Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition, the closest BioWare ever came to making a horror game, is out now on Nintendo Switch*.
*It also came out on PS4 and Xbox One this week! But, I spent 25 hours playing this baby the way 100-hour RPGs were meant to be played and you should to: sprawled on the couch with the Switch three inches away from my face, while Great British Bake-Off played in the background.
The game isn’t especially scary — though you’ll hear plenty of shrieks, wails, and cries of “Don’t leave me! Please, don’t leave me!” as you roleplay your way through Neverwinter, a walled city under siege by a horrifying plague with no easily discernible cause. The sickness doesn’t spread through physical contact, and even those under quarantine have managed to contract the disease.
As a newly graduated member of the city guard, you are tasked with helping the powerful paladin, Aribeth, collect the ingredients for the cure. As the game begins, Aribeth has rounded up the cryptids whose bodies house the required ingredients. But, a mysterious and coordinated strike against the city scatters the creatures across four of Neverwinter’s districts. Your journey will take you through a prison now ruled by the inmates, the city docks**, the Blacklake District** and the Beggars Nest — a poor district beset by a horde of zombies shambling in from the neighboring cemetery.
**I haven’t visited these areas yet. This game is big — this version includes the main campaign, two lengthy expansions, and various player-created modules — and, I’ve tried to sample some of everything it has to offer.
If you’re anything like me, that set-up is relentlessly interesting. I missed Neverwinter Nights when it first released back in 2002 (I was eight), so the appeal of playing through that story, that takes players on a quest, not through high fantasy plains and mountains, but through the socioeconomic strata of a city in crisis was really exciting to me. The idea of doing it on a portable system was especially appealing. And, there’s a lot here to be excited about!
That said, if your entry point to the RPG has been the modern offerings from Bethesda, CD Projekt Red or even BioWare, you’ll need to plan to do plenty of work to get the most out of Neverwinter Nights. In 2019, this RPG, which was “mainstream” for its time, may require a wiki to enjoy.
Combat, its pacing and its execution, is especially tricky. Pacing is a pain point because Neverwinter Nights offers very few opportunities to grind, but seems to expect it. In one dungeon in the Shadows of Undrentide expansion, I went from being at equivalent levels with the enemies I was facing, to vastly underleveled for the bosses. This may be intentional — designed then, and retained now, to push players to seek out multiplayer companions — but for me, someone who is mostly interested in playing this game by myself, it’s a bummer. And, given that enemies don’t respawn after you defeat them, grinding the levels isn’t really an option.
Even if it was, combat is the least enjoyable part of Neverwinter Nights, so I’m not itching to seek out more of it. After 25 hours, I still haven’t gotten to a place where I feel comfortable with the game’s pause-and-play system. Generally, I think it just feels antiquated. The game’s devotion to its Dungeons and Dragons source material means that you’ll frequently miss point-blank hits, even on easy, because a die roll says so. I understand why BioWare, and other developers of turn-of-the-century CRPGs, opted for this system. The semi-real time, semi-turn-based combat was a good fit for online play in an era of spotty Internet connections. But, today, it feels like a chore; neither as satisfyingly tactical as the system Larian used for the Divinity Original Sin games, or as responsive as the clicks in an action RPG like Diablo. Being old and out-of-style doesn’t make a mechanic bad. Recent throwback shooters Dusk and Ion Fury each resurrected the 90s FPS’ story-lite blasting to great effect! But… the combat here feels like a compromise designed to address a problem that no longer exists.
That said, Beamdog has done an excellent job faithfully porting this game to Switch. The developer has been tasked with bringing an era of D and D games to consoles — Baldur’s Gate and Baldur’s Gate 2, Icewind Dale and Planescape: Torment all also came to Switch this year thanks to the company’s efforts — and has succeeded admirably. The current streaming-fueled Dungeons and Dragons renaissance, plus the success of Pillars of Eternity, the Divinity Original Sin games and Disco Eysium have all helped bring the isometric RPG back into prominence. And now, thanks to Beamdog, some of the genre’s most important classics are available on every major platform. That’s a really cool, important achievement.
Especially given the fact Beamdog has put in the work to make Neverwinter Nights a great fit for consoles. While the original game featured an entirely isometric perspective, the Enhanced Edition allows you to control your adventurer from a third-person perspective. You can still use the pulled-back perspective to see more of the play space and queue up actions. But, most of the time, the game looks like a low-poly version of a modern console RPG.
The transition isn’t always entirely smooth. I ran into a progress-blocking bug early on — I walked up to a table toward the end of the tutorial area, got stuck inside of it and couldn’t escape its geometry without starting the game over — that pushed me to save scum the hell out of the rest of my time with the game. I ran into a similar issue later, getting stuck at the entrance*** to a laboratory in Shadows of Undrentide, and had to abandon the save and 30 minutes of progress. Neither of these issues ruined my experience with the game. But, both, combined with the game’s old-fashioned save system, pushed me to play it extremely careful. I saved after every combat encounter for fear of losing progress.
***Doors are generally just pretty weird. I often walked out of a door — one specifically in the main game’s City Core area was a persistent problem — only to re-enter the building I was walking away from.
All those issues aside, I’ve mostly enjoyed my time with Neverwinter Nights and plan to play more! There’s a massive amount of content included here, bolstered by an interesting setting and evocative writing. I’ll likely spend a lot of time with it over the holidays.
But, I’ll probably spend just as much time on a wiki.
Neverwinter Nights review code for Nintendo Switch provided by the publisher.
Neverwinter Nights is out on PS4, Xbox One, PC, and Nintendo Switch.