Ken Follett's The Pillars of the Earth

 PC
User Score
8.1

Generally favorable reviews- based on 89 Ratings

User score distribution:
  1. Positive: 65 out of 89
  2. Mixed: 17 out of 89
  3. Negative: 7 out of 89

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  1. RagingPoet
    Oct 3, 2018
    7
    The Pillars of the Earth is an interactive story with point-and-click adventure elements. Visuals are really nice and the story is interesting even though it's a bit naive.

    It is a good game, but it has the same problem that a lot of Telltale games have: choices influence only minor details in scenery and dialogues but not the story itself. And in some scenes game takes away any choice    The Pillars of the Earth is an interactive story with point-and-click adventure elements. Visuals are really nice and the story is interesting even though it's a bit naive.

    It is a good game, but it has the same problem that a lot of Telltale games have: choices influence only minor details in scenery and dialogues but not the story itself. And in some scenes game takes away any choice from the player, making all options lead to the same result.    … Expand
  2. SuperkenGaming
    Aug 28, 2017
    7
    Ken Follett's The Pillars of the Earth
    Great story telling Not so great execution
    The Pillars of the Earth is a point and click adventure game based off of the book with the same title The game is set in 3 parts, though currently only the first 7 chapters are available, and takes about 5 and a half hours to complete with the other 14 to be released in December and early 2018 Here you    Ken Follett's The Pillars of the Earth
    Great story telling Not so great execution
    The Pillars of the Earth is a point and click adventure game based off of the book with the same title
    The game is set in 3 parts, though currently only the first 7 chapters are available, and takes about 5 and a half hours to complete with the other 14 to be released in December and early 2018
    Here you play as 3 characters, you start as a mason whos in the forest trying to find a way to take care of his family, but for the rest of the game you play as a monk trying to save his church and a forest boy that lives with his #singlemom
    The game takes place in 12th century England, and the story is told with a mix of cutscenes, story book choose your own adventure type moments and dialog within the world…
    The game fits perfectly in the middle of a traditional point and click game and a telltale game…
    Not too much of the collect and combine items nonsense…
    But the other parts about running around the world until you find the right item or talk to the right person just reminded me how little I missed these moments in adventure games..
    The gameplay isn’t quite as painful as those ,ore traditional adventure games.. but still I just didn’t find these moments to be fun, of searching different rooms or looking for items in the environment to report back and find more…
    of connecting clues to progress the story with other people…
    and its made worse by the games constant loading when you go into a new area or even when you bring up the map to remind yourself the direction you should be headed…
    a marker on the map where the character youre supposed to speak to btw would’ve been appreciated…
    this is the only bad of the game though as the story telling and characters are great, I was intrigued with with it all
    and because of a heavy religious theme the game sort of makes you think morally about decisions youre about to make…
    I felt bad for choosing to do bad things,
    and I stopped myself from lying at times in moments that I should have
    this is a sign of great story telling and world building…
    I cared for the people my decision was going to effect
    ive yet to run into a moment where I felt like my decisions has made a huge difference in what was to come…
    but that didn’t stop me from thinking before I acted…
    Though the Pillars of the Earth is held back by its adventure parts.. this is still a decently enjoyable but very compelling adventure game with beautiful visuals that fans of the genre shouldn’t pass up.
    Ken Follett's The Pillars of the Earth
    a 7/10    … Expand
  3. Mandulum
    May 24, 2019
    7
    Favorite Thing: After the story got going it was fairly interesting.
    Least Favorite Thing: The game starts too slow. I almost gave it up within the first few hours.

    Date Completed: 2019-05-24
    Playtime: 14h
    Enjoyment: 7/10
    Recommendation: It's not one of my top point & click games but if you stick with it the story won't disappoint.
  4. PublicNuisance
    Aug 22, 2019
    7
    The Pillars of the Earth is a hybrid of visual novel and a 2D point and click game. Usually many hybrid games I play lean one way and the other is just an add on or gimmick. Pillars actually is literally one part 2D point and click for every part visual novel. Each scene you have to solve a puzzle which will be your typical fare of using something in your inventory on the screen orThe Pillars of the Earth is a hybrid of visual novel and a 2D point and click game. Usually many hybrid games I play lean one way and the other is just an add on or gimmick. Pillars actually is literally one part 2D point and click for every part visual novel. Each scene you have to solve a puzzle which will be your typical fare of using something in your inventory on the screen or combining items. After each puzzle scene there is dialogue in which you will be making dialogue choices. The game is based on the novel of the same name. You play a variety of characters centered around a power struggle in England in the 1100’s as the King has died without a living heir and a power struggle erupts throwing the country into chaos.

    The puzzle parts are pretty standard if you have played any number of point and click games. For the most part it is pretty straight forward and makes sense but there is the odd time where I could understand what they wanted from me but they had a way of getting it done that boggled my mind and didn’t seem logical. Not overly surprising considering that is almost a staple of the genre. The visual novel parts were well done. I enjoyed the choices and thought the game did a good job of not making everything black and white or good/evil. Some choices are timed where more important ones are not. At the end of each chapter you get a summary of your choices and some of the outcomes. If I have one gripe about the game was the story itself. I can understand that since it is based on a book so they probably didn’t want to venture too far off the established path but it was pretty dry at times and I will say I became a bit bored during some parts. That being said when the game was good I was engaged and thought it was great. The ending was a bit different from what I was hoping as things seemed to go a bit darker before settling into a more typical happy ending that I don’t think different choices in game would have changed. The animations were well done as was the art. The voice acting was top notch across the board.

    I played The Pillars of the Earth on Linux. It did crash on launch at first. I determined that the game required a file, “libpng12.so”, that wasn’t shipped with the game and after installing that the game started just fine and never gave me further crashes. It did open on the wrong monitor and I had to manually move it over to my main one. There was no config file I could find to specify which monitor to use and no in game option for it. Alt-Tab worked just fine. You can manually save whenever you want and there are checkpoints for those who don’t want to. While playing the game my total system RAM usage was 3GB, the total CPU usage was around 7% and my VRAM usage was 1.1GB. There were no graphics options besides resolution. I played using version 1.1.703 of the game from GOG.

    Overall whether you enjoy visual novels or 2D point and click games I can recommend The Pillars of the Earth. It may be a bit dry and doesn’t reinvent the wheel but it is very enjoyable for the majority of the playthrough and is solid on both fronts. I paid $13.99 CAD for it and would say it is worth $25 CAD.

    My Score: 7/10

    My System:

    AMD Ryzen 5 2600X | 16GB DDR4-3000 CL15 | MSI RX 580 8GB Gaming X | Mesa 19.1.4 | Samsung 850 Evo 250GB | Manjaro 18.0.4 | Mate 1.22.1 | Kernel 5.2.8-1-MANJARO    … Expand
  5. LordTiger
    Jul 16, 2021
    7
    The visuals are fantastic and the story is a good adaptation of the book but most choices lead to the same result.
    The first book kicks off very slowly but it gets better during the second and third books.
  6. hileger
    Jan 19, 2023
    5
    луше читать книгу а под игру спать хочется ...........................................

Awards & Rankings

100
#100 Best PC Game of 2017

Critic Reviews

All reviews »
Metascore
78

Generally favorable reviews - based on 20 Critic Reviews

Critic score distribution:
  1. Positive: 16 out of 20
  2. Mixed: 4 out of 20
  3. Negative: 0 out of 20
  1. Adventure Gamers
    Jul 2, 2018
    90
    The 20-plus hour commitment to The Pillars of the Earth is well worth it to enjoy this interactive towering tale, faithfully adapted to near-perfection by Daedalic. For patient gamers, this is not a narrative adventure that should be missed.
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  2. Meristation
    Jun 4, 2018
    75
    A great adaptation of Ken Follett's Pillars of the Earth. Daedalic focused on narrative rather tan puzzles, but the game is very enjoyable due to rich characters and strong story.
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  3. GameStar
    Apr 19, 2018
    74
    Atmospheric adaptation of the story as interactive visual novel. Overall a bit too lengthy and static with little gameplay variety.
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