I’m immediately invested; I feel like every little choice I make is gonna come back to bite me (perhaps literally?) later 😅

Baldur's Gate is not for the faint of heart, that's for sure! Though I guess choosing to infiltrate an enemy stronghold, assassinate its leaders, then fight my way back out as my first quest is on me 😅 So good

Larian RPG protip: always Speak with Animals

I figured the nice D&D game would start simple, like saving a town from gnolls and romping through the countryside. But no, I fought my way through a fortress and now I’m in the underdark 😅

Baldur’s Gate update: clutched my way through a way-above-my-level boss encounter, after invoking a god’s wrath and permanently losing a party member, by pulling out a beholder in a genie bottle and throwing it at them 👀 I was a good 45 mins past what I figured would be a non-canon quicksave, but I guess this is my life now. If there were ever a moment to use the nuclear option, that was it

Baldur's Gate is relentless; every narrative arc seems to have the kind of stakes you'd expect at the finale of any other game. I had no real expectations going in, but I have been surprised at how focused its story is — I figured it would be more free-form and open-ended, with plenty of downtime and regular RPG things like collecting things and bringing them back to questgivers, but no. This is a dungeon master’s opinionated narrative campaign and you're merely participating in it. Real good

Also the action economy/combat system is so crunchy and fun to manage moment to moment that it immediately makes the Divinity: Original Sin games feel really oversimplified and lightweight. Give me ten more games in this engine and I would play them all. I hope it gets a bunch of expansions

All I want is for my party to relax in a nice inn for a bit. Is that too much to ask? 😅

Turns out a bear is not the craziest thing you can sleep with in Baldur's Gate… 👀🦑

As the reviews finally trickle in, it confirms my thinking upon entering the third act of Baldur's Gate 3 that the best moments of the game are behind me. The experience has been mostly enjoyable, I haven't rolled credits just yet, but you can tell which parts of the game had years of widespread beta testing and which haven’t. It really hurts that you can't go back and visit older areas that you haven't finished off, even to just get some visual variety, because ~all Act 3 is city and sewers