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.
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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.