Cinemax's Inquisitor

Just try to think for a second what great underrated CRPG game you played in the last couple of years. A retro isometric style CRPG in the vein of Fallout, Baldur's Gate or Planescape: Torment. 

During 2012 was released this game called Inquisitor, and nobody knew about it, or maybe only the people registered on gog.com knew. The game intrigued me very much with it's very dark medieval atmosphere, almost historical, but nevertheless it was newly crafted kingdom of Ultherst. All the real stuff was reflected on general medieval environment, with it's unfaithful people selling their souls to Satan, beggars turning human excrement into gold with the power of black magic, gruesome rituals invoking the fallen angels and releasing Satan from his thousand years imprisonment. This game is very story-driven and focuses a lot on exploration. To complete a quest in this game you literally need to drown yourself in the game's atmosphere, because only then you will be able to follow the flow of the game. There is no arrow on the GPS and there is no GPS, only an auto-map feature, which is very helpful. Almost every quest in this game is somehow interconnected with the whole game plot and you will never find a dull boring quest. All of them immerse you in the dark world of the game. 

There is much to read in Inquisitor, i honestly don't remember a recent game with so much quality text, maybe only the Avernum series. So much dialogues in this game are needed, because your main occupation will be to investigate and uncover the sinister plots of unfaithful citizens. Here comes to mind the next great thing about this game. Almost every quest is very convoluted and requires your deduction to personally uncover the secret. Many times the result is very unexpected. For example i tortured the mayor of Glatzburg for a very long time, for a while returning to the investigation and then torturing him again, but it turned out he was innocent after all, so i released him when i uncovered the real culprit. The good thing is that the mayor forgived me and asked me to find him a wife, which i did. Every side-quest in this game so masterfully is implemented in the whole plot, you can't believe at first it's just a side-quest. Maybe because the game never tells you which is the main or which is the side-quest. And that's the great thing about it. It forces you to learn how to play and not just mash some buttons to win. 

Inquisitor is a great fantasy-medieval dark detective story with a lot of plot twists and unexpected moments, interesting characters, very long dialogues, but they are so skillfully written that you enjoy to read every one of them. On my memory so much text was only in Planescape: Torment. I very much would like a second game in this universe created by Czech studio Cinemax, because they crafted in some aspect a truly great successor of old Microprose masterpiece Darklands. 

In this game there is only Ultherst kingdom, but getting into the game a bit you learn about other lands like Jad-Habbal or the Thron pagan race that ruled the underworld many thousands years ago. It's so interesting just learning the stuff about politics mechanic of this games' world, you never notice how the time flies while you play it. From some other perspective i could easily name this game an isometric Dark Souls (Demon's Soul too maybe, but i never played it unfortunately). Just like in Dark Souls or in any other roguelike classic, your "yet another stupid death" will entertain you like in no other game. And you will die a lot of times. Only after you learn how to play you will enjoy the game a lot more, just exploring the world, reading the stuff and learning about this world's history from every item's description. Every item is described with such passion that you can forget about Baldur's Gate with it's little general descriptions. Inquisitor tells you the history of an object, where it originates from and what political figure possessed this kind of object in the past. I'll just give an example about "Brave Heart" sword so you can decide for yourself. 

"This two-handed sword named Brave Heart is a powerful relic that was most likely made in 955 when the Realm was suffering under the yoke of barbarian conquerors coming from the Icy Plains. When there was practically no resistance and King Hermann III was hiding with just a handful of the last of his knights as a hunted quarry in the foothills of the Moonshine Mountains, there came a hero born from the common folk to become the flame of hope - eventually he and Saint Jilliam started a massive uprising which ended up in the final defeat of the barbarians at Drachtbaum. His name was Elmer of Glen Coil and just his visage was enough to make the barbarians run away in fear. Nevertheless the fear was, to a great degree, caused also by his two-handed sword Brave Heart. The sword supposedly gained the magic powers thanks to Saint Jilliam who blessed the sword using the water from the river Sanctus. After the battle of Drachtbaum, Elmer became the First Knight of King Hermann IV and Brave Heart became the symbol of the office not only for him, but also for the First Knights, the defenders of His Majesty, to follow." 

So as you can see there is a lot lore information. Imagine almost every item with this kind of description. The Russian colleague and fellow gamer is describing Inquisitor as a very masochistic entertainment not for the faint of heart, where every little progress is bringing you so much joy that you can forget your name.