Tyranny is a Pillars of Eternity companion game set in a world where evil won. The player serves the conqueror Kyros as a Fatebinder — a judge and enforcer. The game’s most unusual mechanic is the Artifact system: ancient weapons with personalities and histories that evolve through use.
The Artifacts gain power from kills but also from Lore interactions — specific conversation choices while holding an artifact cause it to ‘remember’ events from its history that it then communicates to the player. These memories are complete short stories about the Artifact’s previous owners, detailing how each owner died and what they failed to accomplish.
The Sirin Codex — obtainable in Act 1 — contains eight memory fragments that outline the complete history of the Overlord Kyros’s magical system from a perspective critical of Kyros. This information is directly relevant to the game’s ending choices but is presented as artifact flavour text rather than plot data.
Obsidian built the game’s clearest explanation of Kyros’s power and vulnerability into optional Artifact memories that most players collected as stat bonuses rather than lore.
The detail work the devs put into areas most players never visit is what separates great games from good ones.
I’ve put 200 hours into this game and never caught this. The developers really reward the obsessive players.