At any given moment I am in the center of a wonderful vortex of skeletons. Bones splash and rattle and burst out of the ground in sharp, horrible spurs. My weakest skeletons, sensing their death coming, explode into fire and shards. My strongest skeletons fight so hard and with such alacrity that upon dying, they drag their spirits together and keep fighting as ghosts for a while. Foul little bone scorpions skitter around on fans of legs made from human hands. Somewhere in the middle, almost invisible among the noise, is the character I am actually playing: Path of Exile 2’s mean-spirited, callous, and gleefully enjoyable Witch.
This is a review in progress. It has to be. Even in its incomplete early access period, Path of Exile 2 is a great sprawling mass of a game. Three meaty acts of a planned six act campaign are followed by a trickier return tour through them, before the absurd endgame kicks into gear and the real work begins. If I came to you having played everything on offer I would be wild-haired, bloodshot-eyed and possessing perfect, incomprehensible knowledge. Let’s compromise: I have toured the dark caverns and the antediluvian crypts. I have been killed by various accumulated nasties. I’ve had a great time.
The place to start is with the original Path of Exile, a vast and metastasising ARPG perhaps best known for its spidery skill tree. Exploding outwards from a central point like so many dropped marbles, it’s the sort of screen that first makes you say “I bet you could develop some really varied builds here,” and then, as the scale begins to sink in, “help.”
Whenever I tried to play, though, it was a different story. Path of Exile 1, this deep into its lifespan, is a dark and austere game for new players, speaking its intricate design language to a devoted base at an almost impossible fluency and speed. I could play, of course, working my way mechanically from one tutorial to another, but it was a kind of blunt and limited play borne of my own lack of experience.
It was with some relief, then, that I saw that the studio was working on a sequel, designed to be supported concurrently with its predecessor. This seemed like an opportunity to board the train while it was at a station rather than leap onto it in motion, and I’m happy to report that I was largely rewarded. Path of Exile 2 is, on the face of it, a more focused and welcoming journey through the dark. The original game launched in 2013, and in the sequel you can feel the studio setting a decade’s work and experience to one side, taking a long and ragged breath, and putting pen to paper again. Like any good sentence, the result follows naturally from its predecessor, but is sharper, clearer, and easier to read. There are fewer clauses within clauses within clauses.
Clarity is important when there’s this much going on. The spider-web skill tree has returned, but as before, it functions as something of a trap. New players stare, enthralled, in its direction and at that exact moment the true complexity of the game comes from behind and wallops you over the head. It’s time to talk about gems.
Rather than being earned, skills in Path of Exile 2 are found in gems, as pieces of loot. You’ll shred through a bunch of snakes and, alongside a new circlet or the usual “Marginally Better Shoes”, you’ll find a blank skill gem with a level attached, which you’ll then “engrave” into a skill of your choice from a delicious menu of options. These begin straightforwardly; each of the game’s six classes possesses initial options that speak directly to a particular fantasy of play. My Witch got her skeletons right off the bat, no messing around, along with a nastily withering damage-over-time miasma. The Mercenary scatters explosive grenades, the Warrior tears earthquakes through the ground. So far, so normal, but I valued such a clear set of verbs for each class given what was to come.
Soon after starting out, “support gems” begin to drop, and then a bunch of build possibilities come exploding out of nowhere. These attach to your skills and augment them, initially appearing blank before you engrave them with an effect, and the game is polite enough to offer some recommendations as to what you might want them to do: Maybe make something stronger at the cost of a longer cooldown, or increase an effect’s duration. The real fun, along with a sort of yawning vertigo of possibility, begins when you uncheck the “recommended gems” option and are shown all the possibilities, bright like gumdrops, ready to be sorted through and slapped onto your skills. The kind of authorship this offers is enticing; on many occasions I’d frown at some quirk of one of my skills (“if only this lasted longer”) or imagine some improvement (“what if my skeletons were poisonous”) and then, come the next opportunity to tinker, I’d go digging in the menu to see if I could make those changes.
Most of the time I could. As is so often the case when a game sets out to offer a massive field of options, in actuality there are certain guardrails put in place. To Path of Exile 2’s credit, they’re never egregiously restrictive, though I wish I could have more than one support gem of the same kind attached to two different skills. Sometimes it is as though they have presented me with a beautiful banquet and told me that I can’t eat the tables and chairs and while I understand that, I really do, the candelabra looks mighty tasty.
Still, sometimes in other games a skill tree can feel like a series of dance steps handed to you to perform. You look up the tree towards the locked skills and you think “in two hours I’ll have the fireball, and in three I’ll have the revive spell”. You close your eyes and you see yourself fighting the final boss with the meteor attack, because what else are you going to pick? With the explosion of permutations its skill and support gems (and other, spiralling sister systems) allow, playing Path of Exile 2 feels like improvising alongside the game. One thread of an idea leads to another, one build plan falls apart completely and another pops out of the wreckage. It’s a loose and expressive way of staging an RPG’s systems that, once I got to grips with it, felt extremely natural.
And my god, this is the meat of the thing. The longer you play, the more the individual components start bumping into each other and the more authorship you start to feel over your character. There are the usual ARPG equipment systems, of course, drumming their sickly and compulsive rhythm. A better cuirass. A worse staff. An unidentified item, complete with the little inhalation of breath (“what could it be?”) and exhale of disappointment (“hat.”) Here, though, the items are often responsive to the swirling mass of choices you’ve made elsewhere, so you’ll find yourself wielding a weapon that initially makes very little sense but triggers some condition you’ve set up elsewhere. I fought the final boss of an act with a main weapon that dealt exactly zero damage by itself but passively made everything else I cast extremely dangerous.
This spirals. Each class can unlock one of two “ascendancy” subclasses that go diving back into the initial fantasies and come up with extremely violent, showy new skill options. As you approach the endgame, the skill trees start splintering into smaller, discrete trees for individual challenges or playstyles. When I put my mind into that place, I begin to understand why it was that Path of Exile 1 was so opaque and off-putting to me and so compelling to its veterans: they had built this awful, wonderful tower brick by brick and there stood I, at the bottom, head tipped back to see the top.
The way this is all carried off is wonderful. Even incomplete, this is a gorgeous game, and one that goes diving into a dark fantasy aesthetic with a wild glee. It is simply tremendous when a Count finds something in the forest, isn’t it? When he starts getting stranger and more sinister? Starts rounding up the villagers and forcing them to dig a big pit? Equally tremendous are carved ruins sunk in swamps, and statues with beams of light pouring out of their eyes, and ancient contraptions, and vast caravans dragged, leaden, across the desert by amassed yoked undead. The visual imagination on display is immense, even as it splashes around in the most well worn spaces.
So, you travel from one place to another and hundreds of unfortunates come screaming in from all directions to see what kind of build you’ve prepared for them. Their teeth are sharp, and the game is quick to punish a misplay or a lapse in attention, but the large procedural maps are littered with checkpoints, and each failure is an opportunity to dip back into your menus, adjust a build, and try again. The highlights of combat are the game’s many bosses, which take a leaf out of From Software’s book not just in showy and demanding movesets but in outlandish and evocative design. A gargoyle covered in lit candles. An undead elephant with entirely too many skulls. Despite the inclusion of an (essential) dodge roll and an emphasis on the importance of positioning, these fights are not quite as Souls-like as they might first appear. Outside of the expected escalating challenge towards the end of the first three acts, none ask for the quick reflexes and patience that From’s creations expect.
Right now, you have to put down around £25 to play the early access, but come the full release, the whole thing will be free. Between then and now, they plan to add three further acts and six further characters, as well as presumably start contorting the endgame into the various experimental shapes of its predecessor. As it stands, the additional monetisation is simple and unobtrusive: a shop to purchase various cosmetics and stash tabs to help you better organise your amassed items.
I’m less curious about the future monetisation than I am about the shape that the game will take in a month, three months, a year from now. While I played, the team at Grinding Gear were constantly deploying patches that tinkered with core aspects of the game. It got easier. Bits of it got harder. More loot dropped consistently. This makes my job as a critic more difficult, albeit unquestionably more interesting. Path of Exile 2 is a game built on top of a teetering, highly interconnected stack of systems and choices, and the studio’s willingness to carve away and reshape them renders the future uncertain. As more of their core players wring the systems dry over immense year-long playtimes, will the studio be able to keep the improvisatory, expressive play intact, or will the numbers get ever bigger and the consequences ever smaller? Five hundred hours into a perpetually updated live game like this, the worst thing to be—the absolute grey death of play—is an unstoppable god quibbling over a single percentage point.
But here I am, with miles to go. Around the corner come three large apes, ten small apes, and a worm the size of a house. I hold down a button and they erupt in flames, and awful skulls come wheeling out of the fire towards them. My army of skeletons goes to town. I have slotted a kingfisher blue skill gem into place, and this lets me try a new tactic where one of my own skeletons is impaled on a horrible bone spike, inspiring his remaining comrades to fight harder. My army of skeletons are terrifically loyal. For one and a half seconds a feeling passes over me and the feeling is: Is this all there is? Fights like this forever, in slightly different shapes? Then my boys fell the worm the size of the house and with a click, its body erupts into bone scorpions, and I shake the feeling off. There’s a support gem to collect. I’ve got an idea.