Baldur's Gate 3

The thing nobody tells you about Baldur's Gate 3 is that the first playthrough is the worst one. Not bad — extraordinary — but the worst, because you spend it assuming the game will stop you. You assume there is a correct route, that the important characters are protected, that killing the wrong person will produce a fail state. It takes about sixty hours to stop flinching, and the game that opens up after that is not the same game you started.

Reactivity is the whole design

Most role-playing games branch. This one absorbs. Kill a questgiver in act one and the quest does not vanish — it reroutes through someone who resents you for it. Miss a companion entirely and the story closes over the gap without a seam. On my second run I skipped a character I had considered mandatory and a scene forty hours later played out completely differently, with different people, arguing about different things.

That is not clever writing so much as an enormous amount of unglamorous work. Someone wrote the version of act three where you did the thing and the version where you did not, and both are good. The scale of that effort is the actual achievement, and it is invisible unless you replay.

Playthroughs

2 finished

Long rests

94

Companions killed by accident

1, permanently

The combat holds for a hundred hours

Turn-based systems usually decay into a solved rotation. Larian avoids it by making the environment a weapon: height, surfaces, shoving, throwing. By act two I was winning fights by dropping a chandelier rather than by dealing damage, and the game consistently rewarded the stupid idea over the optimal one.

The class balance is imperfect and the late-game spell list makes some encounters trivial, but the encounters themselves are hand-built rather than scaled, so a trivial fight is trivial in an interesting way. Nothing here is filler.

Where it slips

Act three. The city is where the ambition finally outruns the polish — quests overlap in ways that produce contradictory dialogue, a few threads resolve offscreen, and the performance dips hard in the densest districts. It was patched extensively and it is still the weakest stretch, which says something about how high the first two acts set the bar.

The ending is also, on a first run, rushed relative to what precedes it. Several companion arcs conclude in a single conversation that deserved a scene.

The verdict

A hundred and thirty-seven hours and I have not seen the version of this game where I side with the people I killed in the first ten. That is the recommendation. It is not the longest game reviewed here, and it does not need to be — almost none of the runtime is repeated, and almost all of it responds to what you did.

Play it slowly. Do not read a guide. Let the first run be messy.