Tyranny

Tyranny begins where other fantasy RPGs end: the dark lord has already won. Kyros has conquered nearly the entire known world, and you are not the hero who will overthrow him—you are a Fatebinder, an official of his regime tasked with making sure the last conquered territory falls in line. Obsidian flipped the usual premise on its head and built the entire game around it, including how other characters talk to you—with respect, fear, or open hatred, depending on how you wield your power.

Before you even start playing, you go through what's called the Conquest: a series of decisions about how the war unfolded in previous years. Which city you spared, which you razed to the ground, whom you helped. The world you then enter is genuinely shaped by those choices—people remember what you did, and some factions refuse to talk to you before you even open your mouth. Few games give the player such a concrete past before the first step in the game itself. Within Kyros's apparatus, two rival factions also stand against each other, brutal raiders and disciplined soldiers, and which one you lean toward further changes the tone of the whole campaign and how the surrounding world treats you.

The combat system follows Pillars of Eternity—an isometric party with pause—but the most interesting part is the spell system, where you assemble spells yourself from cores and expressions, essentially writing your own magic. The game's main strength, though, is in its writing and how well it holds its tone: it keeps pushing you to choose who you actually serve, and none of the answers are clean or safe. Even the game's length, shorter than a typical Obsidian RPG, works in the theme's favor—Tyranny doesn't want to be a hundred-hour narrative; it wants to be a dense story that doesn't dilute itself with side detours.

Why play it: An RPG in which evil has already won and you are its official—and the game dares to stick with that all the way to the end, instead of eventually letting you become the savior.