At RPS, of course. The British gaming site has had a thing for Reckoning for quite some time now, and quite rightly bemoans the game’s failure to thrive in the RPG market.

Damn, it was such a good game. Seriously. I know there’s this contingent of wrongheaded people who disagree, but they’re all part of some evil cult that brainwashes people into not appreciating a lovely game when they encounter it, and you should ignore them. It was a whole new world, a huge, interesting country, in a mammoth-sized game. A game where a false ending is in fact just the mid-point, at which point it blossoms out farther and wider, stuffed with characters, quests, and choppy-choppy third-person action. It was never dark and gritty, nor was it la-la-la-bubbly-for-kids. It found this space between the two, bursting with nice ideas, or just old ideas done nicely.

I love that this was a game where I accidentally pressed a wrong button and hit a monk with a sword. This made him rather cross with me, and indeed the rest of his monk friends, and I ended up having to kill them all to protect my own life. And there it was, this blight on my past, this blot on my record – a now empty village with unfinished quests, due to my having hideously slaughtered everyone who lived there. And that didn’t break the game. That’s the sort of thing that usually sees a game sealed in the collective memory as Something Special, when you have that degree of freedom and impact. Yet Reckoning still remains far too forgotten, and greatly under-rated.

To say nothing of the fact that the game was, in many great respects, Tibby’s baby, chock-full of references to Ultima. That it was also possessed of a mind-blowing philosophical conceit was icing on the cake.