This review contains screenshots with minor story spoilers

Ah where to start with this game. I heard about the many awards Baldur's Gate 3 (BG3) got including Game of the Year but I was wary about the fact that I knew nothing about DnD and that it might've been one of those games that's incredibly impressive to a hyper-specific audience like Dwarf Fortress. Those thoughts turned out be unnecessary as I binged the entire game to completion in around a 100 hours, something that I hadn't done since Elden Ring 2 years ago. BG3 offers a proper RPG adventure by emulating a table top experience in a digital format.

Choose your Adventure

BG3 is based off Dungeons and Dragons the 5th edition, or so I'm told because I've never actually played a table-top RPG before. The only exposure I had was in a chapter of Yu-gi-oh where the characters played a version of it called 'Monster World'. I have this faint memory of Yugi playing this monster tamer with the power to convert foes to allies and thought the whole concept of playing a RPG with physical pieces seemed so fun. My main fascination was with how natural and unrestrained the gameplay was as the players ad libbed creative solutions to puzzles. BG3 also emulates this feature in its 3-part adventure and gave me a chance at the table-top experience two decades later.

The quest design really encourages a multi-faceted approach which makes it fun to plan and execute new ideas. You can fight, talk or sneak your way through an enemy encounter. You can parkour around architecture, shoot contraptions or betray factions entirely. You can talk to reanimated corpses. You can talk to bears. You can be a bear. You can be a gas cloud and waft through a pipe. The freeform adventure is just a stream of addicting gameplay which makes sessions go by instantly.

On top of that I was impressed not only by how much the game allows, but also expects the player to push its limits. I blew a somewhat troublesome enemy into a chasm only to later read on the wiki that they were an entirely playable companion with thousands of lines of dialogue. I made a decision in act 2 of the game which hilariously ended a playthrough right there and then (roll credits). The game is confident in the amount of interesting content it has and has no need to drip feed it. With my first full playthrough, I suspect I haven't even uncovered a quarter of what BG3 has to offer.

Eldrich Lore

On a slight tangent, Lovecrafian horror is one of my favorite elements in video games so imagine my surprise when I came across a moving brain with telepathetic powers around 3 minutes into the game. As a matter of fact, the predominant motivator of your world-saving quest is to remove a brain leeching tadpole that would eventually warp you into a mindflayer, a tentacled being from a higher order. This thing was straight up my ally and I had no idea from the marketting material alone

Upon finishing the game I read up on the wiki to absorb the DnD lore and was surprised at how much overarching influence the original 1974 board game had over other pieces of media I've experienced before. Blink is a common name to denote abilities with short ranged teleportation. I recognized the squid-like Ilithids from Dota's Faceless Void (which of course borrows its model from Warcraft).

All of this is presented through some excellent writing both in narrative and interactions between characters. I usually don't like extensive reading whilst playing a video game but BG3 is on par with Sunless Sea in terms of quality which had me easily immersed.

The Jank

Unfortunately this game can't be utter perfection and there were some gripes that affected my experience. The most disappointing was the general sense of clunky UX that was pervasive throughout the entire game. Take basic movement for example; you click to move your character to the designated location. So is it snappy like League of Legends or slightly slower with Dota-like turn speed? No it's like Runescape. The movement is painfully slow and characters frequently get stuck path finding across gaps in terrain. Other frustrations include

• Frame drops in later areas with denser character counts, reaching as low as the 20's
• A hidden delay on certain actions like when swapping characters, or not being able to activate a movement skill immediately after selecting it
• Clickable items and contraptions being insanely tiny in-world.

These are problems that would put me off in any other ordinary game but BG3 is seriously hard carried by its positives such that I could look past these speed bumps for a 100 hours.

Look Ma, No Hand Holding

On a less technical note, I also want to talk about the hands-off approach of the game both in terms of learning and consequences. Usually I'm more favorable towards games which trust the players to learn and absorb on their own but the amount of information that's offloaded in BG3 equates to a small book. In just the first fight you're presented with around 20 actions that aren't particularly explained. The intricacies of table-top mechanics are all left to the player to figure out through extensive reading. I imagine a lot of these are just things that come naturally to DnD veterans but a lot of the early game had me questioning why I couldn't do a certain chain of actions, which I had to grind through trial and error. This isn't strictly a bad thing, I personally managed and liked the way the game trusted me to handle the bombardment of new information but I could see how a person might be put off by the learning curve when they were promised a relaxing time of throwing fireballs.

More seriously though, is that a lot of encounters or consequences in the game seem to hinge on the assumption that players will and have to reload previous saves. There are multiple situations which are almost impossible to prepare for on a blind play through and they often coincide with strange difficulty spikes on bosses. This means that it's fairly common to run into a fight where you have an extremely low rate of winning no matter what you do unless you start over with better positioning or spell's equipped. This issue is 'solved' by constantly spamming quick-save (f5) but it just feels kinda of immersion breaking to have players constantly rewinding time unless they're playing the entire game extremely vigilantly at a snail's pace. There's a bit of dissonance here where the game technically allows you to do a lot of things but heavily encourages you to take the optimal path unless you want to spend time redoing certain portions.

Verdict

⭐⭐⭐⭐/5