A marriage, a betrayal, a dynasty collapsing on a map that stretches from Spain to India.

The profile of Crusader Kings III is that of a game you respect more than you love at first glance. Its best score is the desert island: there, it edges ahead of nearly two thirds of all games, probably thanks to those hundreds-of-hours campaigns. But the rest follows less closely. Rediscovery stays around the middle, and attachment, the feel of the controller, the art style and the soundtrack all slide toward the bottom. On few votes per criterion, mind you, but it sketches a game that holds you through depth, not through immediate emotion or beauty.

No surprise for a great Paradox strategy game. What makes it grand, those endless cascading intrigues, is not really what questions built for attachment or art direction can measure. Next to an RPG that grabs you by its characters, it plays in another league, the league of systems.

So, who is it for? For you if you love weaving plots across generations, sinking into a living map, restarting a hundred times. Much less if you want a game that seduces you with its looks or its music.