Baldur’s Gate 3: Review

Baldur’s Gate 3 is Larian’s 2023 Dungeons & Dragons RPG, and it won me over the moment I stopped treating it like a normal fantasy epic. The official pitch is big and dramatic: parasites in your head, a threat hanging over the world, a party gathered around survival and power. All of that is true, but it is not why I kept thinking about the game after I put it down. I kept thinking about the smaller moments where I picked a stupid option, failed a roll, annoyed the wrong person, or found a solution that felt like I had slipped past the game’s plan.

That is where Baldur’s Gate 3 feels different from a lot of very large RPGs. It does not just offer choices in dialogue and call it role-playing. It keeps letting those choices spread into fights, quests, relationships, and even the tone of a scene. I would go into one conversation expecting a clean result and come out with a joke, a disaster, or an entirely different problem than the one I thought I was solving. The game is often funniest and most memorable when I get in my own way.

The thing Baldur’s Gate 3 does better than almost any RPG I have played is make me feel like my odd little plan might actually work. Once I understood that the game was willing to follow through on strange ideas, everything opened up. I stopped looking for the intended answer and started looking around the room. Could I talk to the dead instead of chasing a living witness? Could I turn into gas and float past the trap instead of solving it properly? Could I shove someone off a ledge, collapse the floor under them, or sneak around the whole fight instead of treating every problem like a straight duel? A lot of the time, the answer was yes.

That freedom is not just a gimmick. It changes the mood of the whole game. I was not moving from quest marker to quest marker. I was poking at systems to see how far they would bend. Once I realized I could use spells and abilities outside the obvious combat use, the world started feeling less like a map and more like a box of tools. The joy of Baldur’s Gate 3 is not only that it gives you options. It is that it makes experimenting feel worthwhile, even when the experiment goes wrong.

At first, the combat can look intimidating if you are not already comfortable with D&D rules. Actions, bonus actions, dice rolls, surfaces, status effects, positioning, spell slots, concentration. There is a lot going on. But once it clicked, I started to love how much room the game gives you to swing a fight your way. A battle could turn because I blocked a choke point, teleported to high ground, stacked a few abilities in the right order, or found a nasty way to use the environment. The best fights were not the ones where I hit hardest. They were the ones where I felt like I had outthought the room.

I also like that the game gets more playful as your party grows stronger. Early on, I was just trying to survive cleanly. Later, I was finding combinations that felt ridiculous in the best way. One character locks enemies in place, another fills the area with damage, someone else pushes them back into it, and suddenly a fight that looked overwhelming starts to collapse. Baldur’s Gate 3 is very good at giving you powerful abilities and then trusting you to use them in practical, slightly mean ways.

The downside is that the combat can also tilt the other way once you know what you are doing. A well-built party can get so strong that some late fights lose a little of their edge. I still enjoyed them, because the game keeps giving me new spaces and problems to play with, but I did notice that the tension was not always as sharp by the end as it was earlier on.

A big reason Baldur’s Gate 3 works as well as it does is that I did not just like the systems. I liked the people. The companions are not there to hand out exposition and wait politely for me to finish being the hero. They have their own damage, loyalties, grudges, blind spots, and moments of warmth. Some of them annoyed me at first. A few took time to grow on me. By the end, I was attached enough that a camp conversation or a personal quest beat could hit harder than one of the larger plot turns.

What I appreciate is how often the writing lets these relationships feel awkward, funny, or unexpectedly tender. The game can be crude and playful, but it can also slow down for a date that feels clumsy in a charming way, or for a conversation where somebody finally says the thing they have been dodging for hours. Those scenes helped keep the scale of the story from swallowing everything else. I was not only trying to stop a crisis. I was trying to keep this strange group of people together long enough to see what they became.

For all the freedom Baldur’s Gate 3 gives me, it does not always make that freedom easy to manage. The journal can be maddeningly vague. There were times when I knew a quest wanted something from me, but not where to look or what detail I had missed. Sometimes that uncertainty is exciting. Sometimes it just feels like I am wasting an evening because the game is being coy. I can respect a game that does not over-explain itself, but Baldur’s Gate 3 crosses into irritation now and then.

That friction gets sharper because the game is so dense. There is so much to track, so much to loot, so many side stories, conversations, and moving pieces, that the weight of it can start to show. I admired that density more often than I resented it, but I definitely had stretches where I felt the drag. 

What I really respect about Baldur’s Gate 3 is that it does not protect me from my own decisions. If I annoy the wrong companion, miss an arc, break a questline, or take a cruel shortcut, the game often lets that damage stick. That can leave later sections feeling lonelier or thinner than they might have been on another playthrough, but I would rather have that than a game constantly pushing me back toward the “right” version of events. Baldur’s Gate 3 can end up uneven because it is so committed to letting me make a mess. I can live with that.

The co-op side of the game pushes that even further. I think it is one of the more interesting parts of the whole package, because it keeps the same willingness to let things go sideways when multiple people are making decisions at once. That sounds chaotic because it is chaotic. Friends can pull quests off course, miss companion content, or wander into fights that wreck the plan. But that mess also suits the game. It feels close to the spirit of sitting around a table with other people and discovering that your campaign has gone badly off script.

Baldur’s Gate 3 is the kind of RPG I end up recommending with a warning and a grin. It is long. It can be awkward. It can bury useful information. It can leave you drowning in inventory, side quests, and consequences you did not fully understand when you chose them. But it is also one of the rare games where I felt like curiosity was constantly rewarded, where my party felt worth caring about, and where a failed roll could be as memorable as a clean victory.

I would point it first toward players who like role-playing that leaves room for improvisation, experimentation, and a little chaos. If you want a very tidy story, clear guidance at all times, and a smoother path through every quest, this can wear you down. For me, though, the rougher parts never outweighed the pleasure of feeling like I was making my own version of the adventure. Baldur’s Gate 3 did not just let me choose a class and follow a plot. It let me meddle. That made all the difference.