If you're looking for an epic adventure, set in a rich, vast and colorful world with an extensive and fascinating lore, real-time/pause combat mechanics and a fantastic plot then you've found your next game.

Pillars of Eternity's story hinges on souls in two significant ways (minor spoilers):one is the fact that your character's soul initially (and mysteriously) goes through a process known as "awakening" which lets you peer into other beings' souls and their past. The other is the hollowborn's curse, a plague that's causing children to be born with no souls across the Dyrwood. Your objective is to determine what caused these events and how to solve them.

Much like tabletop RPGs, your character's class, background, personality and actions are largely defined by yourself, with a wide range of alternatives to choose from. These will affect your game experience in different ways, such as available dialogue options, skills, character statistics, and even the game's ending. However, your companions' tales are for you to discover (some in the form of quests). Several deific elements in the story not only contribute to the game's plot but also make for compelling folklore, which you're given the option to delve into by studying numerous books and texts throughout the game, should you wish to. It's worth mentioning that the game's important dialogue is nicely voiced over. This, alongside its masterful writing, terrific music and the beautiful environments and landscapes of Eora surely make for an enveloping experience. However, loading times are frequent and of great length, which considerably hurt the game's immersion.

Combat is fairly complex if you're not familiar with classic RPGs (especially Infinity Engine: Baldur's Gate, Icewind Dale). While it may take you some time to understand combat mechanics, its information and explanation are available anytime during the game. Additionally, its core elements are explained in the form of tooltips, for example: if you were to mouse-over the word "Accuracy" in some skill's description, a small pop-up window would emerge, telling you all about how accuracy plays a role in combat (and possibly a numeric example). You can always pause and go over the combat log and there's also a "slow mode" if you feel it's all happening too fast (which I always did). I found the game's combat mechanics somewhat chaotic and overwhelming, given such a great amount of features like interrupts, vitality/health, damage types calculations, attack & defense rolls, engagement and much more happening concurrently at blazing-fast speeds. Particularly at higher difficulties, this can be a detriment to some players.

Inventory management feels natural and practical, with separate item and equipment slots for each character, as well as a shared, unlimited stash. Much like in Diablo, armor and weapons come in different "classes", like common, rare, exceptional and unique. These provide beneficial and sometimes harmful effects for the user, and can be further enhanced via enchantments. However, these improvements can only be stacked up to a certain limit, and cannot be reversed, so be careful when choosing them. It's possible to craft your own potions and scrolls to aid your party in combat, an advantageous mechanic that felt terribly underexposed in my experience.

Pillars of Eternity can be as hard as you want it to, with four difficulties to choose from: "Easy", "Normal", "Hard" and "Path of the Damned". Furthermore, there's also two game modes: "Expert Mode" (more realistic, spells' AoE is not displayed, no dialogue help options, etc.) and "Trial of Iron" (a.k.a. "permadeath"). As if that wasn't enough, the game will offer to crank up its difficulty if it considers your party is overleveled, which will assuredly result in a constant challenge during the whole game. Although I wasn't brave enough to try "Expert Mode" (let alone "Trial of Iron"), I did venture into the game on Path of the Damned difficulty, which proved absolutely brutal up to the very end, and that's not something you see in every RPG! If you're up for a real challenge, trust me: this game will not let you down. If you've completed the base game and are left craving more content, make sure you get both "The White March" expansions, which add even more story, new party members, skills, raised level cap, epic bosses & more).

Pillars of Eternity is a deep, enjoyable, beautifully crafted RPG. After more than 140 hours of gameplay I can assure you it will be worth your while.