I often feel the best barometer of how good a game really is lies in how willing you are to let it just completely mess up your life. In the case of Crusader Kings 3, the grand dynasty management system that put my relationship and job under serious strain, it royally messed me up — in the most enjoyable way.
Long, sleepless nights were spent trying to do things that would probably get me arrested outside of a video game. Matricide, patricide, and all the most dramatic kinds of cide mixed with a healthy side dish of basically just farming my children. I had a system for a while there of just pumping kids out for alliances like the most dead-eyed digital breeder around, a conveyor belt of children I may as well have just called Thing I, Thing II and inevitably Thing XXX.
You see, that’s the brilliant things about Crusader Kings 3: it just absorbs you completely to the point where your ethics fly out the window like an influencer near a sponsored post or war memorial. There might be a temporary moral dilemma while you question whether you should really be executing this pensioner in your dungeon, but then you realise that it would probably be harsher to just let them rot anyway.
And so you do just that.
As well as being just the ultimate misanthrope simulator, Crusader Kings 3 is an exceedingly, almost overwhelmingly dense game with so many different things to be aware of. While you’re staring gormlessly at your keep and wondering how you can make it into a castle, your vassals have suddenly become the notorious vassholes they always are and are now rising up against you. With depleted troops and coffers, you have to slyly bide for time as your allies seemingly crawl their way towards you. Just as all seems lost, they finally arrive like a much less glorious version of Gandalf across that ridge in The Two Towers to win the day. See, I told you it was a good idea to have a child factory.
Once you get to grips with the many, many moving parts (and even then CK 3 likes to surprise you with new, scary things), then it’s time to start threading your own storylines, defining your tapestry in any way you see fit. It’s the perfect game for role-playing, especially when you selectively breed (I swear it’s more than just that) to make your heir the medieval version of JFK or basically the human Sauron. How you adapt as your story unfurls defines what kind of life your monarch will have, whether the woes of the world will beat them down and turn them into a proud ruler or a proud ruler who is also naked because Adamites just cannot relax. Or, rather, have relaxed too hard.
Crusader Kings 3 is the most dangerous game I have ever played, so much so that I’ve had to stop myself from playing it just to make sure 2020 isn’t a complete professional write-off. As I type this up, memories of murder, matricide, and money flying back to me, I think it’s only right that I sign off this long year with another long reign.
Or I could just get Holy War’d by the Pope again. One or the other.
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