Path of Exile (2013)
Path of Exile is a 2013 role-playing (rpg) video game made by Grinding Gear Games.
Cast onto the plagued shores of Wraeclast, your exile is a sentence meant to kill you. It doesn't. You claw inland through drowned villages, corrupted forests, and the ruins of a fallen empire, stitching builds together from a sprawling skill tree and gems slotted into your gear. The tone stays bleak and the systems stay deep: loot, crafting, and character growth that reward obsession. Grinding Gear built it for players who wanted Diablo without the guardrails, and it grew into a free, endlessly reworked action RPG with a devoted, theory-crafting following.
Quick answers
What is Path of Exile about?
Cast onto the plagued shores of Wraeclast, your exile is a sentence meant to kill you. It doesn't. You claw inland through drowned villages, corrupted forests, and the ruins of a fallen empire, stitching builds together from a sprawling skill tree and gems slotted into your gear. The tone stays bleak and the systems stay deep: loot, crafting, and character growth that reward obsession. Grinding Gear built it for players who wanted Diablo without the guardrails, and it grew into a free, endlessly reworked action RPG with a devoted, theory-crafting following.
When was Path of Exile released?
Path of Exile was released on 23 October 2013.
Who made Path of Exile?
Path of Exile was made by Grinding Gear Games.
Similar games
Explore Path of Exile guides
Path of Exile in our writing
- Companion guide: The CRPG: The Complete Guide to Computer Role-Playing Games
- Companion guide: Progression Fantasy & LitRPG: The Complete Guide to Leveling Up
A few thoughts on Path of Exile
The draw is grim survival on a rotting continent and builds refined far past reason. Game of Thrones matches the low-fantasy cruelty, no chosen ones, just power and its consequences. For the sound of Wraeclast's decay, the death-metal churn of Leprosy fits the plague and rot the game keeps wading through.
Grimdark fantasy where nothing is going to be okay
Path of Exile drops a condemned exile onto a plagued shore with nothing but a grudge against the world that sentenced him. Berserk built an entire legacy on that same unforgiving, blood-soaked fantasy. The Witcher 3 shares its bleak moral compromises and monster-plagued countryside, Supernatural drags its heroes through decades of demons and damnation, and The Last of Us never lets its survivors catch a real break.
Music as bleak and punishing as Wraeclast
Path of Exile's endless grind through a corrupted, drowned world calls for music that matches its bleakness. Leprosy is the death metal record that helped define how dark extreme metal could get, Painkiller turns heavy metal into a full-on sonic assault, IX Equilibrium pushes that same extremity even further, and The Spectre Within carries a doom-laden, mythic weight out of 1980s prog metal.
Horror stories about being trapped somewhere that wants you dead
Wraeclast is a shore built to kill its exiles, and these share that hostility toward anyone stuck in it. Backrooms turns an endless, wrong-feeling liminal space into its own kind of horror, From traps an entire town somewhere it cannot leave, Tomie turns a cursed presence into body horror that keeps coming back, and Lee Cronin's The Mummy resurrects a curse that refuses to stay buried.
Stories with no clean hero, only self-interest and violence
Path of Exile's protagonist is a convicted criminal clawing forward through a hostile world, not a chosen hero. American Psycho turns its narrator's violence into a chilling character study with no redemption in sight. Mr. Mercedes builds its thriller around a killer's own twisted logic, The Boys strips away any illusion that capes make someone good, and Grand Theft Auto V lets its players run entirely on self-interest.