Big Finish are better known for their science fiction drama, so it’s rather nice that they’ve gotten their hands on a popular fantasy franchise and are proceeding to give it their best effort.
Empty Graves is the latest instalment in Big Finish’s Pathfinder Legends series which is based on the popular roleplaying game Pathfinder. Anyone who’d played a Fantasy Roleplaying Game will be familiar with the set-up; a bunch of adventurers have travelled to a far off and distant location in order to find adventure and treasure. In the previous instalment, this meant raiding an abandoned Egyptian style city. Our would-be tomb-raiders got caught up in a political power struggle of sorts, and now the dead roam the lands of the living.
More so than the story before it (The Half Dead City), this audio wears its geeky gaming origins proudly. A scene in which the party fight-summoned magical constructs makes for a good action sequence, but it’s also painfully obvious to any gamer that this a collection of gaming mechanics and ideas lumped together in a rather unsubtle way. This isn’t as bad as it sounds; a good roleplaying game should feel like a movie, and Empty Graves is certainly cinematic all the way through.
The plot is consistently entertaining, the acting is brilliantly done, and the characters and world-building are engaging and clever. What it lacks for in subtlety it makes up for in sheer gaming glee. Pathfinder is certainly a franchise to keep an eye out on the future; if it continue to be this much fun it may well become the next big thing.
PATHFINDER LEGENDS – MUMMY’S MASK: THE HALF-DEAD CITY / AUTHOR: CAVAN SCOTT / DIRECTOR: JOHN AINSWORTH / STARRING: STEWART ALEXANDER, TREVOR LITTLEDALE, IAN BROOKER, KERRRY SKINNER, WASEEM ABBAS, DONOVAN CHRISTIAN-CAREY / PUBLISHER: BIG FINISH, PAIZO / RELEASE DATE: OUT NOW
