An Interesting Twist on a Classic Archetype

On the surface, we've seen this story a million times before. A person strikes a desperate bargain that swears them into the reluctant service of a powerful being. The things that makes this story interesting is the nature of the being that holds his oath, and the use that Pharasma makes of Salim.



The pace of the story is usually desperate, and the locations are fantastic. It really does a great job mixing Mystery with Adventure, keeping the mind whirling to solve the problem, while also feeling that you're going on a journey. It seemed that my commute always ended right when they were about to do a big reveal in the story and I wanted to see what was going to happen when I got back in the car.



My issues with this story come largely from the writing style itself. The profanity conflicts so drastically with the tone the rest of the book that it jars you loose from the immersion. Additionally, every now and again, we get a chapter that could have been omitted with no loss to the story (the First World tangent being a really good example). I feel like the story very easily could have demonstrated those within the bounds of the conflict that already existed, rather than creating a new appendage to the story. The fight choreography gets pretty silly at times as well, with a single fighter making three to four moves to another fighter's one.



On the whole, the story is very engaging and fascinating. The performance of Ray Porter is very impressive, lending gravity to the story and personality to the characters. It reminded me of the voice acting in the first Assassin's Creed game, which (at least from my perspective) was a pretty impressive cultural work. I'd recommend this to any fans of casual mystery or the world of Golarian. For fans of swashbuckling action or hard boiled detective novels, this probably isn't a good fit, as the fights are pretty brief and one sided and the mystery is kind of obvious and let out of the bag comparatively early.