In GreedFall’s town square of San Matheus, an Inquisitor is burning a Guardian alive. A native islander is being publicly beaten by an Inquisitor and told to renounce his faith. He doesn’t, and is cut down for it. The whole sequence plays out with the casual efficiency of people who have done this before and expect to do it again. It is, on its surface, the kind of scene that risks collapsing into pantomime – evil announced as in a cartoon rather than earned, a snarling zealot dropped in front of you so you know which way to point your sword. The first time I played GreedFall, that is more or less how it landed.
The second time, arriving on Teer Fradee fresh from completing its prequel The Dying World, something else happened entirely; I just felt sick. Not because the scene is worse than I remembered – it isn’t – but because developer Spiders had spent a full game showing me exactly what colonial violence looks like from the inside: the daily erosions, the bureaucratic permissions for atrocity, the faces of people with everything to lose. By the time the Inquisitor lights that pyre, you already know what it costs.
GreedFall: The Dying World Review – A Bolder, Braver, But Inconsistent Prequel
GreedFall: The Dying World occasionally delivers on the potential of this superb setting, but can also feel rushed and, in some parts, unfinished.
That scene would have meant more if I had cared. GreedFall had been on my list since its launch, and I wanted to like it – I loaded it up with good intentions and a reasonable amount of patience. But somewhere in its opening hours, before the ship even reached Teer Fradee, it simply didn’t catch.
There were the bones of something I could see myself caring about, but the problem was that GreedFall asks you to hold an enormous amount in your head from almost the first moment – factions, politics, family allegiances, the shape of a world already in crisis. Without any emotional handhold to orient around, it all stayed at arm’s length. I kept playing until I didn’t, and though so many people in my life told me it was worth sticking with, I never went back to find out if they were right.
Before The Ship Sets Sail
So I came to The Dying World with the same cautiously optimistic outlook – perhaps the most charitable reading my history with the series could produce. What I found was a game that seemed almost deliberately designed to correct the very thing that had lost me the first time around.
Where GreedFall opens onto a world already in motion – factions established, grievances entrenched, the player dropped into a political situation requiring immediate orientation – The Dying World begins smaller and closer. The colonialism isn’t the context here; it’s the point. And crucially, the game trusts you to absorb it gradually rather than scheduling it into dialogue menus, letting the world feel lived-in before it bothers to explain itself. By the time you understand the full shape of what’s happening on Gacane, you already care – because you were never asked not to.
Finishing The Dying World, I found myself doing something I hadn’t expected to do ever again: loading up the GreedFall for one more chance. I was curious whether the version of me that had bounced off it so many years ago would recognise what I was looking at now. It turns out that I would, but it meant something different. The San Matheus scene plays out exactly as I must have let it play out the first time. The Inquisitor, the pyre, the islander who refuses to renounce his faith and is killed for the refusal. I watched it, and I continued playing, and it was only afterwards that I realised something had shifted; the scene hadn’t changed, but I had a new understanding that made it hit harder and mean more than it used to.
The Right Order
If you haven’t played GreedFall, my recommendation is simple: don’t. Not yet, anyway. Start with The Dying World. Let it introduce you to Teer Fradee, to the people the colonisers left behind and the ones they brought with them, to the low-level violence of a world being slowly unmade. It won’t take long before you understand what’s at stake – not because the game tells you, but because it shows you, quietly and persistently, until you can’t look away even if you want to.
Then go to GreedFall. Arrive on Teer Fradee with that weight already on you. See what San Matheus’s Place of Punishment looks like when you already know what it costs.
There’s a version of this that sounds like a criticism of GreedFall, but it isn’t. The game was always doing something worth doing. It just needed you to care first – and caring, it turns out, is not something a game can demand. It has to be built, gradually, from the ground up. The Dying World builds it better than the first game ever could. GreedFall spends it, and the player is all the richer for it.
- Released
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March 12, 2026
- ESRB
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Teen / Blood, Language, Suggestive Themes, Use of Alcohol, Violence
- Developer(s)
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Spiders
- Publisher(s)
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Nacon
