Baldurs Gate 3

With excellent stagecraft and meticulous detail, Baldur's Gate 3 conjures the illusion of perfect freedom - and then it disappears. Baldur's Gate 3's initial story hook is simple: you have a mindflayer parasite in your brain, and you probably don't want that (unless...?). Its gameplay hook is much more ephemeral though: the promise of not just adapting the Dungeons & Dragons system, as plenty of games have done before, but taking that wide improvisational space of playing at the table into the ...

Baldur's Gate 3 pushes player freedom to the absolute limit. That unparalleled level of freedom can be found in nearly every aspect of the game, from its character creation to combat, and after two full playthroughs and a dozen ongoing campaigns, I've still barely scratched the surface. No two experiences are alike, and every character I've created feels unique. While the game can't always keep up with the spontaneity of a real-life Dungeon Master, it manages to offer plenty of agency while also...

A new high-water mark for CRPGs with satisfying combat and excellent writing. Every once in a long while, a game comes along that is so memorable, exciting, fresh, and well-written that it sets a new high-water mark for an entire genre. Baldur's Gate 3 is such an achievement for the tabletop roleplaying-inspired, swords and sorcery adventuring that its BioWare-made CRPG predecessors helped popularize decades ago. Larian Studios has turned this corner of Dungeons & Dragons' Forgotten Realms into...

After spending 160 hours unravelling conspiracies, setting fire to monsters and finding increasingly fancy hats for my Bard, I can now confidently say that Baldur's Gate 3 is the greatest RPG I've ever played. If I wasn't writing this review, I'd be rolling a brand new character and jumping in for another hundred hours. I've got it bad. It's my dream game: the best parts of Ultima, Baldur's Gate, Planescape: Torment, Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura and Divinity: Original Sin. But it al...