With this hoard of role-playing resources in hand, lead designer Tony Evans and his team decided that Zehir would be a throwback CRPG; a story-light adventure with full party creation, a variety of monsters, and heavy emphasis on skill checks. It would take the player through the mysterious jungles of Chult, founding a trade empire while attempting to thwart a Yuan-Ti conspiracy.

It was a fantastic idea – and, in its efforts to re-establish the delights of unfashionably outdated RPG tropes, highly prescient. Sadly, the project's ambitions come up short against a pretty unassailable obstacle – the game itself. Simply put, NWN2 is the wrong vehicle for this kind of RPG. Its long loading times and module-based gameplay become truly agonizing when applied to a constant series of random encounters and tiny settlements, while the infamously bad AI continues to wreck all hope of creating legitimately tactical combat.

Other ideas simply feel half-baked; the merchant empire-building amounts to little more than trotting across the map collecting invisible lumber and dropping it off at various towns. The main plot itself is so lightly handled as to barely register.

There are genuine consolations, however. The game's dungeons, while often frustratingly small, make full and inventive use of its bestiary. The jungles of Chult (and their dinosaurs!) are a fresh and welcome locale. And the grandest innovations – the party-based conversation system and the world map – deserve to have real influence on RPG design long after memories of this expansion have faded.

Zehir, in short, is a real curiosity – albeit one more likely to appeal to modders, designers and Obsidian completionists than anyone looking for a solid, entertaining dungeon-crawling good time.