I decided to give this another shot but I think there are just too many tiny frustrations that all build up into something I cannot spend my time on any longer. The combat is just so insanely clunky, whilst simultaneously being extremely boring. Enemies will sometimes just stand around doing nothing for their entire turn, while I sit there watching gormlessly waiting for the game to figure out what it's meant to be doing. The entire combat seems to hinge on having high ground or the element of surprise, but when jumping up to higher ground is seemingly a dice roll (not actually) because sometimes the game just decides it won't let you, the entire combat system starts to just look shoddy. The progression here is soooooooo fucking slow, too. And each level-up session feels like such a daunting task while having to level up 4 separate characters all at once, each time having to choose between like 20 different stat buffs or spells and what not. I much prefer smaller, more consitent progression, that makes you feel like your character(s) are constantly improving with you. The whole thing just sort of oscillates between extremely overwhelming and extremely dull.
I do like the main companions and I am interested in where their stories go, but again the dolling out of story moments feels extremely stingy, for no discernable good reason. You do side quests because you have to in order to not be underlevelled for the next big unfair, clunky combat section, not because there's anything interesting to say in those quests' stories. Obviously, I haven't even finished act one, but I think 21 hours is enough time to realize that I don't think this narrative is actually trying to say anything, which means I don't want to spend 120+ hours with it. I'm perfectly fine with things being character-driven over thematic storytelling, but I would much prefer it if that character storytelling was quicker, more direct, like in something like the Mass Effect trilogy. Here it's "Hey, here's my cool backstory, now I need you to help me do this. Welp, see you in 10 hours to find out how that goes!" It's just so unbelievably tedious in such a story-heavy game. Sure, the story and quests are very reactive, and I think that's commendable, but ultimately that doesn't mean much to me if the story you end up with isn't all that interestng. I would truly rather a more rigid set of events that mean something to me, that make me feel something.

Its simultaneously the most cringey but the most real thing ive played in along time.

That makes it hard to recommend forward because it is in those little details where it all really hits, while the bigger picture is far from a disaster, just a pretty standard highschool drama.

Got some lack of polish here or there, everywhere. But if it genuinely interests you, I can guarantee itl leave you with something. For me im glad it was some clarity and a big smile on my face. And to have this kind of moment for myself this year really is GOTY worthy.

I just finished my 110 hour playthrough of this game and it's occupying a cavity in my brain that has transformed into a battleground between all of the positive and negative criticisms I have for it.

I've never participated in a full D&D campaign due to the few attempts I've tried fizzling out after a session or two. So, I don't have any knowledge on the elements of this game that were pulled from actual DnD lore and manuals or what was changed/simplified. The only dungeon I've ever been in is the public restroom of my local Walmart, so this is purely a review coming from a person who just enjoys playing a variety of wildly different games.

My first initial thought was to create a Tav that was some replication of a character I created who never saw the light of day from one of those previous DnD attempts. Enter in my Half-Orc Bard, primarily meant to cast debuffs as some sort of unga bunga saboteur to anyone who dared step to my party. Turns out, that idea was atrocious and it resulted in my first 15 or so hours getting absolutely nothing done and everyone getting absolutely raw dogged by every fight we came across. Fine. My saviour Withers came to town and the game allowed me to change things up, thank god. You can do this with any of your characters at literally any time and I can't thank them enough for including it because after this, we cruised through Act 1 like it was nothing. My character was now a dual wielding Bard with the occasional healing buffs instead. I was a bit disappointed that I couldn't necessarily craft the character I thought up in my mind, but I just attributed that to me not understanding DnD classes or mechanics, so it's whatever.

As for someone who has never played a game like this before, it was slightly overwhelming at first. By the end of it, I was glad to see a multitude of giga spells and attacks at my disposal, but to say that it wasn't confusing at first would be a huge lie. The game just kind of assumes that you'd be aware what every little dice roll means, or what concentration even is in the first place. I originally thought that buffs could stack similar to JRPGs, but it took time for me to realize that's nowhere near the case because it isn't really explained. There's some fights in the game where misclicking or getting your concentration immediately broken is very bad, so I imagine that first 15 hours would have been more manageable if it was a bit clearer. Nevertheless, we persevered.

The combat in this game has highs and lows for me. Once I finally grappled the mechanics and shifted my spells around, it started to become a lot more fun. It became pretty clear to me that pre-emptively making my life less miserable for the future was the best strategy to getting through some boring as shit fights. My character looked like a dumpster, yet had such high charisma that it meant fighting 20 less enemies in some scenarios. So, I don't even want to imagine what playing this game without it is like. The persuasion rolls were some of the funniest moments in the game for me and it actively changed the outcomes of some battles. The worst fights in this game are the ones where it's 50 vs. 4. It's incredibly tedious and the difficulty of them are purely based on the map layout and initiative roll of your characters. Act 3 has some of the most horrendous fights I've ever seen in my life. They basically boiled down to just forcing the enemies to walk through a meat grinder of AoE spells, which was incredibly unfun.

I persevered through all of that because I was genuinely intrigued in the story and characters. I was the most invested in my party of Gale/Shadowheart/Karlach, but the other characters chilling back at camp had compelling weight to them as well. There are definitely some characters who were treated with more care than others. Astarion and Shadowheart's plotlines are like 3 novels of writing in comparison to someone like Karlach, which I found pretty disappointing. I wish that the other characters interacted with each other a bit more because it kind of feels like they just are friends by default after a certain point despite never seeing them together in any capacity whatsoever.

Playing this game as an asexual person is a wild ride. Everyone wants to eat your ass in this game. I tried to make the ugliest character I could and yet, she was still a super model. You do not understand how badly I wanted to play as a goblin freak, only to realize that if I got my wish, the characters would still cry for my grubby goblin hands. I see why this is the way it is, so that everyone has an option, but they didn't need to give Wyll such a sad puppy dog face after I rejected him. I'm not complaining too much about it because it's optional content, it just took me out a bit because it continued to be the funniest thing ever. You know I still gave in and got that fire engine hot rod pussy though.

The level of pseudo-sandbox this game gives you to play in is tremendous. I've found myself getting pretty exhausted with open-world games lately, but it's mostly because those games don't seem to offer really anything in their worlds for me to stay interested. Here, there's side quests and interesting lore bits crammed into just about every crevice. It helped really sell the world building for me, as someone with zero experience with DnD. I found myself investigating through most conversations and genuinely wanting to absorb the information as much as possible because it was actually interesting, for once, and delivered by actors that were giving it their all. If I could complain a little bit though, I wish the journal was handled a bit better, especially with the time sensitive sounding nature of the events taking place. Some quests are written with such mixed signals and given deceptive waypoints, that it literally caused me anxiety. It would result in me running around looking for the way to go for way too long sometimes.

This game was great. It was great for the first 2 Acts, it was even awesome. Then I beat Act 2. Oof. Act 3? Oof. Pretty much all of my criticisms revolve around this section of the game, just like most others who have beaten it. I actually find the sheer amount of people who are saying this is a 5 Star masterpiece while also openly admitting that they still haven't even set foot past Act 1 in the same sentence is insane.

I'm gonna vaguely mention some things that happen in Act 3 without directly spoiling them, but if you want to know literally nothing about Act 3 before going into it, this is your stopping point of my review.

I personally think that the pacing in Act 3 from start to finish is paced very weirdly in comparison to the first two acts. Before, I really felt as though the side quests and every little battle or tribulation weaved together very nicely no matter which scenario you went to first. Pretty much as soon as I entered the city in Act 3, the city that the characters have been talking about the entire game, the city that my character is literally from, a certain character decided "Hey. You stepped foot in my area so I'm now going to railroad you into doing my very important quest. :)" WHY? A scenario that was only triggered because I was exploring in a game meant to be heavily explored. I thought that was a very odd choice, and I didn't like it. Not to mention that most of Act 3, all of the character trauma companion quests are backloaded in this section. It made the game start to feel like a big checklist, "Ope- I did Shadowheart's therapy session, so now I gotta do Gale's." Of course, I wanted to do these quests because I cared about the plotlines that were hanging open, but I feel like they just could have been wrapped up a bit better while also intertwining themselves with the important plotlines as well. It just made Act 3 a bit of a slog to get through, especially with a certain grief fueled fight that might as well have run me over with a car. I also didn't really care for the introduction of Spoiler, Spoiler, and Spoiler. It just felt goofy the way that it was done at the end of Act 2.

And for my last trick, this section of the game is still atrociously buggy. As my playthrough went along, it ran mostly fine up until the final battles of Act 2, where I noticed some graphical bugs beginning to show up more often with every session. Once I got to Act 3 though, Jesus Christ. Baldur's Gate was supposed to be this beautiful city no one would shut up about, but all I saw was endless planes of grass with invisible walls and people floating around while the game chugged to load everything. It messed with the cutscenes endlessly. I had some weirdo conversations with some companions who were suddenly addressing me as one of the Origin characters instead of my Tav. I couldn't finish some side quests because they just simply wouldn't work. It made every session closer to the end even more painful than the last.

My last grievance: The Ending. I will not spoil, but holy shit did it give me the biggest course of blue balls I have ever been given. I spent 110 hours with my party, suffering through some grueling, endless fights, the game shitting itself to death, and the emotional weight of every character piled on top of my back, just for the ending to feel so incredibly rushed with basically zero closure to any of the characters, including mine. Some companions weren't even present. It felt like such a massive wet fart to the face, I questioned if the game bugged out and missed some scenes and it turns out that, no, it did not. This was what I was left with. The final cutscene did not load a single building or object and the final dialogue scene kept freezing because it couldn't load the transitions. That was... a way to end my playthrough, for sure.

I am happy having played this game, but it did not come without it's problems. It's definitely a unique playstyle that I had to seriously commit to learning and I am seriously glad that I did. But, this game does not stick it's landing and that's really unfortunate. The plot threads were what inspired me to keep surviving every battle despite how hard they were getting, so to see the final 25 or so hours to end up like this, really threw me off and kind of offended me.

I really do want to give this game a lot of the credit it deserves though, but it's a weird one to think about. Acts 1 and 2 are basically entire seperate RPGs worth of content and length alone, with so many diverging paths to make the adventure you want while never feeling like they're overstaying their welcome. That alone warrants this game to being fantastic. It's been a while since I truly gave a shit about such a large cast of characters. But, I cannot hand wave how salty everything in the last act made me. I still had fun though, and I'll be remembering this playthrough for a long time.

To preface this review, I went into Baldur's Gate 3 lacking any context about what this game was about, other than the game being "very good" and people thirsting over Astarion. I haven't played Dungeons and Dragons, and probably never will. Further, I have little experience with table-top RPG inspired games aside from Disco Elysium and Darkest Dungeon (does this count?) so this was a decently-sized step out of my comfort zone. I played about 20 hours worth of this game, up until I reached Act II, and decided that I had my fill.

There's a lot to like here. Clearly, a lot of love and care went into making this game. I liked the character designs and I thought the voice actors generally did a good job. Aside from some visual bugs I encountered, the game looked quite nice as well. Initially, I found exploring the world and getting new party members to be quite fun. There's a lot happening in the first ten or so hours of this game, and I was with it. Unfortunately, past a certain point, the game's pacing slowed to a crawl and I sort of lost interest.

I was not remotely hooked by the game's opening sequence. It felt like there were pieces of requisite information I needed in order to understand what was going on. The inciting incident of "let's get these parasites out of our brains, or else we're going to die" kind of loses its luster when you can take as many days as you like working through the world. I'm not suggesting that they add a strict time limit or anything like that, but some kind of motivation other than the parasite would make me way more interested.

I would have only a slight problem with the main quest's structure if the game's other systems were fun and engaging enough to make up for the weaker story. I did not find that to be the case. My gripes with the gameplay mostly stem from being given entirely too much choice. In battles, my magic users have a huge repertoire of spells that they can learn and use, to the point where it's overwhelming. I don't understand basic system mechanics like saving rolls, advantage/disadvantage, and status effects in general because the game does not explain them well enough. I could simply find this information online, but even at the medium difficulty I had no problem clearing battles, so I felt no need to. Winning battles and not really knowing why you're winning is not satisfying to me, however I recognize that those with more knowledge on the systems will likely enjoy it more.

Exploration started to feel like a chore once I had already recruited all (from what I can tell) of my party members. I think that throughout all RPGs, the make or break point for me comes from the party. If I have no interest in the party, then I have no interest in the game. I won't say that I have no interest in the party members of Baldur's Gate 3 - aside from Astarion and Lae'zel, who I couldn't care less about- but I would say that my interest is mild at best. I like their surface-level appearances, but there doesn't seem to be enough depth to these characters to justify spending potentially 60+ hours with them.

What was perhaps most damning to this game in my perception was dealing with inventory management and equipment. I don't like that I even have the option of picking up some of the useless stuff around the world, be it rings that don't do anything or shit like goblets or plates or what have you. I also found most scrolls and potions that I would be rewarded with to be too niche to bother with, creating a situation where I don't want to waste something that could potentially be valuable, so I end up hoarding it for the entire game. I recognize that this is a very personal problem, and this is not necessarily a slight on the game or its design. It's just not for me.

I'm shattered. No game has made me sob this hard. I often say "I'm crying" when I watch, read, or play something sad, but that's mostly exaggeration. I just tear up and very rarely actually cry, but no, I straight up loud sobbed after finishing this. I broke down. My face contorted and couldn't hold back a stream of tears for half an hour straight. My lips were quivering and I was groaning and I could barely breathe; I almost never respond this intensely to things.

Stories about apocalypses normally benefit from their own silliness. These narratives never feel real; they're either too fun, dramatic, or action-packed to have substantial weight. But Goodbye Volcano High is exceptionally hard to swallow.

These feel like actual teenagers. They have real interests, their diverse identities are relatable, their dialogue sounds genuine, they mess around naturally, their tabletop sessions have all these little details and comments that make them feel like the ones I've had, they have awfully relatable casual conversations, and their issues are grounded. For a game about dinosaur people, I always felt like these kids were human.

When you take some of the most real feeling characters I've met in any game and have them face the existentialism that arises from fears of an apocalypse, I was constantly on edge. This is a story where its characters have to grapple with the inevitability of their deaths, and at no point was I not deep in thought regarding their fate. Their happiness, each tuft of fun, and all of its love and positivity is carried by the gargantuan burden of questioning what will happen when that asteroid hits.

When characters make comments about "asteroid facts," describing things like "if you hit solid rock hard enough, it can liquify," it's some of the most disturbing shit I've seen in a game. It may seem tame in a vacuum, but when your world and characters are this convincing, the concept of a realistically approached end of the world is terrifying.

It's especially upsetting in the beginning, when everyone treats the asteroid as a joke, with folks making memes and using it as a crutch for humor. People claiming they wish the asteroid would just hit to get them out of certain situations is so painfully real. It's a behavior that actual people would showcase, and little moments like that make me think about our own existence and how little time we have.

Its narrative is tied to our most future-conscious period—senior year of high school, where we are expected to make definitive decisions on what we do for the rest of our lives—and those futures being shattered by an unavoidable natural disaster is heartbreaking. To see these kids lose their ambitions and dreams, and there is nothing they can do but accept their fates… it's far too fucking heavy for anyone at that age to have to go through. Just thinking about it nearly brings me to tears.

And I cannot put into words how much I relate to the protagonist. Fang failing to find acceptance from their parents, difficulties with their gender identity, conflicts and conversations with their brother, being pegged as the spoiled, selfish brat, and even something as simple as being Arabic... all of it feels so scarily relatable to my personal experience. Many people won't quite get that from it, and it is probably a huge contributor towards why Goodbye Volcano High felt so real for me, but I see myself in Fang more than I ever have in any fictional character.

Today, I'm flying across the Atlantic ocean to see my girlfriend for the first time. I can say a lot about Goodbye Volcano High, but the only thing that matters is that after finishing it, I want nothing more than to hug her as hard as possible. To value the people in my life and the short time we have. The few moments of happiness we can spare in something so ephemeral.

Goodbye Volcano High shattered me, but rather than it having a debilitating effect, I want to do better at cherishing the people I love.

you can really judge a persons personality based on their rating of this game. like i can't believe there are so many people that lynch this game? i mean yes, visual novels are a genre of video games too. i'm tired of hearing "it's not even a game" please get over it already.
okay i'm calm now, let's get into the actual game review! i loved the art, it felt like i was watching a cute emotional cartoon, and the soundtrack was the best part of it all. i also loved scrolling on twitter, it was done sooo well. i loved the characters. ofc there were shallow bits, character writing isn't perfect, plot is far from perfect, but who goes into this type of game expecting it to make full sense? it's a game about teenagers. for me, it's all about the feels, and this game gave me all the feels<3