The Magisters of the Divine Order fear your power and shackle your magic, banishing you to the gulag of Fort Joy. While at sea your ship is attacked and sunk by Voidwoken beasts. As your lungs fill with water and you slip beneath the waves, a bright light and a calm voice beckon you. Your time is not over yet. In fact, it’s just beginning. For you are the Godwoken, a Sourcerer chosen by one of the Seven Gods to arise and claim power.

This is just the opening scene of Divinity: Original Sin 2, one of the most enthralling role-playing games to come along in years. How you save the world of Rivellon will be up to you and branching storylines encourage you to play and replay to explore different narratives. So save your games liberally; particularly when you’ll likely play and replay some battles in order to win.

The turn-based combat takes terrain and environment into consideration. Send your spell-caster or archer to a high point to rain damage from above, for example, or have your spell-caster blast that oil drum to set the enemy ablaze. If fights become overwhelming, you can always fine-tune the game’s multiple difficulty levels. And once you’re done with the single-player game, a multiplayer mode lets you go at it again with a party of friends.

Graphics in Divinity 2 are rendered in a three-quarters view familiar to anyone who’s ever played a classic RPG. You lead a party of up to four adventurers, each with unique skills. The character design options are considerable; each character sports unique core attributes, but you can customise them extensively, even telling them what sort of adventurer you want them to be when they join your party.

The game is hugely inspired by the classic Dungeons & Dragons pen-and-paper role-playing game and that’s something developer Larian Studios embraces. Besides the main storyline, there’s a Game Master mode for creating custom games with other players around a table, just like D&D.

Larian Studios has created a best-in-class Mac game experience by embracing Apple technologies, including Metal, Touch Bar support and support for MFi-compatible game controllers. It makes Divinity 2 a treat to play on the Mac.

So stand Sourcerer and find your strength. Your journey will take you far across the realm on a quest to find divinity, or damnation.