Baldur’s Gate 3 review

I Died and Went to Fantasy Heaven and then Died There

* Image taken from Playstation.com website. No copyright infringement intended.

January 20, 2025

Categorization: Fantasy

Where played: PS5

I have a confession to make.

I haven’t finished BG3. I put it down nearly 5 months ago now. (Spoiler alert)

I am ashamed to say it, but it got too difficult for me. I was stuck between a rock and a place where I became the sort of person who would let an entire community of halflings die. I COULD NOT FIGURE OUT HOW TO MAKE THEM NOT DIE.  I was also unable to kill the fucking enormous elements-breathing dragon that was Wyll’s personal quest. On a lesser note, I was also able to find all but ONE fucking zombie in one of the very minor sidequests, which seems a small thing now but just broke me.

Between this and that and the fact that I had already, at that point reloaded the game several (i.e. hundreds) of times in order to achieve the consequences that I wanted (that my hero DESERVED, having put blood, sweat and time away from my kids - may they forgive me someday - on the line) and having failed to find the solution out of those dilemmas, I simply quit. It was, to say the least, one of the most shameful moments of my gaming career.

Which is not to say that I didn’t try. In fact, in my defense, I had solidly prepared in the year leading up to the BG3 release. I had purchased and played through BG1 and BG2 on Nintendo Switch (my Fantasy education being deficient on this point), which were wonderful but torturous experiences, for as excellent as the stories and lore were, and as gratifying as every Drizzt Do’Urden cameo was, the gameplay was unavoidably cumbersome. The games also crashed multiple times, to my endless, hair-pulling frustration.

I did finish them though, and I was so proud of this achievement that I attempted to play BG3 on hard mode. And now, here we are.

Which is not to say the experience was nothing short of incredible.

BG3 remains, without the doubt, the most ENGROSSING game I have ever played. That is to say, whenever I finished a bout of playing and had to put it down, I became so disoriented in being back in the real world that I did any number of things, such as:

1.        Forget my wallet (with my license in it) and my phone and drive off to work;

2.        Respond to my husband without listening to his question, and say, yes I needed to go to the bank, which I did not;

3.        Suddenly find myself parked at my place of work with no real recollection of how I got there (having spent the one-hour drive gloating to myself in my head about how spectacularly brilliant I was that I managed to kill the Jabba-the-hut like undead barkeep -after 15 tries - by unintentionally lining up him and his endless minions in the tavern’s second-floor hallway, and then casting a Wall of Fire spell at the perfect moment)

BG3 has all the elements going for it, the wonderful Dungeons and Dragons universe and unforgettable characters (except the white-haired vampire whom I thought was useless), the humor, the lore, the choices that really did make an enormous difference on the ending you got (and how your character would unwittingly but logically develop into a.. squid (illithid…)… ABSOLUTE POWER CORRUPTS ABSOLUTELY you damn fool how could you forget). Not to mention it was so damn difficult that I could feel every one of my brain cells squeezing and overthinking in order to perfect juuust the exact combination of spells to defeat the hordes, prevent characters (or entire villages!!) I loved from dying or simply make the best choice to give my Heroine the ending that she, the embodiment of Chaotic Good, deserved. And overcoming the excruciating difficulty was so rewarding because every person saved, every villain defeated, contributed so much to how the story progressed; suffice it to say this created an intense psychological punishment-reward loop that would cause the sort of disorientation I have described.

I was so addicted to this game that it made me late for work several times. For weeks, I would get up at 6:00 AM (no alarm! No snooze button! No lethargic turning over and pulling the covers over my head in attempt to ward off the day!) and promptly brew my coffee and take my Starbucks Christmas mug to my PS5 and plug right back into the forest, campsite, or dungeon I had last left off. I would take FOREVER with the battles. I just RELISHED them. No choice was too insignificant! Every action had consequences! I would save everyone! Some of these battles would take almost an hour. It got so bad that at one point, I found myself fighting a battle from a rooftop, unwilling to send my characters to the kill zone in the floor below, and so I ended up killing the bad guys slowly one-by one from a very (here I would say “strategic”, and my husband would say, or rather holler, “cowardly” position. “COWARD!!!!” he would yell at me during the pandemic while we played Divinity: Original Sin 2. Good times.) safe position, and at this point it was 8:30 AM and I really needed to get to work but remained unwashed in my pajamas. Out of sheer desperation, I tried to save the game in the middle of the battle, and what do you know, it worked. I guess I just got so used to being unable to save during many a battle played over a PS5, or was maybe traumatized from playing BG1 and 2 on Nintendo Switch, where any attempt to save game during a battle would be just laughable. Anyway, things went a little easier for the remains of my professionalism after I figured out mid-battle saves were an option.

This game had moments of pure magic, when I felt transported to an extent where I had to pause and marvel that, this is what video games will bring to Fantasy as a genre– the BG3 gameplay experience is the future and meaning of video games, what will finally distinguish it from the media of literature or movies.

The particular moment I am thinking of, of all the wonderful moments of the game -Honorable Mention to the descent to Hell and the operatic (and I mean literally as it came complete with operatic music) battle to escape it -  was the moment when my squad found itself in a dungeon with dragon torches all around and reading a god-forsaken book on how the Chosen One (Wyll) must somehow open the secret chamber by setting the torches ablaze with lightning. My book in metaphorical hand and my frustration mounting, I just could not figure out how to open the door, and so my Heroine was stuck there pacing, pulling up the book over and over, making Wyll cast lightning spells on random torches while fretting that that he was running out of tries. But suddenly, without me knowing or remembering exactly what I did, the torches all turned blue (or something  equally magical happened) and the cave door slid open. And apart from feeling relieved and proud (though again, I had solved the puzzle by accident), I felt a sense of sheer wonder. That feeling of stomping around, trying everything under the sun, glaring at some obscure text and then a wall that is supposed to be an opening to adventures untold… it was as if Baldur’s Gate had transported me directly to that scene in The Fellowship of the Rings where Gandalf is outside the dwarven caverns and trying to open the door by solving the riddle underneath, but instead of just watching the movie, I WAS GANDALF. I was GANDALF, having said every elven word he could think of and then out of sheer luck, realizing that the password was “Mellon”.

I cannot praise or thank Larian enough for that unforgettable, one-of-a-kind experience. It was truly a formative moment in my video game-playing history (aside from the time I got to tell the male hooker dark elf courtesan I wanted him to role-play Drizzt Do’Urden and his sword for my free night and he sighed and went “Not again!” BRILLIANT), and here I was thinking that I was too old to ever have that sort of immersive experience again.