If any RPG fan is still wondering whether or not to get this expansion for Neverwinter Nights 2, I have one single irrefutable argument to offer: Chris Avellone. That’s right, the lead designer of the celebrated classic Planescape: Torment is on the design team of Mask of the Betrayer, and, boy, does it show. From some of the craziest, oddest companions you can meet in any RPG since the afore-mentioned PS:T, a story of personal redemption that’s more about saving your own soul rather than the world to the multitude of genuine choices with lasting consequences, this is one of the very few RPGs that actually deserves the moniker “role-playing”.

Mask of the Betrayer picks up directly after the ambiguous ending of Neverwinter Nights 2. Following the player’s climatic battle against the King of Shadows, the entire cavern collapses and buries the player and his whole party. You wake up in a cave, but a different one, far, far away from the Sword Coast, disoriented from the cave-in and with only vague memories of what happened. A female Red Wizard of Thay retrieves you from a binding circle within the cave and as you make your escape, you discover a dark hunger within you that consumes spirits and you must either find a way to end this curse or have it destroy you from within.

Being a direct sequel, MoTB offers the player the choice of either importing a previous character from the official campaign of NWN2 or creating a new one from scratch and levelling him or her to level 18. The level cap has been raised to level 30, allowing your characters to gain epic abilities and grow into demigod-like beings. You’ll need all that power though because this game isn’t shy about throwing some very challenging battles your way and pitting you against gods both alive and dead. Your character creation options are further widened by the addition of new races and new base and prestige classes. This makes the already unwieldy system based on the 3.5 edition of Dungeons & Dragons even more confusing but there are fans who will appreciate the metagame of finding and optimizing the best character builds.

With the exception of a couple of hiccups (a band of ludicrously powerful pirates for example), the storyline justifies the epic levels of your characters. Other than traipsing around the spirit-infested Rashemen countryside, you’ll also have to venture into shadow versions of these locations and eventually travel to the realm of the gods. It would give away too much to say exactly who will be able to join your party as your companions, so suffice to say that although you only have a handful of choices, each of them is a fully developed and interesting character. You’ll also have a chance of temporarily getting one of your previous companions from the original game to join you and answer your questions on what actually happened at the end of the first game.

Unlike the original NWN2 which greatly emphasized combat, MotB includes a larger number of puzzles, a few of which can be quite fiendish to solve but make perfect sense within the context of the story. Furthermore, as I mentioned earlier, unlike many other modern RPGs, MotB forces you to make hard choices, so that choosing one course of action definitively closes off other paths. This extends up to which companions and items are available to you. One somewhat shocking option in MotB is that you can indeed play as a truly evil character, and by that I don’t mean the greedy, short-sighted bully that other games try to pass off as evil, but a completely and utterly evil character, with the associated downsides and rewards. As you expect, this makes MotB the kind of RPG that you will be feel tempted to replay upon completion just to see what would happen if you had chosen differently.

One new mechanic unique to the game that has often been criticized is the Spirit Hunger meter which forces the player to consume spirits on a regular basis. Failure to do so will impose penalties and eventually lead to death. Like many others, I found the meter to be off-putting at first, but it’s actually not that difficult to cope with. In particular, it’s a neat solution to one of the perennial problems of games based on Dungeons & Dragons: the ability to rest anytime and anywhere to fully restore your party’s health and stock of spells. Now, with the Spirit Hunger meter ticking down even while you’re resting, you really need to balance resting against the toll it will take on your hunger. Choosing whether or not to give in to that hunger is of course also one of the aforementioned key choices that will affect how the game plays out.

The combat itself is appropriately spectacular and the epic level of the game allows for probably more tactical options than the average player will ever use. The pyrotechnics do tend to obscure what’s actually happening on the battlefield though and I would have preferred to have more large-scale battles in the vein of the original NWN2. Still, I’m not a big fan of D&D combat and I think the system kind of breaks down into an unbalanced mess at epic levels so the combat was merely something that I had to work through to get through the story.

Don’t expect too much graphics-wise even if the system requirements are rather heavy. The visuals are passable and work, but will never be stunning. Similarly, most of the early bugs associated with NWN2 are gone but I still had a couple of crashes, one of which was hard enough to corrupt my savegame. I’d advise saving often and using multiple files. As for the interface, you can now choose to play in a third person view just behind your character not unlike World of Warcraft. This might help with immersion, but as an old-school RPG player, I stuck with the old-fashioned top-down view all the way.

My biggest disappointment is that the story revs you up to really kick some major ass and make some big changes in the cosmology of the Forgotten Realms, but then backs away from a full confrontation at the very last moment. I suppose that having a computer game make a permanent change in the lore would be too much to stomach but at least the ending hints that your character gets another crack at it in some future, unrecorded time.

All things considered, what with the dearth of party-based RPGs today, MotB is pretty much as good as it gets. If you hearken out for the old days of games like Baldur’s Game, there’s really no better choice than this.