Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic is BioWare's landmark 2003 single-player RPG set roughly 4,000 years before the events of the original Star Wars films. With the Jedi Order devastated and Darth Malak's Sith forces spreading across the galaxy, you begin as an unknown survivor caught in the middle of the conflict. What follows is a sprawling adventure across multiple planets where your character's identity, morality, relationships, and ultimately their place in the galaxy are shaped by your decisions.

KOTOR combines traditional RPG character development with a party-based system and real-time combat with pause. You create and develop your protagonist, choosing skills, feats, equipment, and Force abilities as you progress. Eventually, you can wield more than 40 Force powers and construct your own lightsaber, giving you considerable freedom in how you approach combat.

But the party is arguably even more important than the protagonist.

Throughout the adventure, you recruit a memorable group of companions, including Jedi, soldiers, droids, Wookiees, and other characters with their own personalities, histories, motivations, and opinions about your decisions. They aren't simply stat blocks that follow you around. Your interactions with them gradually reveal their stories, and some of the game's most memorable moments happen when you're simply talking to your crew between adventures.

Your ship, the Ebon Hawk, becomes your home base as you travel between worlds. The adventure takes you through locations including Tatooine and Kashyyyk, with each planet offering its own characters, conflicts, environments, and storylines.

The defining mechanic, however, is the game's treatment of choice.

KOTOR doesn't merely ask whether you're a good person or a bad person. Your decisions gradually establish what kind of character you're becoming. You can embrace the Jedi ideals of compassion and restraint, pursue the darker temptations of the Force, or simply make decisions based on whatever seems right to you in the moment.

Those choices affect dialogue, character relationships, quests, and your character's development. The light-versus-dark system gives the entire adventure a persistent moral dimension, while the party system means your decisions can have consequences beyond your own character.

And then there is the story.

KOTOR is famous for one particular revelation, but reducing the game to its twist misses what makes it work. The twist lands because the game spends so much time establishing its characters, conflicts, mysteries, and sense of place beforehand. Even knowing what's coming doesn't completely erase the pleasure of watching the story unfold.