a long time to travel to even from the closest starting point and multiple quests take you there, one of which is timed. Notably, this is exploited by a late-game quest-giver who is intentionally trying to piss you off as part of a Secret Test of Character.
• That One Sidequest:
  • The "Research into the Nature of Curses" projects are a thorn in many players side. They take so much time to complete, but you also receive multiple of them during the game, locking your Advisor out of doing anything else for a while if you plan to do all of them. This would be fine if there were different options for which Advisor can perform it, but the vast majority require your High Priest or Magister, and only a few allow you to chose from either to perform it. While you do get bonuses from them, it only is in Divine and/or Arcane, meaning if the player doesn't need those, you don't get much out of it. To top it off, you need to do each one to get the secret ending, meaning you have to somehow find time to do each project during a playthrough.
  • The Kickstarter-backer-written "Deal with the Devil", for setting the backer's Creator's Pet devil-worshiping pirate against an expeditionary force of Lawful Stupid and incredibly rude Hellknights, railroading you to side with the Creator's Pet because the rewards are so much better. It's telling that many playthroughs end up with the Baron(ess) wiping out both sides out of pure spite.
• Values Dissonance: In a game produced by a Russian studio, a nation historically very skeptical towards political liberalism for centuries, siding with the people against the moneyed interests and granting your realm political liberties and a proto-constitution leads to a revolt that has to be put down with bloody force rather than ensuring they feel loyal to a government where their voice is heard.
• The Woobie:
  • Ivar of Silverstep Village, who was on the end of a Trauma Conga Line starting with his children dying because they'd believed a tall-tale he'd told them, followed not long after by his wife dying from grief. Then, while at their graves cursing his own stupidity, he managed to actually curse himself to turn into a werewolf.
  • Maegar Varn, your friendly fellow baron, doesn't have it easy either. His entire barony gets trapped by Vordakai and the people used to churn out zombies, his trusted friend Cephal among them. He himself has his soul ripped out and kept in a "dark" place he dearly wishes to not talk about. If you're evil, you can keep him imprisoned and let Vordakai possess his body. If you rescue him and have the Varnhold's Lot DLC, he'll ask you to investigate what happened to his friends at Lostlarn Keep. You find all their bodies except the General's, causing him to beg their corpses for forgiveness. Speaking of, if the General romanced him and got trapped in the First World, it takes years before they reunite, during which he has no idea what happened to her.
  • Tristian, who tried to fight Nyrissa alone and was not only soundly defeated, lost favor with Sarenrae for his Pride. Nyrissa then captured him, tormented him with nightmares, and preyed on his fears by lying that she was the one who had taken his wings and would only return them if he became her "skylark". His guilt, grief at what he lost, belief that he's too far gone for even Sarenrae to forgive, and self-hatred plague him until he crosses the Despair Event Horizon at the climax of Chapter 4, either delivering Nyrissa the Oculus or destroying it at the cost of his sight. He then runs away and starts praying for death, at which point a Defaced Sister reveals the truth just to rub salt in the wound.
• Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds: The Man Behind the Man for most of the perils in the Stolen Lands, Nyrissa, the helpful Guardian of the Forest you meet in the first act. While she's a Manipulative Bastard now, she was originally a Chaotic Good being who loved her friends and wanted to make a kingdom for them. It was only after the Lantern King took out her heart and banished her from The First World, demanding that she destroy a thousand kingdoms as apology for the one she'd "stolen" that she became the amoral monster we encounter now.

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