Pillars of Eternity Complete Edition review

The Good, the Bad, the Ugly, and then the Good

September 4, 2025

Where played: Nintendo Switch

Categorization: Fantasy, dungeons and dragons-lite

Minor gameplay spoilers ahead. Mid-game review, 27 hours in.

I bought Pillars of Eternity about a month ago during a period of inclement weather where I (joyfully) was able to spend long days at home and see absolutely no one. I wasn’t really sure what to expect with this game, but I heard comparisons to Baldur’s Gate, which is really all one needs to know when one is in a bit of a gaming rut.

I looked at my “hours played” time a month later and was surprised to see that I had already clocked 27 hours. It has not seemed like it because I have only been playing it in snatches before work, and also because the game itself will not let me play more than a few minutes of it before it hits me with the “system error” message and shuts down, without autosaving consistently. This means 7 out of 10 times, I stop playing out of sheer frustration with the technology.

And yet, here I find myself, still plugging away at it, though halfheartedly. In truth, it may not be entirely the game’s fault, as I have just come back from an absolute monster of a roster – namely Metaphor: ReFantazio and Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. After these two more linear adventure-type games I was really craving for a bit of BG3 open-worldness, and I had hoped Pillars of Eternity could scratch that itch for me.

And 27 hours in, I cannot decide which way to go with recommending this (or not), except to say that I expected to be enjoying it a bit more by this 27-hour mark. I must explain some factors that affect this decidedly undecided review:

1.        The Good

a.       27 hours in and I can barely tell you the plot of the convoluted lore of this story. It’s the typical save the world from the demon-zombie hordes and the capricious gods who love them – type thing, but there are some things that you can’t go wrong with, like the fun of taking your party to explore every nook and cranny of a 2D-style RPG map. It is still fun for me to slowly creep through the dungeons, and open every pot and treasure chest and collect every plant in the forest to craft potions and enchant weapons, and find cool loot to buff up my guys’ stats.

b.       Unexpected things happen while exploring the map, like being attacked by a buttload of flying dragons (I nearly turned tails and ran for the edge of the map) when my party blundered into the horde of them out of nowhere, which made it extremely satisfying when I was able to defeat them. I’ll say one thing for this game, the difficulty makes the adventure-obstacles extremely satisfying to overcome, so there is a reward-loop somewhere that is the main enticement for me to wait five minutes for this game to boot up every morning while I brew and sip my coffee, another five to load the inn while I check my emails, another five minutes to load into a new forest mini-map on the way to a town, you get the picture.

c.        The home base and Sims-like invaders-are-attacking-your-town!-random events are nice touches, I’ll give you that. There is something fulfilling about nesting in RPGs, like how you are able to build your home city in Nino Kuni II, custom-build a house in Zelda and hang all your weapons and shields on the walls, and best of all, rule your very own rogue city-state in Dragon Age: Inquisition (I am making a point not to include Dragon Age: Veilguard as one of my examples, by the way, it would be unfair to Inquisition to refer to both games’ nesting mechanics as if they were somewhat equal – see my review of Veilguard here). So I do love that PoE has this as well, it is quite a special little touch that makes a game uniquely memorable.

2.        The Bad

a.        Now I am a great big fan of this style of sort of vintage RPG real-time active combat, which are championed in the greats such as BG1, 2, and Dragon Age: Origins and Dragon Age: Inquisition. I think it’s a uniquely exciting way to play, and involves a great deal of tactical thinking.

Or so I thought. Now, I cannot for the life of me pinpoint it, but there is something about PoE’s combat that is just not sticking right. And I think it’s because the spells, chants, and other magical abilities don’t seem to do anything distinct in the game. Which is not right, either, because a fan of flames spell will indeed show a very brief orange wave across the screen, and an oil spill spell will cause a load of black goo to fall down on the map. It’s just that… the spells don’t feel like they are causing anything interesting to happen to the enemies except to make them fall down or chip away at their life bar. And perhaps I am not paying close enough attention, but isn’t this sort of thing supposed to make itself obvious, so that you really feel like there are tactics involved in the choices you make during battle? This is a problem that turn-based games (I’m looking at you, Divinity: Original Sin you magnificent marvel of a good time you) doesn’t have, as you are given time to properly appreciate the effects of every little thing that you do. And is probably why turn-based games seem to be favored in recent years.

But I wonder, for example, why the much older games BG1 and BG2 did not feel that way. Every spell cast in those games felt precious and tactical, and even with much-worse graphics, seemed to capture the feeling that your wizard really did something magical and amazing that changed the course of the battle through sheer ingenuity mixed with opportunity.

b.       Another thing that has not really sucked me in is the story. I am enjoying plodding along with my trusty sidekicks and doing all the quests and what-have-you, but none of it feels very urgent or particularly exciting. The lore has lost me completely (lots of gods and Godhammer and that’s all I’ve absorbed so far), and I like to think I am quite forgiving of complicated lore. But no, and I cannot even explain it to myself as that Baldur’s Gate has the Forgotten Realms backstory to stand on and this doesn’t. This simply doesn’t excuse it. Divinity Original Sin and Elder Scrolls have completely new and non-book related lore, but the stories gently grasp you and never let go.

And I know PoE is crowd-sourced, but does that necessarily mean that the story cannot be comparatively engaging? I just feel like, where at the 27 hour mark the story has not fully engaged the player, bad story-telling happened somewhere.

3.        The Ugly

a.        In a fit of whimsy I decided to purchase and play PoE in (what I later found out to be) the most expensive way possible, i.e. paying something like 50 bucks to play it on Nintendo Switch. On Steam one day I saw it was 10 dollars.

And damned if this isn’t also the worst way to play because the Switch port is buggy as hell, as bad if not worse than BG1 and BG2 on Switch, which is not a defense of PoE whatsoever was PoE came out in 2017 I think while BG1 and 2 came out I wanna say maybe a decade before? Whatever – it basically closes down due to a system error every time I boot the game up. My chances of playing a full run without it dying on me increased once I figured out I had to close the software every time I put the game down, but the problem remains.

So mix this in with a meh storyline and you have one hell of a reluctant player. Not to mention the loading screens… which are as bad as Divinity: Original Sin... and for, so far at least, less reward.

So the long and short of it is… I think I will finish the game as my momma didn’t raise no quitter and also, I do want to see what happens in the end. And for all its faults, it is a challenging game, and the difficulty level makes it a satisfying play through, in the sense of accomplishing a long and difficult Zelda temple puzzle.

But I will be that much more hesitant to pick up PoE II, unfortunately, if it is more of the same.

Review update after playing 10 more hours of the game (hour 38ish):

Sooo... feeling a bit sheepish as what I am about to write completely contradicts the grumpy review I had written at the hour-27 mark of PoE.

Suffice it to say that after writing that grumpy-ass review, I proceeded to flop onto my couch and power through another couple of hours of the game.

And woke up the next day and did it again.

And again.

Despite all the things I had pointed out were wrong with the game.

And also because weirdly enough, after I had written my review, the game proceeded to work perfectly, as if it had not continuously glitched out on me for the entire 27-hour run leading to my review. It has not crashed since. As if my whiny denunciation of its technical failings had motivated it to work harder (or maybe my Switch was scared that I would replace it with a Switch 2).

So if you will read my previous review (above), it will appear that the cons of this game vastly outweigh the pros. And yet I still keep coming back to it. Why, you may ask?

Two things: At around the 28—hour mark, I levelled up my guys to Level 7, giving my sorcerer (the only one I really care about) access to a bunch of way cooler spells that obviously did something onscreen visually and in battle effects (one of my gripes, you will recall, was not actually feeling that my spells did anything cool), i.e., summon huge tentacles to crush and flail threateningly at my enemies. That’s kind of awesome! More please!

And another was that I realized that enough unpredictable stuff was happening to me in this game that I was continuously incentivized to enter one more house, do one more quest, enter one more mini map, explore one more dungeon. I believe there is a lesson here somewhere. That one of the most powerful characteristics a game can have to draw in a player is simply this – random stuff happening that makes the trouble of walking around and talking to people and peering into every nook and cranny worth doing, if it will trigger a random event. Exploration being rewarded with unpredictability, if you will. And if a game manages to hit that sweet spot where a player never knows where the next lead or plot point is going to take him or her next, well, you basically have enough to make the player want to finish the game. And that is the be all and end all of it, really.

And it’s funny, I did not realize this playing BG3 because well, at the risk of sounding like the slavish fangirl that I am, BG3 was just so wonderful in every aspect that I just wallowed in- Halsin-game in a sort of take-me-where you will daze of concentration and pleasure.

Whereas PoE, with all its faults, made me really question why I am having fun playing it. Why am I bothering to pick up my controller every day? Why am I enjoying opening every goddamn chest and treasure hole and clay pot that I encounter? Why am I getting thrills watching my very pixelated blobs of people do the funky fast walk through nearly-Diablo II level-renderings of dungeons?

Because for all its faults, PoE is an adventure. And that is the highest and as I have just discovered, the only thing that truly matters in an RPG. It’s not even the story, as I have just realized – although I think the quality of the story is what will separate the regulars from the historical greats. PoE manages to make the player feel that they are never know what is coming next. Your choices matter. You watch your hero and his trusty band of followers grow into their powers and roles in the story, and you never know where you are going to end up next or what awesome spirit-summoning artifact you will find.

And there are I think, a dwindling number of games that give one a satisfying sense of adventure. These games are hard to make and don’t come every day. And they can't all be Baldur's Gate 3-level, and that is just a fact. So when I do find one, I am going to savor it and milk every moment of the journey. And then I am going to come back for more – I’m looking at you, Pillars of Eternity 2.

So a final word? This game is a slow burner if there ever was one. But I say give it a chance, and then another. And then see whether the game manages to take you to place where you want to be (in the gamer-philosophy sense, of course).

pillars of eternity review