The Plague and the Cousin and the Choice I Didn't See Coming

I played Greedfall during the COVID lockdowns. This is not a piece of context I would normally lead with — the circumstances of playing a game are usually incidental to what the game is, something that colours the experience without defining it. But there is no honest way to write about Greedfall without acknowledging that the Malichor — the fictional plague at the centre of the game, consuming the old continent and driving its people toward an unknown island in search of a cure — landed differently in 2020 than it would have in any other year. The fear the game tried to communicate about a disease that could take your life or the lives of those closest to you, about the specific helplessness of watching something spread that you did not understand and could not stop, was not something I had to imagine. It was something I was already living. The distance between the game and the world outside the window was considerably smaller than it should have been.

Spiders and the Budget That Didn't Stop Them

Greedfall was released in 2019 by Spiders, a small French studio that had spent years making RPGs with limited resources and ambitious ideas — games that were always visibly underfunded and often more interesting than their production values suggested. Greedfall was their largest project and their most polished, a game that looked better than anything they had made before and told a story that took its premise more seriously than most studios with ten times the budget would have managed.

The premise was colonial fantasy. A dying old continent called Serene, consumed by the Malichor, had been sending its desperate people to a new island called Teer Fradee — already inhabited by indigenous people with their own traditions, governance and relationship with the island's magic. The colonising factions — the merchant alliance, the religious order, the military — had each established themselves on the island with competing interests and competing claims to what Teer Fradee's resources meant for their respective futures. You played De Sardet, a diplomat cousin to the governor of the merchant alliance's colony, sent to navigate all of this while pursuing the real objective: finding a cure for the Malichor before it took everything left worth saving.

Spiders did not flinch from the implications of this premise. The indigenous Teer Fradee were not a backdrop — they were a people with legitimate claims that the game consistently presented as legitimate, whose relationship with the island's magic had produced a civilisation the colonisers were actively dismantling in the process of trying to survive their own crisis. The game asked you to navigate this without pretending the colonial situation was simple, which is a harder thing to ask of a Western RPG than it sounds.

The Island and Its Unknowns

Teer Fradee as an environment offered something that mattered in 2020 more than it might have otherwise — genuine uncertainty about what the next zone contained. The island was designed with ecological variety that made each new region feel meaningfully different from the last: dense forest giving way to coastal settlements giving way to mountain passes where the wildlife became something more dangerous than anything encountered before. Giant creatures emerged from areas where the island's magic was strongest, ancient and territorial in ways that made clear the colonisers had arrived somewhere that had its own rules and was not obligated to make exceptions for them.

Moving through this world as De Sardet — a diplomat rather than a warrior, someone whose primary tools were conversation and alliance-building rather than combat — gave the danger a specific texture. You were not the most powerful thing in any room. The island was not designed around your convenience. The sense of being somewhere foreign and genuinely unknown, where the ground rules had not been established in your favour, was conveyed through the encounter design in ways that the narrative alone could not have managed. The Malichor was the crisis that sent you here. Teer Fradee reminded you constantly that survival here was not guaranteed simply because the story required it.

The Companions Who Were More Real Than the World

Greedfall's world was beautiful but underwritten in places — the lore of the colonising factions was dense with history that the game implied more than explored, the politics of the old continent a backdrop felt rather than fully understood. What the game built with care, and what made it worth every hour regardless of the world's rougher edges, was the companions.

Each companion represented a different perspective on the situation De Sardet was navigating — the sailor Vasco whose loyalty ran deeper than any faction allegiance, Siora whose identity as a native Teer Fradee warrior gave every colonial decision a human cost the game could not otherwise quantify, Kurt whose mercenary pragmatism slowly revealed something more committed underneath. Their personal quests revealed people dealing with histories that the broad strokes of the political situation had created and that no political resolution could entirely fix. You could care about these people because they were specific — not representatives of their factions but individuals whose factional membership was one part of who they were.

The companions were more real than the world around them. This is not a criticism, exactly — it is a description of where Spiders chose to spend their limited resources, and the choice was right. A game that cannot afford to build everything equally should build the things that matter most first. The companions mattered most. They built them first.

Constantin and the Arc That Built the Ending

Constantin d'Orsay was De Sardet's cousin and closest friend — the governor of the Bridge Alliance colony on Teer Fradee, the person whose safety was the personal thread running through the larger political mission. He was charming and well-intentioned and genuinely good company in the early hours of the game, someone whose relationship with De Sardet felt warm and real rather than written. The bond between them was established not through backstory exposition but through the quality of their interactions — the specific ease of two people who had known each other long enough to drop formality entirely.

The game then spent its middle hours showing you something happening to Constantin that the warmth of those early interactions made difficult to process. Power does something to people in Greedfall's world — not through magic or corruption but through the ordinary mechanism of a person being put in a position with too much at stake and too little support and making decisions that accumulate into a different person than the one who arrived. Constantin did not become a villain in the conventional sense. He became someone who had made choices that the person De Sardet had known would not have made, in circumstances that made those choices comprehensible without making them acceptable.

What this built toward was an ending I had not fully prepared for — not because the game hid what was coming but because the relationship it had established made the arrival of what was coming feel like a loss rather than a revelation. The choice at the end about what to do with Constantin was not a choice between good and evil options. It was a choice about what love requires of you when the person you love has become something that love alone cannot fix. I made the choice and second-guessed it afterward, which is not the same as making the wrong choice. It is what a good ending does — it leaves you in the space of the decision rather than resolving the discomfort of having made it.

The Factions and the Common Cause That Held Them

One of the specific things Greedfall 1 understood that distinguished it from its sequel was the architecture of its conflict. The colonising factions had competing interests and genuine tensions between them — the merchant alliance's pragmatism against the religious order's ideology against the military's methods — but the Malichor gave all of them a common cause that the game could use as a structural anchor. Everyone needed the cure. Whatever else divided them, the plague was a shared enemy that made alliance possible when the story required it.

This produced a game that was politically interesting without being politically exhausting. The factions were distinct and their conflicts were real, but De Sardet's diplomatic role gave you genuine tools for navigating between them rather than forcing a permanent allegiance. The final act — where the factions had to be brought together against a threat that could destroy the island entirely — worked because the groundwork of those relationships had been laid across the game's length. It was not a deus ex machina of solidarity. It was the result of choices that had been accumulating since the first hours on the island.

What the Island Left Behind

Greedfall is not a perfect game. Its budget shows in places — animation that sometimes breaks the illusion of the world, combat that works without ever becoming truly satisfying, lore that gestures at depth it cannot fully deliver. A larger studio with more resources could have made a shinier version of this game and probably a less interesting one, because the things Spiders chose to prioritise with limited resources were the right things to prioritise.

The Malichor scared me in 2020 in a way it was not supposed to be able to. A fictional plague in a fantasy world producing the specific emotional texture of fear — not the genre fear of monsters but the quieter, more pervasive fear of something invisible and spreading — because the world outside the window had made that fear familiar. Games do not usually get to do this. They are usually safely fictional, their dangers bracketed by the knowledge that the screen separates you from them. Greedfall in 2020 did not have that bracket. The Malichor was a metaphor that had temporarily become literal, and the game was better for what that coincidence revealed about what it had been trying to say.

Constantin stayed afterward. Not as a character I fully understood — as a choice I was still turning over, still wondering whether I had read the situation correctly, still thinking about what love requires when its object has become unrecognisable. That kind of staying power is not common. A small French studio with a limited budget and an ambitious premise built something that could do it. That is enough. That is more than enough.