interesting and addicting at first, with the puzzles genuinely making you think while still all being logically solvable, but gets repetitive and sort of frustrating from the pacing/padding between finding new corpses. the starting narrative is compelling, but once you fill out the broad strokes after the first two hours it's easy to see the full picture, and you're left with 8 hours of mindlessly combing over minutiae details, which is my main beef with the game.

on its own it's pretty cool when you realize oh this guy has this pair of shoes so i can trace it back to his bunk number!! but then you have to make the long trek back to cross check, and to make matters worse there's a lot of padding during this process, like only being able to exit cutscenes through doors or the stupid light that unveils new corpses that i hate with all my soul, because is there really a reason i need to follow it around in circles instead of just walking in a straight line to where the corpse is supposed to be? padding like this is rampant throughout the game, like having to wait way too long for new chapter details to unveil itself, and at times it felt more like a walking simulator than a detective game to me. i understand that the developer wanted more realism as opposed to it feeling too 'gamey', but when added with the fact that this game gives me motion sickness like no other, I feel that my enjoyment of the game would've been much higher if i was able to jump between discovered cutscenes easily to cross reference things.

at it stood, even though i really enjoyed the process of deducing identities (real world logic actually applies in every scenario, which is something i've only really seen obra dinn be able to pull off so well), the hassle of all those mindless in-betweens ended up soiling a lot of it for me, which is a shame.

update mental illness (also known as shadowheart brainrot) got to me im now 40 hours deep into the game and my thoughts about it have significantly changed i'm leaving this review up for me to edit later on. i think my points are still valid especially as first impressions of the opening hours of the game though, coming over from dos2.
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to preface this review i'll start off by saying that dos2 is my second favorite game of all time, and hearing all the glowing reviews i had very high expectations going into this game, which is why i'm a lot harsher on it even though it's by all means a very decent game (and more). this review is mostly going to be comparing the two games, and how the dnd setting affected bg3 for better and for worse.

first up i'll talk about what bg3 does really well, and it's what larian always does really well - making a damn good roleplaying experience. just like dos2, the gameworld has incredible environmental storytelling, surprisingly aided by the isometric camera so that there's always a botw-esque type of 'oh that looks cool let's check that out' nearby. very little of the world feels like filler, and almost all of the quests and people you meet have interesting consequences to follow. however you want to interact with the world, the game usually allows it to play out, although to a less extent than dos2, most likely due to cutscene costs and the restrictions of dnd's spell and element system (more on that later).

dnd's established ruleset also brings forth bg3's greatest asset though, which is the tag and character creation system. it genuinely feels like your identity in your world shapes what you can do and how you can do them, with so many options and winding paths that the game is begging to be replayed. whereas in dos2 i never felt the need to make my own character and always went with an origin character, bg3's tags felt so tailored that i couldn't not make my own. the only downside is that all those tags and stats and dice rolls and whatnot might give you brain damage eventually, especially when you miss a hidden dice roll and the game Tells you that. on the actual character creation front, my only comment is that for some reason bg3 is the only game where i've made a female character that i get serotonin from looking at, which definitely makes the constant flow of going into and out of cutscenes less grating, as someone who couldn't care less about plot in games and would much rather speed through all dialogues.

which brings me to my next point of story and characters and whatnot. bg3 definitely enjoys better worldbuilding and plot due to dnd's already established world and lore, and the graphics and cutscenes have gotten a very big upgrade from dos2. i've been told that like dos2 though, the last act suffers greatly from lack of dev time, ending in some less than satisfactory conclusions for a lot of the characters. i agree that the characters are generally more well written and complex than dos2's, but for me personally none of the characters really had that charming spark that made me want to uncover more to them. (this is not to say dos2's companions were much better, but lohse has a very dear place in my heart.) my favorite of the bunch was karlach, but in unfortunate typical larian fashion, finding out her ending just made me want to tear my hair out and i lost most my motivation for finishing the game.

and it was at this point that i realized something must've gone deeply wrong if my motivator for a game wasn't gameplay-related, and it was then that bg3's true glaring problem hit me like a truck - dos2's combat is absolute freedom of interaction and expression, and bg3's feels like dogshit in comparison.

i feel as if i could sit here all day analyzing bg3 and dos2's combat systems and still not be done explaining how much of an absolute downgrade the former is, but to larian's credit the fault really doesn't lie with them (for the most part). if not compared to dos2, bg3's combat system is relatively Fine, but who would've guessed that, oh wow, a tabletop combat system doesn't translate well to a video game format!

there aren't any fun skill and element synergies due to the simplistic nature of dnd's systems, and three ap economy absolutely sucks ass, where i feel like i'm spending more turns moving than actually doing anything fun. i get that crowd control is a divinity thing so i didn't mind the exclusion of it (even if strategizing the best ways to cc as many opponents as i could was something i missed deeply), but the removal of a proper armor system meant that skills couldn't be heavy hitters anymore, with most skills just being direct damage dealers with chances of applying a debuff.

some skills might create a surface, but that only really works with oil + fire synergy, and that's just no fun compared to casting a spell to make it rain blood, then turning the blood into poison so that it heals your undead while damaging the living. i get that the battlefield turning into an absolute mess of elements was a complaint in dos2, but to me that was part of the fun and with the larger ap economy you could always afford to spend some on clearing the field. a lot of this is nitpicking and being spoiled by dos2 where you could literally cast a spell onto someone that made them take damage when they moved, and then follow up by turning them into a chicken so that they panicked and moved a lot resulting in massive damage, but even beyond that even the most simple of mechanics have been taken away in bg3.

most the fun skills are gated behind the rest mechanic so you're discouraged to fight in order to conserve spell points, and again, movement is just objectively bad in this game, with very few options aside from just walking. this is especially apparent when the beginning tutorial of the game literally has a section where you just spend every turn just walking forward to get to a goal point. as someone who loves playing a rogue, it definitely left a sour taste in my mouth when i realized that not only couldn't i teleport behind someone to backstab them, backstabbing wasn't a mechanic at all in bg3, like excuse me what.

maybe i never got deep enough into the game to unlock actual fun skills, but even from the start dos2's combat was so fun i'd purposely pick hard fights to challenge my brain and see what sort of synergies i could conjure up, while in bg3 i purposely picked de-escalation dialogues all the time to avoid fights bc of how boring it is, leading me to suffer through even more boring (to me) dialogues.

tldr: dos2 with shiny graphics and better worldbuilding bc of dnd lore, but absolute dogshit combat and element systems.

horribly optimized for pc. generic and bland story and characters. open world is laughably boring. steals basically every mechanic from another game but somehow implements them worse. accio is the only fun combat mechanic and then they render it unusable after level 20. the actual harry potter stuff like potions and beasts and whatnot is reduced down to a list of errands and button prompts with no meaning whatsoever. the hogwarts and hogsmeade area is the only redeeming thing in game that brims with life and makes you feel like you're actually a student at a wizarding school. you come to this game wanting to be a student at hogwarts. you are given a triple a amalgamation of other games with a shiny layer of ip spray paint over it. so...jedi fallen order, but to a far more egregious degree, basically.