Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous's Summoning Circle in Areelu's Secret Laboratory

BIG TIME SPOILERS FOR PATHFINDER: WRATH OF THE RIGHTEOUS AHEAD.  So don’t read this rant if you haven’t played it to its conclusion.  Yeah, I don’t care that this means I’m gonna get a grand total of, like, 6 readers altogether over the lifetime of this article.  Y’all know I just write these things to amuse myself anyway.  Now, for all of the none of you left, on with the rant:



I wonder if I’ll ever make a Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous rant that’s about something actually important?  Well, if it ever does happen, it sure as hell ain’t gonna be on this day.

So, there’s a rather great and thematically perfect secret ending to Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous which involves a practically labyrinthine requirement of specific actions taken throughout the game from pretty much the first 5 minutes onward.  Actually, “practically” nothing, 1 of the requirements for this ending is literally labyrinthine, because it requires you to backtrack through a labyrinth, with no indication whatsoever that you should do so.  It’s kinda bullshit, actually.  Anyway, in addition to the hard necessities to achieve the secret ending, the player also has to have said or done at least 5 out of 7 things over the game’s course, achieving enough moments of acting in a certain way that the protagonist can successfully argue to Areelu Vorlesh that she or he is, in fact, not a failed experiment, but actually a true representation of Areelu’s daughter or son manifesting herself or himself through the soul amalgamation that Areelu created the protagonist from.  Most of these factors are select choices of dialogue taken from various previous interactions with Areelu, but a couple points are specifically actions.

It’s 1 of these points of action that we look at today: the protagonist’s choice to use the summoning circle in Areelu’s secret lab.  This action is an odd and unique one in Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous, because it is, to my knowledge, essentially the only thing in the game that can be interacted with, yet does not give the standard visible indicator that an action can be taken with it.  Normally in a Pathfinder game--and, to varying degrees, a ton of other PC RPGs of this sort, like the Dragon Age series, Disco Elysium, and most Dungeons and Dragons titles--you’re able to press a certain designated key to make all objects on the screen that you can do something with (loot to pick up, things to examine, items to interact with, people to talk to, etc) highlighted, or to have their icons for interaction otherwise made immediately and plainly visible.  It’s a great tool that helps you get the most out of your experience with RPGs, probably 1 of the best features of the entire genre, and I should probably do a rant on it sometime, if I can think of any single thing to say about it other than that it’s a godsend that every relevant RPG should be equipped with.  And it’s generally this same indispensable assistant throughout PWotR, highlighting lootable objects on the ground (in and of itself important for getting the secret ending, considering you often have a limited time frame to grab those randomly placed Nahyndrian Crystals necessary for the best results in the ending), listing the names of NPCs so you can tell which of myriad townsfolk you need to speak to, displaying magnifying glass icons to provide you the chance to experience the game’s flavor text on its many involved settings, and presenting hand emblems on objects that can be used within the environment to accomplish goals and interact with puzzles and whatnot.  Handy, handy thing, the highlight feature.

But, as I said, this 1 summoning circle in Areelu’s secret lab, so very important to getting the true ending, does not submit to the highlight function.  Unlike every other usable object in the game, the highlight button will not show anything noteworthy about the summoning circle in the front of the recreation of Areelu’s old home.  The only way to know that there’s anything to be done with it is to happen to have your mouse scroll over it and only then see the cursor change to a Use icon.

A lot of people thought, at first, that this was a glitch.  PWotR, like its predecessor Kingmaker, released with a LOT of bugs, in fairness.  Like, halfway to Bethesda levels of bugs.  So they complained a bit about it, and dismissed it as an unintentional little error.  But unlike Bethesda, Owlcat Games makes an effort to fix their mistakes, and also like its predecessor, Wrath of the Righteous received a large update that fixed the huge majority of its glitches and goofs.  It was this corrected version I played, and I was surprised to discover, when reaching Areelu’s secret lab, that the summoning circle still existed in exactly the same state as it had before.  Even though I hadn’t encountered any other bug I’d read about thanks to the new version’s corrections, the summoning circle still hadn’t been fixed.

But on thinking about it, I realized that it had never been broken.  This is how it should be.

Because think about what the use of the summoning circle represents.  This isn’t just some random thing to do for fun, profit, or curiosity, like most of the other stuff you can do in the game.  The primary purpose of this particular point of interaction is that it will potentially be employed, later, as a piece of proof that the protagonist’s person is also partially Areelu’s progeny.  This is a moment of evidence that beyond the Commander’s heart and mind and body, the soul of Areelu’s daughter/son, whose greatest hobby in life was (for some reason) summoning demons, has manifested within the Commander’s own original one.

As a matter of course, then, the decision to use the summoning circle cannot be something that any old protagonist might make.  Using the summoning circle can’t be an idea that would pop into the mind of the Queen/King from Pathfinder: Kingmaker, or any other adventurer.  It can’t be the sort of consciously determined and enacted decision that is implied by an act denoted by the highlight button--that which this feature presents are objects and potential acts that the main character knowingly sees, as an adventurer.  The act of a soul must go beyond what can be conscious or even reflexive.  The soul must be a personality and passion beyond awareness, memory, or even the subconscious, a governing influence from a source beyond one’s physical entity.  For a video game character, the player him/herself takes upon the role of the soul.

And that’s why the summoning circle’s interaction is not made apparent to the player.  Its intended purpose is to demonstrate inscrutable instinct--the soul of Areelu’s daughter/son making herself/himself known by doing something, something that has no other purpose, no rational cause to be done by anyone else, but would have meaning to the soul of someone who, in life, was fascinated with the art of summoning and could not resist indulging in it whenever she/he could.  As the stand-in for the soul of the character they control, it is the player’s own responsibility to possess this same instinct of Areelu’s child to want to be interested enough in the summoning circle to prod at it even when there is no justifiable reason to.

It’s very elegant.  Many kudos to Owlcat Games’s developers for putting such consideration into such an ultimately tiny detail of its deeper levels of storytelling.  Seriously cool!