Have you ever cooked a meal without using salt? If you haven’t done a lot of cooking before, it’s easy to forget to salt things properly, especially when salt doesn’t really have a flavor of its own. Saltiness is just a component of the sense of taste in itself, so it’s hard to pin down how much you really need, but experienced cooks will tell you that if your dish feels incomplete and the flavors aren’t as vibrant as you wanted, the first thing you should do is add salt.

Tyranny is a game with no salt. All the ingredients for a great RPG are here, with fun companions, an interesting world with a unique story to tell, an involved magic system, and thought-provoking decisions to make, but it still feels incomplete. I can’t point to a core flaw or to any specific feature that should have been added or removed, it’s just… it’s missing something. The flavor isn’t popping. Some people want their RPG’s to have a big, cathartic, emotional climax, others love quiet moments among trusted companions, and I can’t tell which of the many possibilities would have made Tyranny stand out. The game feels unfinished, not in the way that it barely runs or only has half the content it promised, but in that it’s missing some kind of moment that would tie the whole thing together. It’s still perfectly enjoyable, and fans of Obsidian certainly know how to appreciate an undercooked game, but it breaks my heart that they keep putting out these beautiful concepts without the refinement to make them unqualified classics. You could even say that it makes me feel a little...