Failbetter’s text-based adventure Dragon Age: The Last Court is available to play now through the Dragon Age Keep, and all you need is an Origin account to try it out.
It’s intended to bridge the gap between Dragon Age 2 and the upcoming Inquisition, and tells the story of a minor noble house in the continent of Orlais (basically fantasy France).
You choose either the Scholar or Huntress class, and manage the affairs of the county of Serault, playing through the franchise’s trademark moral choices and meeting several famous faces from the series. I’ve already bumped into a certain wily apostate mage and a couple of other old friends.
It plays out kind of like a browser-based free-to-play game; you get a certain amount of decisions or scenes to play out each day, and you can either wait for a timer to run down in order to get more, or pay around $2.50 to carry on playing immediately.
From what I’ve seen there’s no real need to pay any cash unless you’re dead set on completing the game as quickly as possible. It’s not yet clear if actions taken in The Last Court will transfer over to Inquisition, which is out on November 21.
