Diablo, as the title suggests, is a series drawn from a medieval Catholic clergyman’s fever dream: a world of skeletal necromancers, levitating exorcisms, high-vaulted cathedrals and stomping minotaurs that clamber through portals. As you tour its world of mud-flecked villages and frigid hamlets, you encounter not just wolves and bears but every imaginable kind of hellspawn born of Greek, Abrahamic and heavy metal mythic traditions.
Cast as a Crusader of sorts, your task is to trail a powerful evil lady who hopes to unleash the forces of darkness on this impoverished land, while simultaneously making time to conduct errands for the villagers, whose Siberian-peasant accents suggest an almost limitless capacity for hardship, an atmosphere compounded by the melancholic, violin-heavy score.
Peel back the Danteisms and, really, this is a game about mathematics and the inexhaustible pleasures of watching little numbers go up: a sort of Pilgrim’s Progress told via an Excel spreadsheet. At the start of the adventure your character is weak and poor. Head into the wilderness and begin to hack at the foes that rush at you – a feeling as pleasurable as popping bubblewrap or zits – and fallen enemies drop weapons and armour, each with its own delicious readout of stats to be weighed against your current gear and then swapped in or sold. This essential loop remains compelling for dozens of hours, and during your adventure you will survey thousands of cloaks, gloves, pairs of boots, axes, rings and necklaces as you incrementally develop your character’s power and resilience.
Diablo IV matches enemies to your character’s level, even while fighting alongside other players who are much more powerful than you. This means, for better and worse, you never feel under- or overpowered. And the moves of each of the four character types offer thousands of upgrade permutations so you can tailor the experience to match your preferred style. Moment by moment, it’s not a particularly strategic or thoughtful game, but submit to its spell and Diablo IV becomes an almost meditative exercise.
