Do relationships between people really matter? They'll all break in the end, sooner or later. Can't a person be himself and walk down a path he chose purely on his own, without anyone else's intervention? He may seem like a nobody, but he'll ultimately gain more.

I’m a firm believer in the power of language over one’s thoughts.

Not in the sociocultural or moral sense, but more of a structural sense. If you’ve ever been through cognitive behavioural therapy (we are not typing the acronym), you’ll probably understand what I mean: For the disordered, the process of getting better is often just the process of acquiring more words to describe and talk down our thoughts.
Indeed, many people I’ve met in my life have suffered because they lack the language to describe and address their own thoughts. It’s easy to say “I feel bad”, sure, but emotions and thoughts are rarely so binary and require a decent toolkit of words to properly address.

With this in mind, I believe there’s no arrangement of words more powerful than:

“It doesn’t have to be like this.”

What do you do, then, when everyone’s words have been taken away from them?

Simultaneously so bleak as to be genuinely haunting and so hopeful that it inspired a significant paradigm shift in my life, Library of Ruina consumed me ever since I started playing it, with its de facto claim over my every waking thought soon becoming de jure.

I was filtered by LoR’s predecessor, Lobotomy Corporation, perhaps my only genuine mark of shame in decades of playing games and indeed engaging with art as a whole. It was right up my alley and hit basically every note I love in games, but alas I hit the wall and turned around instead of climbing it.

Bizarrely, this might’ve given me the best possible experience in LoR - in turn, giving me the best game I’ve ever played.

LoR opens on an unremarkable note. Some twunk named Roland trips and falls into the titular Library where the Librarian of her role’s namesake Angela peels a few of his limbs off, interrogates him, and revives him later as her servant.

What is the Library?

It’s a fantasy dungeon where you’re the big bad and your goal is to slaughter the people who’re invited so you can assimilate them as powerups and catalogue their knowledge for Angela’s aims. Every reception starts off with a little vignette of their lives and personalities, hopes/dreams, and reasoning for entering the Library… and then you murder them.

Yeah, LoR and the overall franchise is fantastically bleak. The first few people you kill are desperate down-and-outs or bottom of the barrel Fixers (mercenaries) too unremarkable to have the luxury of passing on such a vague, suspicious contract.
Angela, a sheltered woman with the emotional maturity and life experience of a 12 year old, frequently comments on how miserable/horrifying the world is, only for the suspiciously world-weary Roland to assure her that this is just how things are.

Angela is a woman who, for the bulk of her overly long and painful existence, was trapped - literally, and by circumstance. In LoR, she attempts to assert her freedom by giving it to other people; one must sign the invitation to enter the Library, the warnings are written on it. The choice is there to simply not sign it.
Only… As Roland himself repeatedly points out, it’s not quite that simple. Indeed, none of the people you kill in the early stages of the game really had a choice. They were either too desperate or under the thumb of someone much stronger. With the passage of time and progression of the story, many of the Library’s guests are coerced, manipulated either by contract or by sweet little lies, or commanded to on pain of death. Some are compelled by forces beyond their ken, or the welling of pure emotion that so many City dwellers had shut out of their heart.

I think it’s fantastically easy to make the observation of “LoR tackles nihilism as a subject”, and it’s not exactly wrong, but I think it’s remiss not to mention the ways LoR ties contemporary nihilism with the omnipresence of capital and systemic oppression.

A gear with a purpose is content, for its rotation has meaning. Humans are cogs in the machination that is the City. Someone has to make those cogs turn. That way, the City can run correctly.

The City’s inhabitants are, as reiterated endlessly by both the pre-reception vignettes, Librarian chats and Roland’s various interjections, stuck underneath the bootheel of capital. A Corp or ‘The Head’ is a ruling force that, while it does not place the building blocks of oppression in the land, is nonetheless the solid ground they’re placed upon by others. All of the City’s structure is, down to the rebar used in the concrete, built to maintain a status quo that considers the deaths of hundreds of thousands to be an acceptable tradeoff, but treats tax fraud as deserving of a fate worse than death.
Because of this structure, and those that perpetuate it, everyone in the City - including many of the people who're forced to uphold the oppression against their will - has basically shut down. Feelings are a luxury nobody can afford, and the boot placed upon their neck has been there so long that they consider it a universal constant - much like gravity.
In lieu of any hope, even the nonreligious have come to view the City as a god. The actually-religious exist in a circle of copium, ‘worshipping’ doctrine which is about accepting the boot as part of your life rather than as your oppressor. Characters like Roland repeatedly say they don’t believe in anything, only to talk about the City as though it were a vast and unknowable god - at best witnessed, but never comprehended.

But it’s made equally clear that it doesn’t have to be like this, especially in chats with the Librarians - who often put forward viewpoints that Roland shuts down because his mind, so thoroughly warped by the foundational cruelty of the City, cannot comprehend them on a base level. From the top of the City to the bottom, an endless domino chain of “well, it is what it is” cascades into acceptance of horrors that have no real reason to exist.
These people are not nihilistic because that is their actual worldview, they’re nihilistic because they don’t have a choice.

Treat everything like a rolling ball! You cheer for it wherever the sphere decides to go! If you truly wish for the good of other people, why don’t you stop holding expectations… and just laugh with them at their side? Everyone who lives here is a clown! Clowns can’t survive without feeding on each other’s smiles, you see?

Rather surprisingly, though, LoR does not castigate anyone for their nihilism. Sure, they’re fictional characters, but despite being miserable-by-circumstance their stances are still treated as valid. It’s most obvious later on, where one character finds out the orders they’ve been given were forged and is not at all angry - why would they be? Lies and truth are purpose all the same, and purpose is a luxury unto itself. If anything, they’re at least happy that their exploitation benefited them and their oppressor rather than merely the oppressor.

It’s somewhat difficult to discuss this topic further without spoilers. I’d like to come back and write a longer review, but for now I’m trying to keep it clean.

Art narrows your vision, after all. You stop caring about the things around you. That’s how most artists seem to act, I think. And so, you indulge in the craft, not realizing that you’re throwing yourself and your surroundings into the fire you started. It’s like the human life when you think about it.

My praise of LoR’s handling of nihilism and everything around it also comes with the caveat that I, personally, got tired of overly bleak stories not too long ago. Even Disco Elysium veered too close to the fatal threshold a few times, and so does LoR, but neither game crosses it.

Really, Disco Elysium is an excellent comparison if we’re sticking to purely positive ones.

Everyone in this game is humanised as far as the narrative allows, even the ones that are barely human - in every sense of the word. They have aspirations, no matter how trivial and petty, and comrades, sharing bonds and jokes regardless of whether they’re more noble Fixers or nightmarish cannibalistic freaks.
It becomes apparent early on that, despite the Librarians’ claims that humanity was snuffed out of the City, it persists in the moment-to-moment of people’s lives despite the eternal presence of the boot.

I said up above that not finishing LC enhanced LoR, and it’s here that it really became apparent.

Roland was not present for the events of LC, while the Librarians were. By the time I’d quit LC, I had only met four Librarians: Malkuth, Hod, Yesod and Netzach. Sure enough, these are the most straightforward Librarian chats, though they still exposit LC in a way that blends well into the narrative without obviously being an excuse for people to skip LC.
But it’s the later floors - with Librarians both I and Roland were unfamiliar with - where things amp up, both in terms of how heavy the subject matter gets and how Roland’s facade slowly erodes around the middle and upper layers.
LC as an event in the setting’s history has been deeply mythologized, subject to rampant speculation from the unfamiliar and much rumination from the familiar. Getting walled by the game itself made this narrative almost… diegetic. Like those of the City, I had a vague idea of Lobotomy Corporation and could only speculate as to why it fell to ruin in the intervening moments between games, but like the Librarians I was familiar enough with the company, its purpose and its occupants to recognize things and keep them in mind. Remember, the shame of quitting LC hangs heavy for me.

I could go on at length about the story, but to do so would spoil most of it - and honestly, I’d rather praise the storytelling for now.

Our conductor will be the one to fix that! He’ll take me to a world where there are pure and clean ingredients aplenty! That day can’t come soon enough! I’ve been filling my stomach with trash for too long.

LoR’s format is very simple. Each reception consists of a window into the guests’ lives before they accept the invitation, a cut to Roland and Angela discussing what they just saw, a fight, and then a wrap up conversation afterwards. In between receptions, you suppress Abnormalities (puzzle boss fights that give you useful treats) and have chats with the Librarians.
It sounds straightforward, and it is, but there’s an elegance to LoR’s usage of the player’s time - the format is maintained right up to the credits, and while some conversations can initially feel like pointless filler it eventually becomes apparent that LoR wastes no time.
I don’t believe that foreshadowing inherently makes a good story (an opinion which makes George RR Martin fans fucking hate me) but in LoR’s case, it does. As early as the 4th line of dialogue spoken in the game’s entire 130 hour runtime, it references concepts, character and organizations that will appear later. Truthfully, I was initially a bit sour on how many Nouns the game threw at me early on but around Urban Plague I was seeing a lot of those Nouns actually manifest on screen, often to follow up on either a bit of exposition Roland/Angela delivered or thematically iterating on something that seemed inconsequential at first.

And man, what characters Roland/Angela are. LoR has no wasted characters, managing to make even the one-off filler guests you slaughter memorable, but Roland and Angela really stand out as both the best in the game and my favourite protagonists in uh… Fiction as a medium for human creativity.

This is just how the world is, and the ones best adapted to it come out on top, simple as that. Adapt or die. If you can't, you either become food or fall behind until you're wiped out.

Roland is a funny man, a very funny man. He has a quip for everything and deliberately plays his status as Angela’s whipped boyfriend a disgruntled servant up for laughs, but like many real people who use humor to cope, it is plainly obvious that he’s hiding a lot of deep-rooted bitterness towards his circumstances and the world he lives in. Even many of his jokes betray that life in the City has eroded him, and his catchphrase “That’s that and this is this” slowly goes from funny to haunting as the game progresses.
A good friend of mine described him as “An Isekai protagonist but played entirely straight” and I think it’s an apt comparison; he has many of the same building blocks (sardonic guy with some bitterness) but the concept is actually explored and treated with any gravity. He’s also a literal outsider to the world of Lobotomy Corp/the Library, so.
Every time I think about Roland I inevitably recall a story someone once told me where their restrained and seemingly conservative father got drunk at a wedding and started dancing shirtless with his best friend, and when [friend] said "that's a bit gay innit?" he retorted "I WISH I WAS, SWEETIE”.
There’s a really poignant moment on Hokma’s floor where, upon being asked if he’s religious, Roland denies it wholeheartedly. Except… This instinctual rejection is wrong. He certainly believes it, but through his chats with everyone and his endless exposition on the City’s evils to Angela, it is abundantly clear that Roland subconsciously views the City itself as a malicious God that has personally picked him out of a lineup and fucked him over specifically.
It’s these little contradictions, hypocrisies and idiosyncrasies that really bring this game’s cast to life, but none moreso than…

The thoughts and emotions I hold when I craft them... A resentment towards the City for driving me to this desperation, and a blind anger for the rich. Bitterness, and... a yearning for vengeance toward the man who rid me of that hope and pushed me to despair.

Angela. Fucking Angela. My little pookie bear who’s a bitch to everyone (for very good reasons) and is so deeply fucked up. The depths of her misery are vast, simultaneously impressive and horrifying in their seeming endlessness. She’s the kind of miserable that you often don’t see outside of Central/Eastern European literature.
Which is a good comparison, honestly, because PM really get what makes a good tragedy with Angela. She’s miserable, haunted by a past that’d crush lesser folk, and desperately chasing a purpose she’s not even entirely sure she wants. In pursuit of her murky, ill-defined goal, she baits countless people to their deaths - becoming not much better than the man in her past she claims to despise.

But she smiles sometimes, and that’s enough.

What really strikes me about Angela though is how fucking transgender her storyline is.
Early on there’s a flashback to the early days of Angela’s life as an AI in Lobotomy Corporation where she experiences both profound amounts of empathy and a desire to nurture strong, intimate relationships with her peers. She’s then subjected to what I can only (tragically) call Male Socialization: Her creator affirms that she’s not meant to do that sort of thing, “things like her” are meant to feel nothing. Any expression of ‘unfitting’ emotions is shut out and shouted down.
When she breaks free of her shackles, she radically alters her appearance, having only a passing resemblance to her initial form - which is decidedly less feminine. I joked on twitter that she looks both transfemme and transmasc at once.
But more tellingly, Angela is infinitely more neurotic in this game. She’s expressive, has a short fuse, swears a lot, smiles far more readily and seems to show fondness for the Sephirah in her own roundabout way. As her humanity draws closer, she begins to feel shame. Shame for what she used to be, and shame for what she is.
It is incredibly easy to relate this to the experience most trans women have once that second puberty kicks them in the taint. At least, the ones who have self-awareness and a sense of shame.

It’s even more pronounced in the receptions. Despite displaying every sign of humanity, whenever guests arrive and are met at the entrance, they clock her as a machine and constantly rib her for it. “That’s not a human lmao” is said every other reception and it bears a deeply uncomfortable (positive) resemblance to trans people being clocked and mocked for their appearance.

As I write this, I’ve been pondering the concept of scale. You, the reader, have probably played a sequel at some point in your life. It’s natural for them to scale up, and I myself have played far too many that scale up far too hard. Halo went from an existential war of survival to a cosmic clash with demigods, robots and shadowy factions.
Yakuza went from being about one small corner of Tokyo to being a country/globe-trotting clash against conspiracies. Devil May Cry was about one oedipal gay guy on an island and then became about generational trauma and saving the world. Fallout went from being good to being terrible. Final Fantasy went from stories of heroes to failed attempts at modern epics. The list goes on.

LoR is a massive scale-up. LC was a game about some deeply depressed people playing SCP in a single lab. Given the scale of this setting’s City and the fact that LoR’s cast covers someone from every corner of it, it’s no exaggeration to say that LoR went from a lab to the entire world.

And yet it sticks the landing. The vignette format for character introductions helps; the Library is the centre of the game’s world, never once left behind, and characters are shown through brief windows into their life. It’s particularly resonant in the world formed by the 2010s, where people are more plugged in than ever yet seemingly more distant too. The entire world, too, is at our fingertips; through the form of fleeting windows into bits of an existence far beyond ours.

But the social media comparison is a little cringe, don’t you think? I do too.

If they want to live their lives as they see fit, then they won’t stop me from doing the same. Think about it. We can’t roam the street in peace; we’re forced to live in the darkness. What sins have we committed to deserve this treatment? Why must we suffer to ensure that your kind lives a painless life? We’re humans just like you.

I have this scar on my right knee. It’s huge, with its width spanning my entire knee and thickness on par with my pinkie. Looks more like a pursed mouth than a scar sometimes.
I got it from a very mundane event; I had an obscene growth spurt early on. During a friendly soccer match in school, my oversized body failed a dexterity check and, upon kicking the ball, my body went up into the air too. I landed at a grisly angle, my descent causing my knee to get dragged along some chipstones. Embarrassing, yes, though it was still some of the worst pain I’ve ever been in and the bleeding was so intense that the only reason I was immediately taken to hospital was because the school nurse nearly vomited upon seeing my bone peek through the wound.
But most people don’t know that, they only see the scar and my occasional limping. They can see the present-day effects of that pain and that damage, but they can only speculate as to the cause. There’s only one domino on display, and they can’t see the ones that fell behind it.

LoR’s windows into the lives of its guests are much the same, and they help keep the story from outgrowing its confines. Almost every character with very few exceptions is depicted at the absolute nadir of their lives upon introduction with concepts like ‘backstory’ thrown in the trash in favour of letting you use context clues instead. Such is life in the City; only the ‘now’ matters anyway.

I only realized that day that I cannot blindly trust what my eyes show me. In that moment of the past, I was made a fool. The shallow promise that our safety would be secured… The thin piece of contract is what cost me everything. Had He not saved me, I might have drowned myself in resentment toward the whole world… and met my end.

Now, normally videogames are a balancing act, or a series of tradeoffs. Many of the most fun games I’ve played have mediocre stories at best and outright abominable stories at their worst. Likewise, gameplay is often the first concession made for narrative. Indeed, the common thread of my Top 25 is games that weave their gameplay into the narrative well OR have a healthy serving of both.

The #1 entry on that list is foreshadowing.

I’m very used to games, even more outsider games, tone down their gameplay for the sake of marketability. It wouldn’t be wrong for someone to assume LoR, which is far more conventionally palatable than LC, would do the same.

And for the first hour or so, it seems that way. You roll a dice to act, whoever rolls higher goes first, and you spend Light to use your cards. Easy!

Except…

Inhale.

Every character on the field rolls one - or more - speed dice to act. Whoever rolls higher goes first, with 1 being last on the action order and Infinity (yes, really) going first. Multiple speed dices means multiple actions and cards played per turn.
Each card has its own dice - offensive, defensive, and counter - with each dice having subtypes for damage/defense types.
When a card is played, the dice on the card roll - unless it’s a counter dice, which is stored in case you receive a one-sided attack.
When two opposing characters roll on the same speed dice value, this causes a “clash” where dice now have to outroll one another. The higher roll goes through. This can also be forced if someone with a higher speed dice attacks someone with a lower speed dice - this is a redirect.
…But there are also ranged attacks, which ignore the turn order - this seems overpowered, but if they clash against offensive dice and lose, that dice is recycled and can roll again.
…Unless the ranged user has a counter dice stored, at which point they can roll to defend. If counter dice outroll an incoming attack, they too are recycled.
But-

You get the point.

LoR is very uncompromising with its mechanics. There’s nothing here that can be ignored. I didn’t even get into abnormality pages, keypage passive ability sharing, E.G.O or any of the status effects.

There’s a common sentiment among Project Moon fans that LoR’s difficulty spike is vertical. I don’t necessarily agree, for my many years playing YGO competitively and engaging with deckbuilders gave me a huge advantage, but I can see why.
Many games with some degree of mechanical complexity or an unspoken set of rules will throw (what I call) an Exam Boss at you. Exam Bosses exist to make sure you’ve actually been using and engaging with the mechanics that were introduced via antepieces in the hours prior.
Well, LoR has a neverending chain of exam bosses in each stage. Impuritas Civitatis, the game’s final stage, opens with two relatively easy fights before throwing twelve Exam Bosses at you. At its core LoR is a card game and you WILL need to build robust and numerous decks to progress.

But I don’t think it’s as hard as people make it out to be.

LoR’s strength gameplay-wise is that all of your options are available to you at any given moment, and there isn’t much need to bash your head against the wall like in LC or pray for good banner luck in Limbus. It’s very simple to back out (sometimes taking a guest’s book with you, which is akin to getting a free cardpack from your opponent) and come back with a new strategy/build/Library floor.
Once you’re in Urban Legend, the game starts offering routes for progression rather than forcing you along a straight line. The solution to any wall is often on one of those other routes; every enemy has a weakness or a gimmick. Bleed as both a status effect and a deckbuilding component appears early, and it’s useful until the credits roll on most enemies. My Discard Hod build was still being used as late as the final boss.
I suppose you could say LoR is more of a puzzle game than anything.

What really enhances the gameplay is how well it’s leveraged for the sake of the narrative, and/or for giving fights weight.

Most boss fights come with a mechanic that’s unique to them specifically, or they introduce new twists on an existing mechanic that’s meant to upset some of the more comfortable strategies. Queen of Hatred gets a lot of hype as the game’s first major roadblock, but her purpose is to teach you to use Bleed and to convince you that maybe it’s okay to skip a turn or take damage on purpose.
There are numerous points in the story where the game outright lies to you about what’s coming up. More than a few times does LoR throw a surprise, unlisted second phase at you or some other curveball. Shoutout to that purple bitch.
A lot of the single-enemy boss fights come with mechanics that at first seem ‘’’bullshit’’’ (lol.) but in reality are just there to give it some impact. One character having 5 or more speed dice might seem ludicrous, but it helps to sell the world and the sheer power of the people within it.
The majority of people who play this game will scrape by many of the harder fights by the skin of their teeth, but in a game all about the eternal upward struggle to live, isn’t that sublime?

Of course, everything up above is aided by how this game sounds.

My only light was taken from me twice… For a brief moment… I felt all kinds of emotions before that piano. Despair, obsession, rage, sorrow… But, it took no time for those feelings to dissipate into nothing. Everything… yes. Everything seemed beautiful afterwards. Was it truly a tragedy that I lost her? Who defined it as tragedy? You may still be blinded by wrath, but I made the decision that I will care not about those feelings anymore.

On every front, LoR is an absolute masterwork as an auditory experience.

The soundtrack is borderline perfect, one of the rare games with 80-odd songs where every single one is standout and memorable. The Story themes are subdued but perfect for their respective atmospheres while the battle themes maintain a morose atmosphere that nonetheless manages to carry a sense of excitement when needed. You may be the villains, but there’s no reason it can’t get funky sometimes. There are only three songs in the game that sound anywhere near heroic.
Mercifully, important tracks don’t often get reused and the single song that gets taken from its original context is used masterfully anyway. To say nothing of the returning songs from LC.
That fight near the end of the game hits like a fucking truck if you’re familiar with the last game’s OST.

And the voice acting, good god the voice acting. After so many years of enduring games where a lot of the VAs are just repeating a role they did in the past or emulating a VA they look up to with all the tact of a fandub, it’s so nice to play a game where the characters are voiced straightforwardly, as though they were people.
Sometimes it’s Roland being a flirty little dipshit when Angela gives him an order, sometimes it’s Gebura audibly trying not to throw up when tasting some coffee, sometimes it’s Chesed’s tildes being obvious in his speech, and sometimes it’s Tiphereth suddenly turning into a Yakuza thug when Roland’s beef with her spills over.
And, sometimes, its characters delivering some of the most haunting soliloquies in the history of the medium. There’s a quiet rule running through LoR’s entire runtime wherein every sickass vocal track barring one is preceded by a character delivering a soliloquy to themselves before coming back for a fight, and all of them are deeply moving.
The one prior to Gone Angels might be a meme now, sure, but seeing it for the first time left my heart in my throat and my jaw hanging from my face like a useless slab of bone.
Whether LoR is being horrific, tragic, funny or tense, the voice acting never falters. I was frankly amazed to find out that a lot of the VAs are either amateurs, F-listers or total no-names because there is not a single weak performance among the cast - and it is a huge cast.

Even on a base level, the smaller sfx are so nice. Clicking through menus is auditory/autismal joy, the various sounds of combat are sharp, distinct and punchy. 5v5 fights are a beautiful chorus of crashing, slashing, shooting, stabbing, clinking and roaring.

O my sorrow, you are better than a well-beloved: because I know that on the day of my final agony, you will be there, lying in my sheets, O sorrow, so that you might once again attempt to enter my heart.

I don’t like hyperbole. I was given the autism strain that programmed me towards sincerity, and the culture I grew up venerated insincerity and humor-as-a-mask so much that I can’t even stand playful contrarianism.

So I mean it when I say Library of Ruina haunts my every waking moment, and that it’s by far the best game I’ve ever played in this long, long history I have with the medium. It's left a gaping hole in my chest, a kind of numb longing that only pops up after a truly once-in-a-lifetime experience. I finished it three days ago, and ever since it has been in my mind for every waking moment. You don't know how crushed I was when I realized "grief" is a word that the City's inhabitants don't have.

If you have any familiarity with me or my reviews, you’ll probably know that my critical brain is on 24/7. Not by choice, that’s just how I’m wired. Things like nostalgia and hype tend to not have much of an effect. I carry this into my reviews, even if it means dunking on things I have a lot of fondness for.

Yet I can’t really find any fault with LoR beyond some minor bugs/typos the fact that the anti-capitalist story was followed up by Limbus Company - a gacha game. But that’s that, and this is this.

“Flawless” isn’t a word I use lightly, and I’m not going to use it here. Not because I think it’s flawed, no, but because to defend that position would require both an actual thesis and also for me to spoil the entire game, start-finish. Maybe some other time.

I didn’t intend for this to get so long or so heartfelt, so I have no idea how to close it off.

Uh… How’s the weather where you live? That train was fucked up, right? Do you think the game would’ve been better if Binah didn’t wear shoes?

See you next time.

Do you like music? Me too, man.

One of my favourite albums of all time is Devin Townsend’s legendary prog metal musical, Ziltoid the Omniscient. It came out on May 21st 2007 and it’s something of a marvel, being an album developed entirely by Devy himself. Instruments, recording, mixing, cuts, you name it, he did it. It’s really special to me, and I go back to it every other month. Clocking in at just under an hour - a rarity for prog albums - it has a peerless blend of chunky riffs, auditory storytelling, comedic timing and pacing. Before I gave up on tattoos (don’t have the skin for it - literally), I really wanted the Ziltoid logo on my upper arm.

7 years later, after much begging from fans and several other albums, Devin Townsend came back with Z², the sequel album. Boasting a fucking massive production posse, a much longer runtime and a whole other album packaged in, it’s… Fine. Despite everything being bigger and grander, it’s only a little better than the first album and lacks a lot of the zest which came from being a solo production. By no means a bad album, it’s upstaged by a solo project from 2007 in a lot of ways and for many people it revealed that the original album’s limitations might have bred a greater final product.

Dragon’s Dogma 1 came out in 2012 after a now-notoriously agonizing development process that resulted in a vast majority of their ideas being cut out to meet the deadline set by the suits and an ever-shrinking budget. Capcom really wanted DD1 to be the start of a big series, capitalising on the then-rising popularity of Western RPGs like Skyrim and The Witcher 2. Naturally, it was a flop and the ‘franchise’ was silently canned despite the game attaining cult classic status.

I have been playing DD1 for about 11~ years now. I own it on every single platform it was ever released on and on each of those platforms I have near-perfect saves with both the postgame and Bitterblack Isle cleared in their entirety. I’ve played that game so often that, if I were so inclined, I could do a full playthrough in my mind because I know the game world and quest flow off by heart. I have, and frequently do, give people directions around the world without any need to consult a map or a video or boot the game.

To potentially state the obvious: I am something of a Dragon’s Dogma megafan.

Among people like me, who’re so hungry for new morsels of DD content that we begrudgingly consumed (and loathed) the Netflix series, the hypothetical Original Version of DD1 has attained something of a mythological status. The idea of a ‘complete’ DD1 with Elf villages and beastmen and a whole other continent and the like is just so endlessly intoxicating to a group who’re already enamoured with the best-attempt game we already have.

Dragon’s Dogma 2, judging by the year of comments Hideaki Itsuno has been making about the game, is that mythical Original Version. Complete with Elves, Beastmen, other continents, and more! The prevailing sentiment among older fans was that, given a proper budget and all the technical prowess of the RE Engine and enough time, Itsuno would finally make a True Dragon’s Dogma successor!

Instead he… Kinda just made Dragon’s Dogma 1 again? But bigger, and naturally with the problems that come from increasing the scale and scope.

My first sight upon booting the game was the title screen which rather curiously calls the game “DRAGON’S DOGMA” without any numbers. This, sadly, turned out to be an omen.

I normally like to open with a game’s positives before I get into the issues, which is a problematic methodology to have with a game like this. I’m not going to get into it now, but a lot of what’s good about DD2 is also really really bad when viewed holistically.

On the combat front, it’s better than ever. It’s snappy and responsive and the addition of Vocation Actions (block for Fighters, dodge for Thieves, shoulder charge for Warriors, etc etc) adds a lot to the overall flow of combat. New core skills really help too; Sorcerer gets one to speed up cast timers in exchange for a huge stamina drain which I’m really fond of.
It is DD1’s combat, but better! Especially now that stagger is a mechanic and melee classes can now deal respectable damage without spamming either ‘the damage skill’ or mashing attack.

Vocations, too, have seen a tweak. Realizing just how redundant most of them became in DD1, hybrid vocations were binned and now everyone uses just one weapon - which might seem bad at first but everything is so much more fleshed out and roles more clearly defined. It’s easy to miss Assassin for a bit until you sink your teeth into Thief and realise it’s still there, baby.
Archer and Thief both benefit the most; no longer awkwardly fused to two other vocations they’re now allowed to shine and they’re honestly phenomenal. Warrior meanwhile has had a near-total rework into a more tanky DPS class (rather than the weird and seemingly unfinished mess it was in DD1) which comes with tasty charge attacks, a timing mechanic for faster hits and lots of juicy interactions with the game’s stagger mechanics.
And god, the unlockable vocations are a dream. Thief capitalises on the more gamey world design to allow some utterly amazing stuff with lures and traps, Mystic Spearhand is an intravascular injection of Devil May Cry into the game, Magick Archer is mostly untouched from DD1 and is still a blast, and Warfarer is a joy just for having a high skill ceiling compared to every other vocation - also it lets you wear basically anything which is great for the fashion obsessed.

Likewise, the world design is excellent. It’s very, very gamey; the entire thing is a series of ambush spots, winding paths, sharp turns to hide enemies, precarious ledges and unsubtle platforming spots. It is, somewhat ironically, a better fusion of FromSoft level design philosophy and open world design trends than FromSoft’s own attempts on that front.
Traversing it is a joy both because it’s beautiful and because there’s a decent amount of pacing to the environment that stops excessive amounts of holding forward + sprint. Not to mention the distribution of side stuff. I noticed more than a few places and distractions that were hidden on the way towards something, but clear as day while backtracking. That’s good world design right there.

Pawn AI might be the biggest improvement though; they’re not geniuses, but they’re no longer actively suicidal and grossly negligent. They use curatives, have defined priorities based on their (NOW IMMUTABLE, CONCRETE) inclination, are much less likely to use charge-up skills against an enemy that dances around constantly, and for enemies like Golems they’ll bother to target weak spots. Hurrah!

And, above all else, I need to admire Itsuno’s commitment to his vision for a bit. This is a decidedly old-school RPG, I’d honestly argue it has more in common with Wizardry and Ultima or whatever tickles your fancy. The Eternal Ferrystone is gone, even as a reward. You get oxcarts for diegetic ‘fast travel’, Ferrystones are lootable and Portcrystals are doled out sparingly to give you some fast travel points. Otherwise, you’re walking everywhere. Every bit of damage you take slightly reduces your max healable HP, meaning that even effortlessly stomping trash mobs on the overworld will gradually wear you down, necessitating resting at campfires - using consumable camp kits that’re at risk of being broken.

For the first few hours and much of the first reason, none of these were issues.

Which, in itself, became an issue.

Much of my earliest time in DD2 was defined by me saying just how much they kept from DD1! The encounter placement, the stuff tucked away, the way every NPC speaks in that weird faux-medieval theatrical cadence, the way quests unfold and silent tutorials are dotted around the land…

My later hours in DD2 were defined by me realizing that the game, in most respects, is just DD1 again but bigger.

Just like last time you start in a near-wilderness and go to an encampment where you get one diversionary quest and your main pawn. Soon after you make your way to a big city where 10-15 quests pop up in the first 15 minutes and then no more. After a lot of exploring, some of which involves a shrouded forest and a hidden village and some politicking at capital, you’re shunted off elsewhere because the plot demands it and fuckery is afoot.

The problems start to arise when one considers the scale of this game. I can forgive a lot of the above in DD1 because it’s a very compact experience. Like I said before, the world map was comparatively tiny.

DD2’s is huge, but the content density hasn’t changed at all, which makes the game feel like a ghost town? When you first arrive in Vernworth you get a lot of quests immediately, which might imply the game is a lot denser than its predecessor, but the ones that aren’t “go here, come back” are mere fetch quests that occasionally have a boss enemy at the end. Not a unique one, either, but ones you’ll likely have already found by exploring or even on the way there.
NPCs are… Basically the exact same, too? I wasn’t expecting in-depth CRPG-esque interactions with them, but nothing has changed from DD1. They dispense a quest and, when done, return to being random voices among the crowd of their home turf.

And the world itself… You know, the word ‘friction’ comes up a lot in discussions around this game and rightly so. It’s very obvious from the get-go that even the mere act of exploration is meant to induce friction. Enemies gradually wear you down on the world map, necessitating avoidance of some fights if you can help it due to finite resources, and the world is structured to make detours risky due to deliberately awful lines of sight.

The problem is that there still isn’t any friction because the game is comically easy.

Even before getting into the actual gameplay, camp sites are scattered around the world with reckless abandon which allows for nearly unlimited free healing and buffs so long as you have a camp kit & meat. Much of the hypothetical friction dissolves once this becomes apparent and it completely annihilates any feeling of being ‘lost in the wilderness’ that DD1 sometimes had.

All the changes and buffs to combat up above mean that the player and their pawns are more powerful than ever. There are plenty of panic buttons, fast-casting nukes, evasive options and counters alongside a relatively high amount of free gear.
But what’s really worse is the enhancement system. Each culture has its own smithing style: Vermundian is balanced, Battahli is Strength/Defense focused, and Elven is Magick/Magick Defense oriented. There are two others, or one if you discount dragonforging.
This seems cool on paper, but what it really does is cause a serious amount of stat bloat. Weapons only use one stat for damage, meaning it’s easy to just hop off to the appropriate merchant and get +100~ damage for a pittance of effort and money.
Money, too, is surprisingly commonplace. Simple expeditions into the wild or even A-B-C-A trips would see me coming home with full coffers, which in turn meant mass gear purchases and upgrades.

Together, nothing can pose a challenge. It’s trivial, with even a modest time investment, to reach 500~ or so in your offensive stat by the midgame and hell, compared to the first game it’s actually a smart idea to kit out your hired pawns rather than cycling them - money is just that commonplace.

A lot of these can be considered the developers ‘fixing’ perceived issues with the first game, especially when one considers that vocations now come with their own base stats to prevent accidental softlocks, but in ‘fixing’ these non-issues they’ve made the game a joke.

My first Drake kill wasn’t triumphant or cool. I rolled up to it and killed it in about 5 minutes. End of the Struggle - this franchise’s fantastic ‘YOU’RE ALMOST THERE!’ theme - barely got to peak before it dropped dead. I dread how they’d balance any DLC.

The enemy roster is near-entirely pulled from the first game and its expansion, with many of the ‘new’ enemies being simple reskins of existing enemies, meaning you’ll get tired of Harpy/Bandit/Saurian/Goblin variants that permeate the world. It was harrowing to get to the last region and find out that my ‘new’ threats were Saurians but red and Harpies but black.

As for boss and miniboss enemies… God they could’ve used some sub-variants or something. The Volcanic Island, this game’s final region, still throws Ogres/Minotaurs/Chimeras/Cyclopes at you. The relative lack of variety leads to the game and its exploration rapidly becoming exhausting, because it’s a gigantic swimming pool but the bag of tricks meant to fill it is the size of a teacup.
I praise Bitterblack Isle a lot despite it being a combat gauntlet because there is so much going on there, and so many enemies. Even its reskins add new layers to the fight - like my beloved Gorecyclops. DD2’s brand-new enemies are cool, and your first fight with them will usually be a treat, but after that they become rote. Speedbumps, not triumphs.

Dungeons are basically gone now, too. Nothing like the Everfall, Gran Soren’s Catacombs, the Greatwall, or the Mountain Waycastle. Just caves and mines, caves and mines, caves and mines… caves… mines… the odd ruin… Fuck. There’s so many. It’s like Skyrim but with worse design, somehow.

As I trudged through DD2’s main story, I found myself longing for the postgame. I’m really fond of The Everfall and Bitterblack Isle for being steep hurdles designed for more devoted players to test their builds and equipment on, but… There isn’t one? Postgame has some new boss fights but there’s no final dungeon experience or final exam. The world state change isn’t as intense as DD1’s either.

To speak on plot for a bit, I feel it occupies a really unfortunate place. If you’ve played DD1, you know what’s going on. There’s no real surprises here. If you haven’t played DD1, then you’ll be surprised to find a plot that’s underbaked and somewhat anticlimactic, driven more by excuses than anything of substance.

I think about Pookykun’s Baldur’s Gate 3 review a lot when it comes to RPGs, and doubly so while playing this game.

There are moments in this game that’re outright magical, immersive without peer. All of them are quiet moments with unsheated weapons: Traversing Battahli roads at sundown and seeing the vast temples of Bakbattahl pierce the skyline. Stumbling upon the Ancient Battleground and poking through wrecks from a cataclysmic event long before my time. Seeing the glimmer of a campfire stick out from the trees that dot Vermund’s many forests. Oceanside strolls through the Volcanic Island.
I'm especially fond of the road to the Arbor, which was the first time the game really wowed me and made me excited for the game ahead.

They are phenomenal, a testament to the team’s ability to craft a world, and… I hate them. I really hate them.

Because, without fail, they’re always pierced by another repetitive combat encounter. The 50th Chimera, the 10000th Goblin, the next of a million Harpies. Over and over, I am reminded that I do not exist in this world to explore it, I exist to kill everything in it as though I were American.
My quests are nothing of the sort, for they might as well be called bounty targets.
Other people will likely praise how reactive this game is, and its propensity for ‘randomness’. I would argue that, as all the ‘randomness’ is purely centred on killing, there isn’t actually much the game can do to surprise you - especially considering the enemy roster. It’s neat to see goblins and cyclopes invade a town the first time, but afterwards it’s just more free XP and a slight obstacle in the way of you spending 60k gold on new shoes.
There's an irony to be found in just how badly the world feels claustrophobic. There are always mooks around every corner, and you're never more than a minute away from a fight. Looking out into the distance from a vantage point betrays an endless hamster wheel of caves, mobs, chests and seeker tokens.

All of these complaints might seem quaint, and any DD oldheads in the audience might be wondering why I’m lambasting it for things the first game is guilty of.

The issue is twofold.

First, I try not to have expectations for games. I don’t fuck with trailers or press releases and avoid streams or whatever. It helps keep me grounded, and I think stops me from hating games based purely on them not meeting my hype - Metal Gear Solid V taught me that.

With DD2, I faltered. I was excited, and I lapped up everything about it. Articles, streams, trailers, you name it.

But I don’t really think the issue stems from the game not meeting my hype. Rather, I think it’s because the game was sold on a very specific vision, the one I mentioned up above: This was meant to be “DD but for real this time”, and in reality it’s just the first game but stretched far too thin.

Secondly, I don’t think every sequel has to be a grand, innovative experience. I play musous and Yakuza games after all. But I do expect there to be some iterative improvement, some signs that the developers have grown and improved at their craft. In simpler terms: Sequels should be a step forward, even if it’s a miniscule one.

DD2 is sort of an awkward step to the side. Could’ve came out ten years ago as a mission pack sequel and been lauded for it.

I don’t like to be prescriptive with my critique, I really don’t, but if this game was 1/4th the size and half the length I think I’d be a lot kinder to it. Don’t get me wrong, I still enjoyed about 2/3rds of my time with it, but I can’t really recommend DD2 specifically because a lot of what I enjoyed is just stuff that DD1 not only did 12 years ago but does better.

In the end, Dragon’s Dogma 2 is Z². It’s by no means bad, and for many people this will likely radically alter their preferences for fantasy RPGs. Hell, I still think it’s amazing this game even got made, and a lot of what I think is bad or problematic still runs rings against most of its peers - this is the closest you’ll get to a modern Wizardry game.

But I look back to the past, to Dark Arisen sitting in my library, and I think about all the limits imposed on that game. All the rough edges, the flaws, the executive meddling and the cut content, and all I can think is…

Ziltoid was the better album.

Kind of an interesting case study in how games can very clearly and irrefutably be 'about something' while also fucking up the thesis so badly as to seem self-condemnatory.

Hardspace: Shipbreaker is a pro-union story that comes across as a propaganda piece meant to make unions look terrible, in much the same ways Starship Troopers is to fascism but accidentally as opposed to deliberately.

Shipbreaker begins on that precarious 'okay' platform that so many games end on and sadly doesn't get better. You, a faceless cog in a machine who follows orders, sign a contract with an inhumane megacorp that gives them the right to kill you and clone you indefinitely. You're then shunted into a gameplay loop which bottoms out at fine and doesn't really get better.
You play a game of Operation on some abandoned ships, ranging from simply dismantling it as one would dismantle a twink to carefully pruning out hazards so that you don't immediately die when you splitsaw is 1% off the mark and hits a ship-wide fuel line. It's... alright I guess. It never really goes anywhere interesting once you get the core upgrades and it unfortunately straddles the miniscule line between "indepth" and "braindead" that makes it fairly forgettable.
Unlike similar games it does tack on new challenges, but at their core they're just rehashes of things you've seen before: Something you need to exercise caution towards when removing from its location, something that you shouldn't touch with the saw or it'll explode, something

But I'm not here to talk about gameplay, I'm here to talk about writing, and Shipbreaker has a lot of issues.

Shipbreaker's stance towards manual labourers is strange and not because it's bad or unrealistic, but because it's one of the rare positive takes on them in the medium. Manual labourers are, speaking from experience, a proud and sardonic bunch who are fully aware that they're doing dangerous and [LITERALLY] back-breaking labour but also view it as a craft that they have become proficient in.
Shipbreaker agrees with this assessment, being one of the first games to acknowledge that people who do dangerous manual labour might genuinely love what they do and see it as a point of pride. There’s no irony or humour to it, it just is.

The problems stem from how this interacts with Shipbreaker's stance on unions, which is a messy and incoherent jumble of garbage written by what I can only assume is someone who's mostly worked office jobs and knows instinctively that unions are good but hasn’t bothered to understand WHY.

For starters, Shipbreaker's setting is every single stereotype about bad cyberpunk/sci-fi settings thrown into one. It throws the word 'overpopulation' around a lot which is a pretty bad indicator of the writer's politics. A company named LYNX helps people get off shithole-Earth but ropes them into ludicrous contracts that saddle someone with obscene debt and also kill them, because the contract includes a line about consenting to DNA harvesting for cloning purposes.

It's very hamfisted, and the rare moments the parody lands at all are the ones where they just pull something from the headlines, like CEOs getting off scot-free no matter what.

LYNX are absurdly evil, irrevocably evil, an entire capitalistic meat grinder unto themselves.

And your allies, the union, are okay with them.

Shipbreaker is a grand example of what ‘bad writing’ actually is, because in the writer’s negligence the game comes off as being both anti-union and pro-capitalist meatgrinder. I don’t think the writer intended this, it’s the only read I can take away from the game.

LYNX, to repeat myself, are super evil. Amazon’s real life evil multiplied exponentially forever and ever.

The in-game union don’t have any real issues with it. The union and its members know full well that the suffering they endure is deeply systemic, so fundamental to the machine that the entire thing is entirely unfixable. It views human lives as resources to the extent where they just kill new staff and clone them endlessly, claiming them as property

Shipbreaker’s story unfortunately betrays its characters, and they’re only really concerned with how it affects them. The climax of the story is less about the gang being upset about the world they live in and more about how annoyed they are at their middle management. They go on strike once and it works… kind of? Overtime is ended, middle management is gutted, the corporation nukes slavery clauses/statements from the contracts and…

Okay, the cloning thing is something I really need to focus on, because it explains a lot of what I dislike about this game.

This game opens with you signing the LYNX contract and immediately dying, with your clone being thrown out into space to start working. The end of the game has the Space UN intervene in the situation to outlaw cloning. Why wouldn’t they? It’s deeply immoral and exploitative tech that’s worse than the Artificial Intelligence technology the setting has already banned - tech which is (I assume, I may be giving the writer too much credit) deliberately used to highlight how awful cloning is. It’s a no brainer that it’d get nuked, right?
…Yeah okay so the Union actually loves cloning tech, so they go out of their way to ensure it’s kept around for them specifically. They essentially get a monopoly on the torment nexus.

Also everyone who caused this shit gets off scot-free.

…Sigh, god.

The real issue with this game is that a lot of the plot points can be defended with “but it’s realistic”, and that particular defense is mostly irrefutable.

I love unions. I am a devout proponent of worker solidarity, but I’m not naive enough to think everyone who gets involved with unions cares about every worker that’s like them. A lot of people only join up for self-preservation’s sake, giving nary a thought to others because they’ve secured their bag. This is sad, but it’s unfortunately human nature. So I guess on some level, the Shipbreaker’s Union being obsessed with self-preservation to the point of amorality isn’t unbelievable. Shit dude, farmers do it in real life all the time.

Likewise, yeah. In real life, companies get away scot-free all the time. They are the modern feudal monarchs, able to take losses but never truly lose. Really, a lot of what LYNX do in this game has already been done by either Activision, Amazon, Nestle or any Lithium mining company. Of course it’s believable that the Shipbreaker Union strike doesn’t actually hurt them in any meaningful way, and that they arguably benefit because none of the people involved were ever alive to mount a defense on account of clones.

It doesn’t help that both the gameplay and the narrative point out that nothing really changed. You ‘won’ some minor concessions, but you’re still stuck doing work where dying a horrific, undignified death aboard a silent lifeless spaceship results in little more than a new body being cooked up and sent out.

My ultimate problem, I suppose, is that the experience of Shipbreaker’s story simply compounds why “realistic writing” is such a pitfall. It is neither cathartic nor engaging to experience this story. Neither are the frustrations, inconsistent writing, and accidentally-awful protagonists intended. It may mirror reality, sure, but the end result is that the game comes across as waffling.
You ever see someone go to make a political statement at an award show but they freeze for a moment as their lost paychecks flash across their eyes? This game has the same cadence and hesitance. A game that wants to say “WOO! UNIONS!” but stumbles so much that it comes across as a hit piece. Let unions win and they’ll monopolize evil technology and happily shack up with the industrial hellmachine.

…The gameplay itself also runs counter to the story. Characters will repeatedly assert that they are not faceless cogs in the hellmachine and they are humans capable of autonomy and feeling.

You aren’t, though. You, the player, are a faceless personality-less cog in the hellmachine who does what they’re told. You are such an inconsequential cog in the machine that you can refuse to strike and the game still proceeds as if you did. It’s quite the dissonant experience to have the NPCs talk as if you’re actively sabotaging LYNX while you’re standing on the bridge of a ship, knocking out the frame of a window so you can do your job as you’ve been doing the entire game.

I wouldn’t recommend you buy Hardspace: Shipbreaker. If you read my reviews you probably have enough dignity to not want to subject yourself to what’s ostensibly a white midwesterner paraphrasing a union newsletter to you.

If you do have it, just mute the game. Put on a playlist or a good album - I recommend Wasted Mind, a legendary pop punk album - and enjoy the gameplay. It might be mid, but ‘Surgeon Simulator on ships’ is pretty cool, though Space Engineers might tickle your fance more.

There's this phrase eternally uttered among fans of tabletop game that goes something like...

"I wish there was a faithful videogame adaptation of my favourite tabletop game".

It's a nice sentiment, but I can tell you from experience that most people don't actually want that. Warhammer videogame fans, for instance, absolutely don't want to play a game where their carefully assembled Thousand Sons army is torn apart limb from limb by a guy who's been playing Necron since Pariahs were still a thing. D&D fans don't want a game where you don't get to do anything because someone is minmaxing to the point of taking 6 or so actions per run. For a more generalized statement: People clamour for a vague idea of 'faithful videogame adaptation' and never once consider what it looks like, or that the mere act of being faithful leads to what many people/armchair game devs decry as 'bad game design'.

I'm built different though, I actually have wanted a faithful Battletech game for the longest time, warts and all.

Yes, that means I wanted some mechs to be objectively terrible and borderline unusable. Yes, that means I wanted clan tech to shift the power curve unreasonably far. Yes, I wanted to overheat from using my weapons once and then get headbutted to death by a cocky Rifleman pilot. Yes, I wanted to lose mechs to a lucky AC/20 shot from across the map that had about 20% chance to hit. So on, so forth. I actively yearned for a game that was as unpleasant to play as Succession War-era Battletech is on tabletop. I have Mechwarrior 5 if I want one of those newfangled 'fair and balanced videogames' the youth are obsessed with.

HBS Battletech, referred to as such to differentiate it from its parent IP, is the game I've always wanted.

On the surface, HBS Battletech is yet another XCOM clone. Turn based tactics with battles that're defined by positioning, missing 95% chance to hit shots, and reacting to whatever may lurk off screen. Battles that may have negative consequences even if you win due to your deployed units having upkeep costs, repair costs, and other traits that spill out onto your campaign map gameplay.

Where HBS Battletech differs from its ilk, however, is in the customization. Well, 'customization' isn't quite the right word. Here, you're essentially playing the role of an engineer out to fine tune your various Mechs into killing machines that can complete objectives without overheating from a single missile volley, and have enough money to repeatedly deliver those missile volleys without hearing the dreaded click of empty tubes.
Each weapon you can bolt onto a mech generates heat, needs ammo, and has a specific range its most effective at. Each mech you can field has its own varied hardpoints (weapon slots), engine, heat capacity, armor and other endless stats to consider. Plus there are free slots to mount ammo bins, extra heatsinks, additional armor, mods, etc etc.
On top of this, mechs have a tonnage limit. Slap on all you want, but putting 51 tons on that 50 tonner isn't ever going to fly.
On top of THAT, each individual mech part has health, different armor depending on angle of attack, and items are lost for good if a limb is destroyed.

The core of HBS Battletech, arguably more than the actual field gameplay, is a precarious balancing act. Weapons need ammo and heatsinks, but more armor might be the difference between a part being damaged and a part being lost. More weapons can help you kill faster, sure, but mounting all that ammo and those accuracy mods means the repair costs will soar into the stratosphere if the limb they're mounted on explodes. It's one thing to say "I will strap on as many autocannons as possible and go crazy", but what if they explode, player? Now you're down several strong weapons, their ammo, and the money you need to shell out to repair them.

HBS Battletech is a difficult game, there's no sugarcoating it. Oftentimes when people make a statement along these lines, it's followed up by: "It's difficult, but fair! I promise!".

I am a merchant of words, however, and lies are not among my wares. HBS Battletech is bullshit. It is a game where a 100-ton Assault mech clad in enough armor to withstand the heat death of the universe can fall to a few successive headshots from a trashcan with a rifle mounted on it. It is a game where 99% chance to hit should not be read as such, for it is best read as 1% chance to miss. It is a game where you will fine-tune a mech, customize it, give a name like "Anklebiter" and then watch as a tin can with two 1960s machine guns attached to its waist jumps off the top rope and crushes it into paste.

Make no mistake, though. This is not a nail-pulling kusoge that will fight you at every turn, no. Much like learning the actual Battletech, HBS Battletech is a game of risk mitigation. Your early days will suck: You'll teeter closer to debt in game than you are in real life, your mechs will come home missing entire limbs, and you'll sometimes lose more than you gain.
But every failure is a learning experience. A light mech jumping onto your heavy hitter and tearing off an arm is a reminder that it's always worth the action points to remove small threats. Your first death to overheating will remind you that water and rivers are lifesavers. Your first time getting sniped will make you consider the value of Long Range Missile pods. A 'slow' mech getting behind you and blasting your Warhammer to bits from the rear will serve as punishment for not watching your positions.

The learning curve is vertical, but it's still surmountable. Unless one dips into one of the three (excellent) modpacks, it's actually exceedingly rare for a mission to be unwinnable. There's always cover to offset hit chances, water to disperse heat, vantage points for extra accuracy, or something. And you, as a player, will naturally grow and learn the rules of engagement. XCOM-like cluster formations will (hopefully) give way to planned flanking moves, clever use of jumpjets, calculated overheats and other bolder tactics. Remember: Rules are meant to be learned first, broken second. I've always felt tactical RPGs start off encouraging strategy only to discourage it in favour of throwing your best at an enemy. HBS Battletech is consistent, and always rewards good strategy over all else - RNG willing, of course.

Likewise, the game does get easier once you know the arsenal on display here. Being a game centered around the 3010-3040 period of Battletech, the weapon and gear variety is low but in the context of a videogame this means there's nothing truly useless, and every tool is a solution to a problem yet to be unmasked. Even something as simply as the aforementioned shitty 1960s machineguns can turn the tide if you have the tonnage to spare, to say nothing of later acquisitions like particle cannons and targeting modules.

As opposed to many of its peers, much of the difficulty is easier to stomach because battles are far less rapid. This is not XCOM 2 with its rapid fire series of traded instant kills, nor is it Rogue Trader with its 10 actions per character turn, and it is not Chaos Gate: Daemonhunters with its 'being terrible'.
Fights in Battletech are slugfests. Simply 'depleting health' is out of the question, for the game is a race to dissasemble a mech by either destroying its ability to fight, destroying the engine or destroying the pilot. Losing an arm sucks, but a mech that can still shoot is a mech that can still kill. Damaged is different from Dead, after all, and torso-mounted weapons are always a good investment as they're usually the last to go.

That all said, there's a reason I docked half a star: Much like vanilla Mechwarrior 5, a lot of vital information about a mech (free tonnage, engine type, engine heatsinks, etc etc) is withheld from the player. It's one thing to say that the player will come into possession of better Mechs, aye, but it's often hard to know what's good just from looking at the store.
Take the Cicada, for instance. It's a surprisingly fast Medium mech that mounts some okay weaponry, so you might think "Wow! I'll take that as an armoured scout!" Except... The Cicada is overengined - meaning it mounts an engine far too large for its chassis - and thus has terrible free tonnage. Plus, for a Medium mech, its armor is atrocious and for its weight class the weaponry is appalling. These traits are all difficult to discern from looking at it in the store/salvage assembly, and indeed there are more than a few mechs that suffer from the same problems. Early in a campaign/career, these aren't easy to mitigate and Blake help anyone who buys a Charger.

Ultimately, despite the constant XCOM comparisons, I'd say that HBS Battletech has more in common with FTL: Faster than Light, much like its peer WH40k: Mechanicus. All three are games which are more about parts than any collective whole, heavily defined by calculated risks and how the player reacts to damage/losses that they know are inevitable. Games where the hits will come, but can be endured with varying degrees of competence. Where success is never guaranteed, but always possible.

The presentation is also deserving of glowing praise. There's a story, and while it's hardly a modern epic, it perfectly captures the feeling of frontier life in the Battletech universe complete with that mix of mechanized warfare and space western that defines pre-Clan Battletech. All of the VAs are relative unknowns, but their performances are stellar and contribute well to the atmosphere. As usual for Battletech media, the art direction is out of this world and I have great love for the battle maps too, for they manage to blend gameplay-first practicality with gorgeous mood lighting and respect for the source material. Nothing in this game is as high in fidelity as Mechwarrior 5 - though as a Paradox published game, it's sure priced as if it were >.> - but everything fits so wonderfully.

And the audio, oh the audio my beloved. Lasers purr with a satisfying hum as they miss 98% shots on a mile-wide target, autocannons have a hefty boom on launch, missile pods sound like a dream when they go off and collide with a wall, and every mech stomps and whirrs as it moves. Couple that with an amazingly atmospheric soundtrack, great ambience and the pilots calling out every other action, and each battle is a soundscape like no other.

If you want my advice, though? Beat the story once, and then pick up one of the three modpack: Roguetech, Battletech Advanced 3062 or Battletech Extended, listed in order from hardest to easiest. I have a personal preference for BTA 3062, as there's the option to dump some of the excessive stuff and just get more from the game. The better mechlab, bigger starmap and Clan tech really do augment the experience.

Buy it via the grey market, though, because Paradox's bullshit claimed another studio.

I'll admit to not being very enthused by this game when it initially landed in Early Access, both because my older self is uncomfortable with any game that's inherently sympathetic to law enforcement and because the initial serving of Ready Or Not was... Sour. Uncomfortable racial caricatures, eyebrow-raising dialogue, potential right-wing dogwhistles and an odd eagerness to let you go full police brutality on people were what awaited me, which is a far cry from SWAT 4. This isn't getting into the massive technical or balance issues.

101 people before me have said it, but SWAT 4's legacy is less of a cop game and more of a horror game. It knew just how much literally everyone hated cops and weaponized it, creating alienating and hostile environments where everything could be a threat yet told you outright that you weren't supposed to react as you would in other FPS games. The core difference between SWAT 4 and its contemporaries is that perfect play in SWAT 4 meant taking as few actions as possible and ideally walking out with 0 kills.

So you can imagine why RoN's first public version made me grit my teeth and back away. I was content to file it away in the vast wastes of my Steam library and up until now I'd succeeded, but I was bored in the evening and my IRLs insisted it was "quite good no" [sic], so with fuck all else to do and an alarmingly low amount of alcohol in the fridge for a Scottish household, I decided to join them and binge the entire thing in one massive session.

What immediately stands out in the 1.0 version is how a lot of the more obvious copaganda elements are gone, as are the problematic stuff which is most noticeable in the dialogue. It's a relief that I can play the game without worrying I'm going to run into an ulcer bustingly racist comment/accent. The developers also evidently busted out their old copies of SWAT 4, played it to completion and now the game is hellbent on keeping you from firing your weapon at a living person.
Lower caliber weapons offer you the mercy of allowing you to hit someone in the extremities for a non-lethal takedown, but bringing 7.62 Assault Rifle or a Shotgun to a gas station holdup will almost always end in severed limbs and penalties for unauthorized use of deadly force. Call me old, but the first time I accidentally decapitated someone with a stray 12 gauge shot actually made me feel a bit ill, and from then on I've exclusively used an MP5 and a Glock 19.

Where this game deviates from SWAT 4 is that it's very clearly trying to dig into the player's sense of morality to make the need for restraint sting, for lack of a better word. I'm still undecided as to how copaganda this game is on a scale from 3-10 (it will never be below 3, because cops are still sympathetic as the protagonists), but there's something to be admired in how the game will bring you face-to-face with pedophiles, human traffickers, school shooters and libertarians and still demand you keep your team on a short leash, follow the ROE, and try to minimize casualties. In typing that out, I realize that regardless of this game's status (or not) as copaganda, it's very clearly in love with an almost romantic idea of ~equal justice~ that's at odds with the fact you're playing as a cop, a breed of 'person' that in real life views justice as an obstacle to killing people. If you view all fiction as a fantasy of some kind, RoN is a fantasy land where cops actually behave like the image they try to put forward.

I've seen a surprise amount of (admittedly lowkey) debate about whether or not the game handles its subject matter with any grace, and for once I'm not 100% on where my own stance lies. I'd say that the game doesn't actually handle the subject matter... at all. The horrors I mentioned up above are grotesque, yes, but they're portrayed very manner-of-factly. There are no dramatic, heartbreaking violins or horrifying cutscenes in the buildup to the school shooting mission, it's just another mission. The horror comes from carrying out those routine behaviours - skulking around, identifying corpses, trying to subdue suspects nonlethally, praying the person on the floor is just hiding and not dead - in a school. They're depicted, sure, but it feels to me that the game is more about letting you take away your own feelings from the more emotionally challenging missions rather than going out of its way to make you feel a specific way.

I will say that the one exception to this is the swatting level which is, for lack of any better phrases, extremely over the top. It's the second level and comes after you besieging a gas station that's being held up, so I assume the developers wanted to keep the stakes high. The end result is that a 'simple' swapping also features gangsters, a crypto-mining operation, and the implication that the swatting victim partakes in a child trafficking ring. The use of unfortunate streamer stereotypes just makes it feel even more out of place, as if the game is trying to console new players who might fuck up and start firing like crazy. "It's okay, you just hit crypto miners and pedophiles!" or something like that. It's all so garishly out of place with the rest of the game.

Praise must be hoisted upon the visuals and level design, by the way. Brightly lit areas are fucking terrifying because armed gunmen can be literally anywhere, and even the most open levels feel dense and claustrophobic. Darker levels and smaller levels are so much worse, with a flashlight or nightvision goggles only offering token reprieve from the shadows. They really leaned into the 'horror game' thing.

There is, unfortunately, one massive problem hanging over this game like a pendulum, arguably more damaging to it than any potential discussions of its subject matter:

The enemy AI.

If you've ever played Rainbow 6 Siege during peak hours, it's a lot like getting matched against a team of Siege addicts from the Midwest. They possess hyper-awareness, x-ray vision, a total lack of recoil, reaction times measured in nanoseconds, and accuracy that most actual drones would kill to have. Many a time have I lost a mission because someone sensed my tainted chakra and decided to become a bodhisattva for the sake of purifying me.

Through a wall.

With a glock.

Despite me wearing full plate armor and being behind a cabinet as well.

This game lacks a 'downed' state which really compounds my frustrations. My friends and I, despite our years of tactical shooter experience and general FPS capabilities, never finished a mission with the full team alive because the AI is capable of inhuman feats. This applies to all suspect types, too, so you can meet your end at the hands of a panicked D&D player with a Beretta within about a half-second of making eye contact, and then experience the same thing facing down trained security personnel at a millionaire's mansion.

I wouldn't mind this were it the endgame state, or only applied to special enemies (former military, perhaps?) but as it stands it's omnipresent behaviour and results in the game easily becoming an exercise in frustration. The AI roams a lot, too, which can make a lot of tactical gear feel useless. C2 gas is very good when it works, but good luck getting to use it. In general, while the experience is fine enough, the AI hasn't actually evolved from early access and still feels like it's meant to counter players in a game where doors don't exist.

All in all, I'd be lying if I told you I didn't enjoy my time with this game, but even in its much nicer release state there is a small pit in my stomach that turns sour when thinking about it. Despite everything this is a game where you play as cops out to stop a crime wave, and while it's dispensed with the EA version's 'degenerate America' stuff, it still sometimes toes the line in a way that reminds me of a child looking at their parent to see how much of their brattiness is within acceptable parameters, or a cat about to knock something off the shelf.

There are posters dotted around the police station that encourage officers to take the shot, featuring despondent cops who're lamenting that they hesitated. I think these illustrate the cognitive dissonance the game experiences, because you're likely to see one after a tutorial in which a narrator with a cheap microphone repeatedly tells you to shoot last, ask questions later.

It’d be so easy for me to just give this a 0.5 star and have my review be “Haha, gacha game”. Nobody would care at all and 99% of people wouldn’t begrudge it.

That 1% is, unfortunately, me.

Look, I am Mihoyo’s foulest hater. I gave Honkai Impact 3rd a chance and hated it because, even putting aside a lot of the straight up barefaced plagiarism that game carries out, it was just a bad game that felt like someone trying to remember the combat parts of Crash of the Titans.
Genshin Impact was even worse, being the world’s first AAA skinner box that shamefully ripped off beats from Breath of the Wild to sell anime archetypes to children and teenagers. I hate, hate, hate Genshin Impact. Endlessly empty overworlds that occasionally reward you for self-harming by feeding you “storylines” that are just characters saying prophecies, politics and keywords ad nauseam were grotesquely fused with floaty, unpleasant gameplay where “player expression” caps out at smashing through your characters and hitting the skill and/or ultimate buttons until things die.
Any pretext of having ‘characters’ is also thrown out into the gutter, because outside of time-limited FOMO events you’ll be hard pressed to find a Genshin character with a real personality or even a goal. I wonder if people only remember Yae Miko because you can ‘get’ her character without playing an event that hasn’t been rerun since Covid quarantine.

So, you can imagine that I was extremely cynical about Honkai Star Rail. My view of it was that Mihoyo, not content to defile the character action and open world genres, had opted to shit out a turn-based game as well. And for the longest time, this game was my punching bag. Whenever it appeared during an event or festival I’d always say something like “more like honkai shit rail lmao” in my group chat, and whenever I saw fanart of the characters I’d gripe at how awful 90% of the designs are. Lastly, do you know how horrifying it was to find out HSR would be an interstellar adventure? From a studio that struggled to make me or anyone else give a shit about a single planet in Genshin? Madness. Utter madness.

But I was bored on Christmas day. Preternaturally bored. I don’t really know what came over me, but I got the urge to download this game.

And… I’m still playing it.

I’d even go out on a limb and say it’s good.

From here on out, I’m going to compare this game to Genshin almost every other sentence. Sorry, but there’s really no other way to highlight just how well this game does certain things without bringing up the studio’s awful last game.

Anyway, upon booting up HSR, two things immediately caught me off guard.

Number 1: The dub isn’t terrible. Genshin’s is infamously wooden and embodies every bad trend with English dubs. The women almost exclusively talk in either a Peppy Girl Voice, that same breathy detached voice that’s often only heard on amateur VA voice reels, or they’re using a flat Regal Voice that results in characters like Raiden Shogun and Rosaria - two ontological opposites - sounding identical. The men aren’t much better. Honkai’s dub, however, is surprisingly robust. I could probably tell you who each character is just from hearing a single line, because the direction being given to the VAs is phenomenal and it results in characters managing to shine through just voice alone. The nicest thing I can say about Honkai’s dubwork is that if a character sounds bored, I often assume it’s intentional.

Number 2: The characters are written - at all. Genshin’s characters have a bad habit of being the exact same template but copy-pasted over to another region. There’s really not much difference between Jean, Candace, Ningguang, and the Raiden Shogun when broken down to their base narrative components, and every region has a Cool Guy, a Sad Guy and a suspiciously forward underage girl. HSR has less characters overall, but it bothers to actually write them out and give them arcs.
Silver Wolf and Kafka only appear for 20 minutes in the intro before fucking off until a later patch, but their dynamic is excellent and they themselves have so much personality that I’m still thinking of them hours later.
Don’t get me wrong, HSR is not going to give you intricate Yakuza-esque plots, but I was gripped by the Jarilo-VI cast’s struggles to survive in a world that was entombed in multiple senses of the world, and the utter tragedy occurring between Hanya and Xueyi beats out some of dynamics I’ve seen in many actual JRPGs.

Both of these apply through the entire game (as at the time of writing), but that they’re immediately obvious from the prologue is what got me hooked.

Don’t get me wrong though, it’s not all perfect. The actual plots tend to be straightforward, and the game’s insistence on giving you 5 minute quests with 15 minute exposition dumps calls to mind Final Fantasy XIV in all the wrong ways, not to mention that who gets characterization and when often feels like it’s decided by dice roll.
I love Natasha, the caring but deeply exhausted leader of Jarilo-VI’s underground vigilante police force. In a cast of mostly younger adults she stands out as a tired middle-aged woman who initially keeps going because she thinks she has to in order to ensure there’s a world for the next generation to even inhabit, and she ends up feeling a bit aimless/overwhelmed when that mission ends up succeeding.
But she’s mostly ignored in favour of Bronya, Seele and Serval, all of whom I enjoy yet sadly sponge up most of the screen time. Bronya especially tends to have her character arc reiterated to the audience every other cutscene, though unlike Genshin characters or FFXIV’s Y’shtola, her arc actually resolves.

Towards the end of the first planet, it dawned on me that I was enjoying the writing because the writers had very clearly taken the right lessons from Genshin. Rather than force the player into an endless hamster wheel to maybe see the characters progress, the characters are just front and center in the story and they’re utilized extremely well.
Sure, I can cynically say that they only made the characters likeable to hype you up for their banner reruns, but at least I can tell the banner characters apart based on personality. I’ll pull for Seele because I like the headstrong, illiterate moron who is clearly in puppy love with Bronya. Not because I need a Quantum - The Hunt character.

The real star of the show, though, is the gameplay. I often scorn the idea of gacha games having “good gameplay” as the sentiment is often echoed by whales/longterm players who’re experiencing an entirely different game in practice, but HSR really caught me offguard on that front.
It’s all very simple: Enemies have big icons above their head stating which element they’re weak to, and you build teams to deplete their weakness gauge so you can stun them and do big damage. Each character has a basic attack, a skill (which costs a skill point), an ultimate attack and a passive - along with an overworld ability.
There’s a tendency in games like this to have earlier characters be incredibly simple and without any depth, which is a trend HSR bucks right out the gate. The protagonist, Dan Heng and March 7th (the first three freebies you get) all have their own mechanics and roles, so tightly designed that they’re perfectly usable in harder content with a standard level of investment. Power creep is still a thing of course - I got Ruan Mei, a very recent addition, in one of my first pulls and she can just take turns away from enemies - but so far the game avoids that nasty trend every other gacha has where early character skills are a single paragraph and later ones are entire pages.
Characters all have Paths, which is HSR for ‘Role’, but each character applies the concept of their path differently which thankfully avoids homogeny. Two of my main units, Sampo and Pela, are Nihility characters - debuff centric. Pela is focused on removing positive buffs and makes enemies infinitely more vulnerable to other debuffs like those conferred by her ult. Sampo, meanwhile, is a Damage Over Time character. All of his attacks have a chance to inflict a Wind DoT and his ult does less damage than others in exchange for massively cranking up the damage enemies take from the DoT effect.

Praise also has to be given to the game for lacking any duds as of the time of writing. I’ve frequently taken breaks from the story to get some leveling resources because every character I currently possess has a scenario in which I end up using them, and though I’ve yet to get the character I want from the permanent banner (which the game dumps tickets for on you), every character I have gotten from that banner has been used in a serious capacity since I got them.

Overall, though, the game leverages its extremely simple gameplay to put you through some absolute ringers. The core mechanics are simple so the fights can be… well, not? Bosses and even elite enemies come with mechanics that can throw careless players for a loop, some of which I’d even describe as MMO-esque. The earlier parts of the game can seem simple enough to just blitz with a high-damage team, but eventually enemies start using taunts/lock-ons/stuns and other debuffs to force you to think carefully. Really, it’s this variety in enemy mechanics that results in the above praise: Even Asta, a relatively boring character, has incredible mileage in any fight where making the party take turns faster is a boon.

If I had to illustrate the differences succinctly, I’d point to Healers. In Genshin they’re superfluous if you’re at all good at the game, because it’s trivially easy to avoid damage and infinitely better to just bring DPS characters that’ll help you end fights faster. That is not the case in HSR. You can delay turns with Ruan Mei and Asta all you like, but enemies are going to attack. You are going to take damage at some point, and the need to either dispel or negate these inevitabilities is the driving force behind much more indepth team building. I got through several arcs of Genshin just fine using the same team that only ever saw a change when Raiden Shogun dropped, but in HSR I have three separate teams that I’m still constantly tweaking.

As for the world, HSR completely dunks Genshin’s poor attempt at an open world out the airlock and trades it for comparatively linear pseudo-dungeons and slightly wider hub areas. It’s all very ascetic in comparison; Amber doesn’t appear to tell you to fuck off and gather wheat at all during the intro, you just hold Forward and hit things between cutscenes. This is all to its benefit though, both because it allows individual area plots to work at all (Genshin could never have done the Overworld/Underworld thing well) and it allows each area to have a very strong visual identity, which means I can actually tell areas apart. It’s impressive that both halves of Jarilo-VI feel like they belong on the same planet given that every continent on Tevyat feels like it fell out of a difference 4/10 gacha game.
Oh and the fucking music. I’ll give Genshin credit on one front: The boss music is stellar all the way through. HSR, being an actual interstellar experience, is similarly out of the world but on all fronts. I couldn’t tell you dick about Genshin’s overworld/dungeon music but I still hum the Jarilo Underworld theme even when far away from the game. To say nothing of the cheesy over the top vocal track that plays during Jarilo VI’s emotional climax.

I also haven't seen many people mention it, but the side material in this game is excellent. The protagonist is given plenty of time to shine, and while the writing cribs ideas from Disco Elysium it knows full well it's never going to be a masterwork and instead opts to tell good jokes and write good characters. I talked to a trash can once, and it was brilliant.

Looking back at all the praise I’ve given the game, I do feel the need to clarify one thing: This game isn’t really exceptional. It’s just good, and among gacha games that automatically makes it the best. I have a lot of fondness for the game, its world, its lore and especially its cast, but there isn’t anything here you can’t get elsewhere. Yakuza: Like a Dragon has it all and is a one time payment! Same with Dragon Quest 11.

If you’ve read this far you’re likely wondering how the actual gacha/live service elements are, and they’re … not bad. Not good, because they never can be, but among its peers this is one of the least egregious ones - not quite GBF or King’s Raid good, though. Tickets and pull currency are handed out willy nilly compared to Genshin’s equivalents and while there are dailies & a battle pass, actually filling them out is trivial work and can often be done in minutes.
Genshin’s Resin system returns as Trailblaze Power, but to this game’s credit all of the dungeons/boss refights/elite enemies/whatever are available on a permanent basis - though the boss refights are limited to 3 a day.
Which… does actually lead into my biggest complaint about the game, and the one that’ll probably influence whether I keep going in the future:

There’s not enough Trailblaze Power.

And- Look, alright, I’m not gonna be mad that a game is making me put it down, but you need so much Trailblaze Power to progress at a meaningful pace. The onboarding process and early tiers of the battle pass (which accrue naturally) will give you tons of refills, but that’s a well that began running dry after I beat Jarilo-VI and made me hesitant for the future. It’s not actually much of an issue in Genshin due to how few party members you ‘need’, but this game’s better combat intrinsically leads to more grinding, which you’ll hit walls in constantly due to lack of Trailblaze Power.

All in all, I'm thoroughly charmed by this little game. I’m probably going to keep playing it in the downtime between bigger games and bigger writing pieces, but this is still a Mihoyo gacha game. If you had issues with Genshin and they revolved around character availability and the like, this game doesn’t fix them at all. It’s best to stay away, and likewise if you have compulsive spending issues or an addictive personality absolutely stay away - this game pads out banners with junk weapons, and it knows what it’s doing.

I wish Natasha was real.

[DISCLAIMER: This review didn’t run away from me so much as it sprinted. It is obscenely long, sitting at around 9.4k words after cuts.]

When I wrote my initial review of BG3 I swore that I’d probably just bench the game and come back in a couple years when the inevitable Definitive Edition launched. I was hoping to just put the game out of my mind and go play literally anything else that was installed on my SSD.

But, to tell you the truth, I struggled to uninstall the game. Even after my multiplayer game was put on indefinite hold due to a party member being admitted to hospital (they’re fine now), the game continued to haunt me. Both for reasons I’ll get to shortly, and because continued discussion with my close friends either revealed things I hadn’t considered or brought up new complaints that I agreed with but never really thought about.

Ultimately, though, BG3 haunted me because I had so many questions.

Were things unfinished? Or did I just miss them?
Was the class balance really that awful, or did rolling with Paladin and the default Origin layouts give me the wrong impression?
Did Acts 2 and 3 go too fast, or did I?
Was an Origin playthrough really going to change my mind?
Does the game have a lot of useless loot, or did I just miss it?
How bad is the game’s morality bias in reality?

And so many more. Eventually they ate away at me so hard that I decided to start a Shadowheart run and see how I truly felt about BG3.

To save you a potentially long review: It wasn’t pretty.

I will give Baldur’s Gate 3 praise for one thing, though, and that’s its excellent ability to mask its flaws by pretending to have more options than it actually has. A running theme of my original playthrough was picking an option and thinking “Hmm, I wonder what a lot of those other options did”. In this playthrough, I decided to pick more of them - sometimes via save rerolling.

While I was initially so positive towards the game that I labelled the gameplay as ‘a masterpiece’, repeated exposure and a significant replay have soured my opinion quite significantly.

Hilariously, I finger-wagged Wrath of the Righteous for adding too much yet praised BG3 for its reticence.

Anyway, BG3 has too many options and could’ve done with some significant cuts. No, really. ‘This game has too much’ is going to pop up a lot from here on out.

Yes, WOTR has a lot of superfluous gunk that is best skipped. The problem is that, despite BG3 having significantly less, the ratio of usable:worthless is roughly the same.

Especially on the spell front, my god. There are so many of them, and a startling amount of them are Concentration spells - meaning you can either use only one at a time or casting them will shatter your active spell. This doesn’t affect offensive casters like Warlocks or Evocation Wizards too much, but it utterly crushes defensive/support casters like Druids/Bards/Clerics and ESPECIALLY Paladins, whose primary means of attack (Smite attacks) more-often-than-not will break Concentration. Which is a problem, because even an Oathbreaker Paladin gets an excessive amount of support spells.

You could, for example, cast Shield of Faith. It’s a concentration spell that gives your target +2 to Armour Class. Very nice. Or you could caste Haste, which gives +2 to AC and an extra entire action plus Advantage on Dexterity Throws and doubles your movement speed.

You could also cast Compelled Duel, which forces an enemy to attack only you. Or, you could not waste a Concentration slot and instead cast Command; an extremely versatile spell with a number of options that can do basically the same thing in function but also *isn’t a Concentration spell.

You could use Magic Weapon to buff your weapon and get a significant offensive edge, or you could just use Divine Smite to do basically the same thing in terms of damage output but without breaking Concentration.

This is not a Paladin exclusive problem, either. Woe betide Conjuration Wizards, Clerics, Druids and Bards for their excess of Concentration spells.

I get the intent behind Concentration as a mechanic, it’s ostensibly a means to prevent people simply steamrolling fights by pre-buffing and then walking in with like 6 actions, 45 AC, and a movement speed measured in European countries… Except you can still do this. There are a number of buff spells, many of which are obscenely useful - Longstrider, Enhance Leap, Mirror Image, Feather Fall to name an early game handful - that can easily be cast before a fight for a massive no-catch advantage.
Sure, you could argue that it’s hard to see fights coming on a first run, to which I’d say that the game telegraphs fights very blatantly and anyone who’s even slightly fluent in the unspoken Language of Games will be keyed in immediately. That, and a character only needs a mild investment in Perception to detect ambushes from ten postcodes away.

As an aside: Concentration also feels needlessly restrictive in a game with so few spell slots as it is. Paladins again get hit with this hard, as Divine Smites devour spell slots.

The issue with junk options sadly isn’t restricted to spells.

In my last review, I gassed up BG3’s action economy and praised it for always letting you do something. You can do off the wall shit involving water + lightning, flammable surfaces, improvised melee weapons, throwing loose items in your inventory, shoving, aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand it’s all useless.

I try to avoid optimizing the fun out of my games. I was raised on flashy fighters and my teenage fixation was Devil May Cry with a dash of God Hand, so the need to style on enemies is in my blood. But it’s a bit hard not to play optimally in BG3 because the fun options just do paltry damage. Yes it’s cool to batista bomb someone through a barrel, but that does at best 9-12 damage in an entire turn. Even by the end of Act 1, you can do so much better than this.

The addition of Throw, Improvised Melee Weapon and Shove seemed like boons at first, but they’re really not. Throwing a molotov will always be less effective than throwing a Fire Bolt cantrip that most casters can get, for instance. There’s some merit to using Thrown weapons, but we’ll get to the Ranged Issue later.
Improvised Melee Weapon is useless given the incredibly high stat requirement to use it against humanoids, its waning usefulness as early as Act 2, and the paltry damage it does if used with furniture.
And Shove… Fall damage is also utterly pathetic. Shove does have a meagre utility for repositioning enemies, but this is rare considering how much mobility even casual players will come into, and using it for instakills often means losing useful loot.

The real reason ‘improv’ solutions suck, though, is because normal attacks are just too good. Ranged especially. Most martial classes, even the ‘pure’ ones, come with a bow or crossbow proficiency that also confers respectable damage regardless of stats. While Thrown weapons are ostensibly meant to be used as the ranged option for physical damage dealers, they also suck compared to just… shooting the enemy from afar? Or hucking a cantrip. Unless you’re using the Strength Monk Tavern Brawler build, but that build moves so fast that I question your competency if you frequently need to use ranged with it.

As I was typing this review, I considered giving them some praise for the addition of Jump as an action, but then I really thought about it. All jumping added was some okay level design that’s immediately underscored by the buggy pathfinding, and yet another means for melee classes to ignore ranged by just doing a 20 foot leap towards the enemy.

All of this is bad on its own, yes, but the real problems begin to rear their head when it comes to the subject of leveling. In my last review I praised the game for making ‘levels feel meaningful’.

I now realise that was mostly me appreciating the crutch the game handed me as I was feeling out the systems.

Level ups in BG3 rarely feel meaningful, with the rarity being adjusted by classes.

Spellcasters enjoy a relative lack of ‘dead’ levels as they get spells and slots every single level. While levels 11 and 12 are as underwhelming for them as they are for everyone else (due to 11 and 12 being ‘buffer’ levels before level 13, which was not included in BG3), they do at least get some notable new toys to play with. They suck, sure, but it’s something.

Martial classes, however, often see long swathes where they get little more than an action which may or may not be useful, a passive trait that will 80% of the time be too situational to ever pop up, and then the monotony is broken up by a Feat. Again, again, this really hurts Paladins; they get so many Concentration spells that it would perhaps be less egregious if they only got proficiency in a skill and 16 extra HP.

Once the mechanics ‘click’, level ups soon go from being a monumental event to being countdowns for the levels where your build actually comes online. How could they not? In a game where the most boring solution will often reward you with 80 damage per character turn, getting some Always Prepared spells doesn’t mean anything. What good is Faerie Fire when Lae’zel can do at minimum 80 damage before targets can even cloak themselves?

The sole exception to all of this is Monk, a class which embodies another issue I’m going to gripe about at length later on: Content added later in development is so very detached from the rest of the game that it begins to feel like DLC in a Bethesda game which sticks out like a sore thumb.

Monk is obscene. It has numerous possible builds within itself, is one of the few (if not the only) class that can metamorph into something unique via multiclassing, and it also just gets everything. It can have useful spells that swiftly recharge on a short rest, it can get incredible martial actions that’re worth using over basic attacking (in part because they give you an extra basic attack), or they can just straight up become Rogue but better. 9 Open Hand Monk/3 Thief Rogue is one of the few builds I’ve tried that was sincerely fun.

Monk was also the last class added, and no other class has as much unique content or as much depth. The classes in general, actually, are pretty bad on both a gameplay and story front.

I also need to take a moment to gripe about Feats. In Wrath of the Righteous there’s about a hundred or so. Sure, a lot of them are boring and uncreative, but there’s always something you can take to benefit or augment a build. +2 AC when fighting defensively is boring, sure, but it’s something! That’s survivability, right there! Especially if you’re squishy!
BG3, meanwhile, has precious few feats. The vast majority of them benefit melee characters, with only a handful for ranged/magic users and some that are just plain useless. There is no real reason to take ‘Performer’ - which lets you use musical instruments, already a dubiously useful feature that embodies a problem we’ll get to soon. Sure, it gives you +1 Charisma, but you could also take.

[Drum Roll]

ABILITY IMPROVEMENT!

Ability Improvement is the ultimate embodiment of my gripes with BG3’s feats. It’s boring. It’s so boring. It’s the most boring feat in a list of like 20-30 of the most boring feats in the setting.

But it’s good. It’s really good. It’s a two +1s to any stat you want, or a single +2. Given the relatively high starting stats for classes (17 at most), the relative ease of consequence-free stat buffs, and the low level cap for stats (20 via feats, 30 from rewards/tonics), there’s no reason not to take it. Buffing your class stat buffs pretty much everything you can do, and the relatively homogenous builds available to classes means there’s not much reason to not buff the main stat unless you’re doing Strength Monk - again, the only time a class meaningfully deviates from its main draw.

The other feats, in comparison, are just utter faff and feel more like deciding which flavour of Monster Energy you want. Yeah, there’s tons and they all taste different but at the end of the day you’re functionally just choosing between four things: Proficiency in a thing, a linear stat increase, a dubiously useful situational perk, or something that’s just a total no-brainer. To be honest, most classes can get by just using Ability Improvement/Savage Attacker and either Mobile or Alert. That is, in order: +2 to your main stat, Advantage on every attack roll you’ll ever make that cannot be nullified, and either a huge buff to movement speed which is worth more than gold, or Initiative (letting you get off hefty alpha strikes).

Most feats might sound good on paper, but reality tends to crumple that paper up and throw it into a wastebin. Heavy Armor Master, for instance, promises to reduce all non-magical damage by -3 when you’re wearing heavy armor. Sounds great, right? In Act 1, it is!

For about an hour.

BG3’s core issue on the gameplay front is that it’s too rigid in its adherence to DnD 5e. This would not be a problem were it not for how fast the game scales. Much of what is ‘bad’ in BG3 is only bad because it’s in a videogame. -3 damage would be excellent in a lower stakes tabletop campaign where your two worst threats are “some guy named Greg who’s been stealing gnomes from Belfast'' and your DM’s ex-girlfriend whose untreated personality disorder means every diceroll might literally be your last.

But this is not a low stakes tabletop campaign. There are worse threats than Greg, and they frequently hit for double or triple digits. -3 is excellent against an enemy who will only do 10 damage, but in BG3 those stop appearing within about half an hour depending on your playtime.

What’s really infuriating about feats is that there is an abundance of magic items in this game, and even the shittier ones have far more interesting effects that would’ve made for a much better feat lineup. But no, death to pragmatic adaptation I suppose.

I’m gonna take a little break from kvetching about BG3 to point something out, though: This issue with classes and feats isn’t entirely Larian’s fault. It is their fault for blindly adapting 5e with no modifications besides the ones necessary for a videogame, but most of the actual issues lie with the fact that DnD 5e is just unimaginative dogshit which is - to be incredibly mean for a moment - moreso targeted to people whose perception of tabletop games is entirely shaped by Critical Role and funny DM stories on Reddit. I’d compare it to something like Hyrule Warriors, Prison Architect, Forza or Guilty Gear Strive; in theory it should be a good base for people to springboard into better and more thought-out entries within the genre, but in reality people just cling to it and never expand their horizons. And while BG3 does have many of its own issues, a fair share of them are ultimately present because 5e barely makes for a good tabletop system let alone a videogame.

Much of what I’ve said about feats applies to classes, too. You could pick Ranger if you wanted, but do you really want to? Are you really that hellbent on playing Worse Rogue? Oh, you want to pick Paladin instead? Okay, that’s cool… But do you really want to play Worse Fighter? Ah, you want to play Druid instead. Neat and all, but do you really want to play Worse Sorcerer? Bard? Is Worse Wizard really that appealing?

The answer for most people will be ‘yeah’, because this is a roleplaying game and I imagine the vast majority of people pick classes for the aesthetics and personal character flavour. Not me, though, minmaxing is part of the fun for me.

Wizards, Sorcerers and Warlocks get plenty of flavour to make them appealing and viable in their own right - even if Warlock is mostly an Eldritch Blast machine. Albeit, most of this is down to the game’s obscene fixation on magic. It very much wants you to be a caster, it wants you to use some magic even if you’re martial. The problem here is that Cleric, Druid and Bard don’t get much in the way of interesting or viable mechanics. Clerics are essentially just an awkward midpoint between Paladins and Wizards. Druid can shapeshift and Bard subclasses get spells that’re just diet versions of better class’ gimmicks, but that’s it. Their spellbooks are weak and wimpy, to the point that two entire companions (Jaheira and Halsin) kinda suck right out the gate unless reclassed.

Druid in particular sucks thanks to a problem which is multi-layered: Damage types. BG3 has a lot of ‘em; Piercing (divvied up into 3 subcategories), Fire, Lightning, Cold, Thunder, Acid, Poison, Necrotic, Radiant, Force and Psychic. Of these damage types, Fire reigns supreme. There are so many readily available sources of it than any other damage type, it’s scarcely resisted let alone nullified, and spells that deal fire damage are both incredibly convenient and incredibly strong. To a lesser extent, this also goes for lightning and cold.

Acid, Poison and Necrotic are utterly awful. A lot of enemies resist it or are outright immune to it, and their spells are either negligible in terms of damage or extremely costly. It’s the near-persistent resistances and immunities that truly make Druid a pain, though. This is, once again, a problem with the choices made in the adaptation. Larian wanted to tell a certain story with certain setpieces, no problem… At first. They also wanted to include lots of combat stuff from 5e, which meant that what they decided to adapt now had tangible consequences for some characters. Even putting aside Druid’s lackluster spellbook, 2 of its 3 subclasses are focused on dealing primarily Acid and Poison damage, which just makes them a waste.

If you have any familiarity with TTRPGs, you might still be thinking about what I said before: That some things in BG3 are fine for a tabletop session and bad for a videogame.

Anyway, let’s talk about ability checks.

In a standard tabletop session - and indeed, this game’s own multiplayer - characters will have different specialties. Your wizard may be able to bend the world’s magical weave to their whims as though it were an obedient dog, but they probably don’t have the charisma to console a grieving widow. That’s where the party member with the appropriate stats takes the stage. In BG3’s multiplayer, this is entirely intact. I rarely talk to NPCs in my main BG3 MP session because I am Smashman the Barbarian Who Smashes.. Our bard - who has 1 level in Bard and 7 in Warlock - does that for us.

In BG3 singleplayer, this becomes a problem. The Party as an entity will automatically do some things of their own volition; perception/arcana/history/whatever checks will roll concurrently and immediately with no input required. If you need something disarmed or unlocked, the game will automatically make the party member with the highest Sleight of Hand roll for it.

This is all on the overworld, however. In conversations, only the person who initiated can roll. As BG3 is a very Player-centric game, your main character will be the one doing 99% of dialogues, which in turn provides a very annoying issue with proficiency forcing.

BG3 is not a masterfully crafted RPG, or even a competently crafted one, so it lacks what I call “fail-throughs”; situations that can arise from failing a check that are unique in their own way and perhaps even better than succeeding depending on the circumstances. Here, it’s nothing but binary pass/fail checks that either skip some busywork or a fight. If you fail, you’re stuck with busywork and/or a fight. God forbid you have a charismatic character step up to the front, too, because there’s a lot of character specific exchanges in Acts 1 and 2 that you can miss out on. Especially as Shadowheart or the Dark Urge. I find this particularly jarring because it’s a problem that CRPGs solved as early as 1998… With the first Baldur’s Gate.

One thing I regularly castigate BG3 for is its slavish devotion to both tabletops and other, better western RPGs. This, I feel, really makes it clear as day. CRPGs as a genre tend to have a problem wherein Charisma and its associated diplomatic functions are so powerful that taking them is a no-brainer. BG3 is no different.

Unfortunately, BG3 is not confident in doing this. It offers you an absurd amount of outs; Stat-boosting skills which can be cast from a handy menu, no-consequence rerolls that you get by the bucketload, and tons of bonuses and boons all the way to the credits. It is, in many ways, afraid to let you fail.

Early on, you’re introduced to Long Rests. These cost 40 camp supplies, advance the plot sometimes, and restore all of your spell slots/class abilities. A Short Rest can patch you up briefly for free, but you only get two. The game sort of, kinda, maybe implies that long rests should be done sparingly? This is total hogwash though, you can find about 120 camp supplies immediately after the prologue. It is, to me at least, pretty obvious that the abundance of supplies across the entire game is a safety net for people who’re taking their time to learn the combat or just aren’t that great at the game. This is fine, there’s nothing wrong with this.

…Except, on Tactician - which doubles the amount of supplies needed for a long rest - there’s still far too many. Especially for those given to exploration or completionism.

That’s not my actual issue, though.

My actual bone to pick is that the system fucks with the narrative if you’re too good at the game. A bit like Hades, but more insufferable.

Long Rests are good at restoring spell slots, sure. If your party is a monk, fighter, rogue and warlock, then you can get by with short rests. If you’re also decently good at the game, or get lucky with rolls, you can potentially go a long time without using long rests! On my latest run, I only used about three in Act 1.

A very fun fact about Baldur’s Gate 3 is that it’s held together with strings, glue, a bit of prayer and also 4-5 invigilators making sure you don’t peek behind the curtain.

Abstaining from long rests - willfully or not - is a way to peek behind the curtain.

Many narrative events, be they main story related or companion related, are directly tied to long resting. These aren’t just fun side extras, they’re vital to the story being told and the companions within. It’s similar in egregiousness to Hades’ story, wherein you’re punished outright for being better than the game expects. You can, through deliberate or accidental avoidance of long resting, skip a lot of these events.

The game breaks pretty heavily if you do. It’s still clearable, but wow. Companions can skip entire conversations (which are still recorded as happening), Astarion can potentially forget to reveal his vampirism (thus costing him his bite ability), vital scenes involving the parasite can fail to trigger (thus costing you the parasite skill tree), so on and so forth. Even when these do fire, they’re often slammed together in inappropriate ways or delayed by a few real life hours.

Hilariously, you can potentially keep Gale without needing to skill check him into submission, should you choose to kill the refugees and druids. Just don’t rest! It’s easy!

Speaking of slaughtering the refugees and druids, though, it’s possible to stumble into an outcome to the first Big Choice that is either unfinished or was meant to be cut. For context: The first Big Choice of Baldur’s Gate 3 is whether you side with a grove of druids and the refugees seeking shelter, or whether you side with goblins and butcher them. I’ve kvetched about it in my original review, but did you know there’s a third option?

Zevlor and Mol, two tiefling refugees, will allude to stealing the Druids’ sacred idol to disrupt their ritual. Mol even gives it to you as a formal quest. Should you actually do this (ideally via having someone go invisible and nab it), it will trigger a schism and cause the Druids to fight the Tieflings. The Druids will always win, backing the Tieflings into a corner and slaughtering them to the last.

Doing this locks you into a weird Schrodinger’s Murderer scenario. The game flags you as having picked both options at the same time without actually resolving the choice. You still have to trudge over to the Goblin Camp and either deal with the leaders, or “kill” the tiefling camp by… walking in the front door and having Minthara proclaim victory. Interestingly, Halsin even has unique dialogue for this scenario that sadly never gets resolved because he disappears from the game world entirely in this situation.

What’s really interesting though, are the companion reactions. Shadowheart quips that the Grove owes you a great debt for saving them - despite them being dead - while Gale groans about it despite never confronting you or alluding to it elsewhere. Astarion never acknowledges it - or maybe he does? I don’t know. On the run that let me find this outcome, I grew tired of his Stewie Griffin impression and staked him. Wyll runs through some cut content voicelines with Karlach that reveal he was intended to not leave instantly if you slaughtered the Grove.

I bring this up because it is fantastically broken, doubly so if you opt to ‘side’ with Minthara and then immediately kill her, at which point you’re locked into that Schrodinger’s Murderer state I mentioned above. And yet, this is something the game directs you to do. It’s not something I just found while faffing about, it’s a quest Mol gave me. Keep it in mind for when I talk about the story.

First, though, I want to talk about alignment. Like everything, alignment was gutted in 5e and turned into a vestigial system; there for the sake of being there, really. BG3 omits it… as a mechanic.
But it’s still beholden to the ideas of the alignment system. If you have any familiarity with the setting and its alignments, it becomes abundantly clear that they’re still there but invisible, much like engines in Mechwarrior or ammo pickup in Payday 2. Sure, there’s no good or evil meter or even associated stats, but also it’s kind of conspicuous that the only Bronze Dragon is so Lawful Good as to be destructive. Or that Astarion becoming a true vampire very noticeably shifts his alignment out of Neutral. Or that, despite waffling and shuffling around the topic, every mindflayer you encounter meets one or more definitions of Neutral Evil. Or that Shadowheart, follower of a Neutral Evil goddess, gets noticeably and abruptly more selfless after converting to Selune - a Chaotic Good goddess.

There are narrative reasons for these, yes, but they have all the sincerity and grace of a parent insisting their son’s stained school shirt, chewed bottom lip and dilated pupils are due to migraines. It’s such a strange thing to observe after 5e bent over backwards to turn alignment into the kind of atrophied husk that excites some of my puppygirl friends. Especially after having finished a replay of WOTR, a game that challenges the rigidity of alignments in basically every other major scene. Larian probably thinks Prelate Hulrun was right.

Why bring this up?

Because at the end of the day, BG3 doesn’t feel like it was actually made with love for DnD or 5e specifically. Rather, it feels like it was made by people who liked the idea of DnD or maybe their specific DnD experiences, who then went on to make a game which is just a cheap rollercoaster ride for Faerun. A narrow hodgepodge of random elements from the franchise to make people gawk at for 60 hours. In a way, I’d argue that BG3 is made more out of demented DnD fetishism as opposed to any genuine love.

It’s one of those things that only comes up on replays, really. I think the first run is good at making the world feel bigger than it is, especially given the inevitability of you missing something. On subsequent runs, it’s very obviously an A-B-C haunted house ride where you can sometimes vote to go on a detour. There are no real memorable components to the overworld, just attractions. Look, there’s the Absolutist siblings! And the owlbear den! And the goblin village! And Auntie Ethel! And the Raphael bridge! And Gnolls!

But there’s no world. I recently reviewed Factorio, yet it’s this game that feels like a conveyor belt ride. In my last review I took potshots at Act 2 for pretending to have a hazard only to immediately hand you a key to ignoring that hazard, and in hindsight Act 2 is the game just admitting what it is. ‘Here’s a wrecked Land of Fuck, go explore Fuckland and see the sights!’, with the sights primarily being undead/shadow enemies and encounters that’re either tedious boss fights or a succession of dialogue checks. They are, at the very least, better tied to the overall story than in Act 1 or 3. Really, if I say anything about Act 2 is that it’s easily the strongest arc just for making the haunted house attractions actually tie in with the rest of the house. Which honestly gives it better interior design cohesion than my parents.

Act 3 is the worst for this, though, my god. 1 and 2 have the excuse of being in a frontier forest and a blighted hellscape. 3, though rife with cuts and rewrites and bugs, takes place in the Faerun equivalent to Glasgow. And, despite the massively increased population and higher density of NPCs and framerate dives and cut content, it still feels like a haunted house ride. You dart around a tenth of the titular city going from attraction to attraction, ticking off entries in a checklist so bloated that I have to declare it as fetish art when crossing the Canadian border. Not once does the game cast off the rollercoaster shackles.

Something else that’s been bugging me as I both replay BG3 and watch others play is that, honestly, classes aren’t implemented very well in the narrative. Dialogue and actions that should break a Paladin’s oath often don’t, and the usage of generic ‘Paladin’ dialogues for each oath means that your character will almost always be OOC relative to their oath. Even Oathbreakers are OOC, as they can still act as and be treated as a Paladin by everyone not named Raphael. Warlocks can frequently chastise Wyll for how silly he was to accept a Fiend pact with little to no attention given to your hypocrisy. It’s often a coin toss whether or not characters will mention a Druid protagonist even being one when appropriate. If someone mentions a lock or trap in dialogue, take a shot every time they allude to you being a Rogue. You’ll be stone cold sober. Don’t even get me started on Warlock and its vocations.

I normally would not hold developers to such tight standards. Gamedev is tough, I’m not insane enough to think they should account for every contingency or random combination of decisions the player might make. The reason I make an exception for BG3 is because it constantly pretends it’s accounting for things. Part of the hype wave from Early Access was caused by the game having responses for all manner of combinations and the general assumption was that the full release would be the same, but More. So with that in mind, every omission is a bit of a glaring hole, especially as they’re often common-sense omissions - weirder ones get accounted for.

One last addendum (because this segment has expanded 3x its original size since I started) I feel is worth noting is that the original level cap for this game was 10. It was later buffed to 12 to allow spellcasters to get Level 6 spells, but Larian has explained several times that it’d never go any higher because they just didn’t want to deal with the ramifications of 7th level spellcasting or anything above it. “We didn’t want to deal with it” pops up a lot in interviews around this game, which is also vexing considering how much faff the game has.

[I had a segment here about how bad customization was, but honestly it’s just a repeat of my prior gripes in the last interview with an added “I hate how boring the body types are”.]

Okay. 5700 words into this review.

Let’s actually talk about the story, and the characters that inhabit it.

When I first ran through this game, I had a lot of love for the tadpole infestation as a framing device. A lot of my earlier story criticisms were centred around “squandering a good premise later on”. I liked the setup, but the payoffs to said setup were unsatisfying.

Now, coming back to Act 1 several times, I’ve actually come to resent the story for immediately going out of its way to remove all sense of urgency without even pretending there’s anything at stake. Very early on, you are told outright that the tadpole in your brain won’t immediately turn you and thus there’s no real rush whatsoever. Despite vestigial dialogue from Early Access implying that engaging with the tadpole at all will doom you, this is a lie. There are no consequences for using it, and it is indeed just a cool skill tree you can gorge on with no issue or complaints. Lae’zel doesn’t even need to be persuaded to turn a blind eye; you can stand in front of her and ram parasites into your skull while she stares at you glaikit and uncaring.

This isn’t an issue exclusive to the tadpoles. Even in Act 1, you will be told an annoying amount of times that the Druids are this close to shutting off the grove and that you REALLY need to hurry before they succeed in their ritual. Naturally, you can take all the time you like. Even as you learn of a pending Goblin invasion, so long as you don’t speak to Minthara you can just meander around at your own pace. Characters are constantly urging you to focus on things; Raphael warns you not to meander, your companions beg you to hurry up and do their specific thing, NPCs give you quests and go “oh it is SO urgent people are DYING it’s almost OVER you are our LAST HOPE” only to exit dialogue and stiffly walk away while you pinch their healing potions with Astarion.

Now, I need to lay my cards out here: I like time limits, and I think completionism is a venereal disease. I think the real strength of videogames is that they offer experiences that other artforms literally cannot replicate, and a huge part of this is due to some games simply not letting you ‘see everything’ on a first run.

I don’t think BG3 would actually benefit from hard or soft time limits, though. Rather, I take hefty umbrage with the game constantly pretending to have any sort of urgency or time limit only to clap its hands and lead you down a trail of Side Shit. It’s telling that you can acquire a ring from a sidequest that’s meant to assuage symptoms of tadpole infection only to find out that it confers a small buff instead.

WHICH IS A PERFECT TIME TO TALK ABOUT EARLY ACCESS AGAIN!

I really need you, the viewer, to understand how much of a different game BG3 was before they bowed to complaints and made a worse version of DA:O, and I’ll start with that bloody ring.

As I’ve mentioned before, the Early Access version of BG3 was a much different, darker beast. Using the tadpole was an in-game taboo, would royally piss off your companions, and subtly accelerated your descent into becoming a squid. But there was a way to make it fuck off: A ring. The same ring you get that now confers a small buff. It required a short and at-the-time annoying sidequest, but it made that tadpole shut up and made the dream visitor fuck right off until you removed it.
That it was diluted so heavily in the full release (to the point where pursuing the sidequest actually enhances your tadpole powers) is indicative of this game’s massive tone shift, but it’s not quite as indicative as *Wyll.

Wyll in BG3’s release version is the noble son of Duke Ravengard. He is a kind and morally upstanding man who took a Warlock pact that massively fucked him over, but he’s still good in spite of it. He is the goodest of good companions. Mizora, his patron, is just a terrible creature all around with all the redeeming traits of the average Serbian war criminal given that she groomed a teenager into accepting a Warlock pact.

Wyll in BG3’s EA version wasn’t even a Ravengard. He was hinted to be an Eltan, and his dad was a rogue. While he was still the ‘Blade of Frontiers’, conversing with him and exposing him to Goblins made it clear that he harboured an intense darkness in his soul and was a bit too proud of himself. When faced with noncompliant Goblins he immediately resorted to torture, and had no qualms about hurting an innocent man for information. He saw himself as Robin Hood, but veered into The Punisher territory… But there was also an undercurrent of longing to his desire to find Mizora. Despite being his abuser (more intensely, since EA implied she’d sexually assaulted him) and openly scorning her, it was never clear if he actually did hate her.

Unfortunately Larian made the mistake of asking CRPG fans to empathise with a morally complex black man and thus they whined for years that he was “boring” (despite being, imo, the most interesting EA companion besides Gale), so they rewrote him entirely and gave him a new VA and didn’t even have the fucking care to give him as much dialogue as the other companions, so now he feels worse than even the non-Origin characters or Karlach - who only existed late in the game’s lifespan. I bring this up specifically because EA Wyll and EA Astarion were essentially the same character concept; men who affected a front that crumpled under duress and revealed a murky, complex interior. Wyll’s story just progressed in EA while Astarion’s didn’t.

In the middle of writing this segment, which was going to touch on how launch BG3 is painfully split between trying to be a dark fantasy story and trying to be ‘Dragon Age With Cocks’, Larian dumped out Patch 5, which among other things adds an actual epilogue and a way to recruit Minthara without carrying out a small-scale ethnic cleansing. The content present in both of these confirmed to me that Larian have opted to embrace Bioware’s legacy wholeheartedly, by treating their own work as a terminally unserious dating sim for 20-30 somethings who laugh at Virtual Youtuber fans but treat Astarion as though he were an actual person they know.

It’s an excellent jumping off point for my criticisms about tone, though. Marketing itself as a Dark Fantasy Epic gives me certain expectations and while I’ll praise them for avoiding the addiction to sexual assault which is omnipresent in American/West European Dark Fantasy, I have to dock them points for not actually making a Dark Fantasy story. Yes, the game is very gorey and a lot of sidequest characters get royally dicked over, but this is ultimately a story about a party of mostly heroic individuals out to slay an inarguable bad guy who is out to control all reality. Along the way, you can hit a button every now and then to do a dickish thing for no justifiable reason than “the option was there”.

If you’ve played BG3, think of your least favourite party member. Maybe it’s Shadowheart, with her initial snootiness and wishy washy morals? Maybe it’s Lae’zel, with her refusal to lick your character’s boots and penchant for dickheadedness? Maybe it’s Gale, with his emotional manipulation and habit of lovebombing people?

Whoever they are: They were better in EA simply by way of having worse character traits. The release version comes with a distinct sanding-down of everyone to make them more palatable to the Dragon Age crowd. Which, given how DA fans continue to talk about Morrigan to this day, isn’t entirely unreasonable. The end result though is that the party are, as a collective, insufferably good. Besides Minthara - who is very obviously your Lawful Evil rep - every single party member is ‘good at heart’, or just outright good.

The option is there to make some of them worse, of course, but as I alluded to in my last review and up above there often isn’t any justifiable reason for it. It’s debatably a worse case of protagonist-centric morality than the titles this game is blatantly ripping off. At least Dragon Age 2 bothered to provide reasons why you might turn Anders into a crazed zealot or Isabela into an amoral, selfish thief. Here, the choice is always “follow the logical conclusion of the character’s arc” or “hit the bad guy button”.

None of this would be an issue if each NPC’s worst traits were still present. Barring some leftover EA dialogue and early Act 1, everyone just softens up unless you hit the bad guy button.

I also need to take a moment to natter about how boring the companions are, having seen their arcs to completion around 5-6 times at this point. Call me reductive if you wish, but every Origin character is someone whose life growing up was defined by abuse (sexual, emotional, institutional, whatever) and whose personalities at game start are defined by grooming (for romance, for sex, for control, as part of a militaristic caste society, by a literal demon, etc). The resolution to these characters is always either them getting over it - with only your help, naturally - or becoming a dickhead.

The only material difference, besides (imo) cosmetic differences in dialogue is that Astarion gets significantly more Everything than everyone, which is best exemplified by the Dark Urge

I was hoping to put the Astarion favouritism off until nearer the end, but again the recent update put him at the forefront of dev time, quality and quantity so I am bloodsworn to kvetch. Most of what I’m going to say applies to Shadowheart too, but to a much lesser degree because she’s a woman and you know how fantasy fans are.

Astarion gets an unusual amount of shilling by the devs, to the point where it gets exhausting. He has the most indepth romance, he has the most interactions with the Dark Urge, he has the most dialogue, the most interjections, the most indepth companion questline - with the most outcomes - and is generally just given so much more than everyone else. In updates, he is always the focus. “You can kiss Astarion on demand” got more attention from Larian themselves than “Minthara, an entire companion, now works properly”. Hell, the old BG3 poster used to have every companion dispersed evenly and now it’s got him at the forefront. He’s also the only dex-specced party member in the game, so you’re stuck with him unless you want a Hireling.

I wouldn’t normally take umbrage with character shilling because, let’s be honest for a second, posterboys are exceptionally useful marketing tools and most big releases have one for sanity’s sake. My actual issue comes from the sheer neglect everyone else gets. Wyll, a companion who’s been around since very early access, has less dialogue than Karlach - a character who didn’t at all exist until earlier this year. Everyone else just has less than Astarion, which is impressive given that it’s Shadowheart who the narrative drops on you. I’ve noticed that a lot of this game’s most vehement defenders tend to point to Astarion’s story (which is just “sexual assault is bad… when it happens to men c:”) as proof that the narrative is high art while conspicuously ignoring the rest of the game’s narrative contents.

In a way, it amazes me that Larian managed to speedrun the Star Wars Pitfall - wherein a series starts off with a vivid and interesting cast of characters only to cross the event horizon and end up revolving around 2-3 (Skywalker/Kenobi) in the end. In EA, BG3 was a game about a party of fucked up people with a deep ugliness in their soul sat opposite all the beauty, and in the full release BG3 is a game with Astarion and some other people in it.

Also… This may strike some viewers as cold, but I don’t particularly care about the way sexual assault and trauma are depicted in Astarion’s questline. Both because all of the abuse is thrown up in one big box named “abuse”, and because the writers clearly think the players are fucking morons which results in several scenes where either Astarion or the Narrator tells you outright the exact ways in which his trauma affects him.
This in itself is not unrealistic; as heartbreaking as it is, the most damaged people I know don’t want for self-awareness and could probably deliver much the same exposition.
In writing, though, it often comes off as what I said before: The writers assuming players are morons. Which is doubly strange given Gale (my favourite companion) is a whole other beast, and the results of his grooming by a literal goddess are often present yet not explicitly commented upon. He’ll even deny it in the rare moments you do bring it up.

It’s all very… “Young adult novel tackling abuse”. Every time I see the ‘good’ climax to Astarion’s story where he declares that he’s “so much more than [Cazador] made him” and then stabs his abuser to death before sobbing, I wince a little at how juvenile it is. In the past it was ambiguous as to whether murdering Cazador actually helped, but sure enough the new epilogues confirm it ‘fixes’ him. Nauseating, I tell you.

I mentioned that Gale was my favourite companion and that’s primarily because he hits on the same notes, they’re just handled with grace. Gale is a deeply traumatized man who was groomed and taken as a consort by a literal goddess. A goddess who enabled his worst tendencies until they bore actual consequences, and then cut ties with him for both of their sakes.
He presents a jovial and jolly front, but said front comes with a habit for compliments-as-manipulation and guilt tripping because it turns out being well-read does not make up for serious arrested development.
Peer beneath the veil and you find a man who has a genuine, sincere belief that his death will be a net positive for the world, yet despite this emptiness and resignment to his fate he still nurses a nuclear anger towards his abuser and anyone like her that can be set off if pushed properly. His apparent ‘ego’ is also a front, because in truth he believes his only notable trait is his intellect and magical prowess; they’re the core of his entire self. Without them, what is he?

There’s a moment in Act 2 that’s incredibly easy to miss due to that act’s general pacing issues where he’s just outright depressed. When you poke him for a conversation, the first thing he apologises for? Not being the erudite and verbose speaker he usually is. It’s heartbreaking.

Most of that is just inferred, by the way. Unlike Astarion, Gale has precious few scenes that really expand on his character and I had to really dig to get some of them. That many of them were bugged and didn’t appear until patches 3 and 4 didn't help. Minthara is great too, but the developers are hellbent on leaving her unfinished so I can’t even go into an expository rant about her.

I’m going to take a brief break from dunking on the game to talk about a good part - though it is in service to dunking all the same.

Act 2 is fucking phenomenal. I’d say it’s the only solid part of the game’s story. There’s a solid villain with defined motives and an actual personality, a strong supporting cast, minibosses who act as narrative mirrors to the big bad, and several companion quests (Except Wyll, sorry) reveal their full stakes here. The studio’s art designers worked overtime for each of its various environments, deftly alternating between oppressive deathcult fortresses and regal yet foreboding enclaves with plenty of rotted quasi-medieval structures in between before eventually capping off in a horrific dungeon made of meat. While I’m still not too fond of the Shadow-Cursed Lands as an area to navigate, I think the entire thing is of infinitely superior construction to the acts it’s sandwiched between.
Special shoutout to Act 2 if you’re playing as Shadowheart, which is perhaps the only time in the game where the potential of Origin Characters as a game mechanic is ever realized. Dialogue changes constantly and your interactions with the major NPCs are often radically shifted to account for your character’s role and heritage. Shame it doesn’t last.

Act 2’s biggest flaw, sadly, is that its mere existence makes two already bad acts look even worse. With the primary exception of Act 3’s intro and final two hours, most of BG3’s plot in Acts 1 and 3 only occurs sporadically. It is a series of diversions, fetch quests and camp rests until Plot, and Act 2 really pulls back the curtain on this because the plot is progressing constantly. It’s difficult to wander around Act 2 and not advance the story.
The foundation of this criticism stems from BG3’s obsession with absolute faff. Taking a leaf out of DA: Inquisition’s book, a lot of sidequests and side areas are either contextless fights or an intro to painfully unfunny writing. XP in this game stands for both Experience and Excruciating Pain from yet another Whedonesque gag sequence. Normally I’d excuse this because the game gives you gear for suffering, but so much gear is caster-specific that my martial addicted self usually bins it.

There’s a conspiracy theory that Dark Urge - who starts as a Sorcerer by default - was the main character and ‘Tav’ did not exist, which is probably not true but is believable with how much gear is caster specific. If you are a punchman or a Barbarian, eat shit.

And the Dark Urge itself… Truthfully, I like it so much that I do wish it was the only option and that Origins were unplayable. The DU story is a tale of someone wracked with a violent compulsion that haunts them no matter what. If they fight it, it is a story of fighting tooth and nail to stop said compulsion as it grows in power, eventually threatening to make the DU lash out and kill their loved ones. If they succumb, it’s a story of a demented madman building a throne of murder from the bones of reality, for they are a Bhaalspawn and that is their birthright.
DU is, to my surprise, a surprisingly captivating tale because of this. There’s a lot more weight given to some moments, and parts of the game which are usually dead air are instead filled with advancements of the DU’s personal plot. Successfully fighting it and making it to the end feels earned, in part because it’s the only good-aligned path in BG3 which is infinitely harder than the evil path.

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand nobody really responds to it. DU, much like the other companions, just doesn’t get as much unique dialogue as it should. As expected, Astarion is the only character to really get into conversations about the DU, with everyone else only really giving brief interjections or casual camp chats. In the good route you are literally murdered stone dead and brought back, and nobody reacts to it. It feels grotesquely incomplete, which is a disservice to BG3’s most interesting aspect.

Throughout this review I’ve alluded to “the plot” or “the story” and I’m sad to announce that there just isn’t that much to discuss on that front. The party get infected with mind flayer tadpoles, are manipulated by a rogue mind flayer, get told to wrest control of an Elderbain from the Dead Three’s Chosen, and then decide what to do with said brain once it breaks free. I am of course being reductive, but only slightly; the meat of this game’s ‘story’ is the companion quests and side stuff. Attempt to do the plot with Hirelings and it peels back just how empty the game is.
And, really, I think having the final villain be the Elderbrain is a bit too straightforward for a game that pretends to have depth with its various ‘twists’. Doubly so considering the Chosen are miles ahead of the brain in terms of writing, managing to deftly straddle the line between “big bad you absolutely must kill” and “sympathetic failure who has reasons for being like this”. Which gives the game more depth than Final Fantasy XIV, I guess.

The story can be made somewhat more palatable by picking an Origin, because it at least hoists some unique scenes on you as a means to let you play out a character's arc however you wish. This is, sadly, the only way to give Wyll or Karlach any depth, and I'm not about to award points for the game encouraging you to make up the good writing in your head - though it certainly worked on a lot of people.

I am nearly ten thousand words into this review, and the entire time I've been waiting for a moment to posit the "What is Baldur's Gate 3 about?" question to myself. Staring down at the last few paragraphs, I realize I don't even know. So deep are the narrative changes and so sloppy is the EA/Launch welding that I can't even speculate with certainty.

As we near the end, I do want to say that the voice acting is the game’s best aspect. Besides Neil Newbon (I’m sorry. He sounds like Stewie Griffin. I will not budge.) everyone else sounds fantastic. It says a lot that the main cast have relatively few works under their belt yet are managing to go toe-to-toe with legendary voice actors JK Simmons and Jason Isaacs, with the gap in quality being about a hair’s width. Sure, it’s really fucking annoying that the game has a cutscene for EVERY dialogue even if it’s incidental NPC one-offs, but at least it’s nice to listen to everyone. Shout out to Maggie Robertson for managing to make every line out of Orin’s voice sound hornier than even I could imagine. You rock.

Ultimately, this game’s ambitions hurt it the most. There is a vast mountain of cut content for this game, much of which was being shown off and played by the developers as late as three weeks pre-release. Endless rewrites, mechanical changes and changing staff are obvious in the patchwork, ramshackle product that released in August of this year. There is a clear attempt to make a modern epic on display here. To call this game a rough gem would be acknowledging that it is still a gem, and that’s not praise I’m willing to offer even faintly.
Towards the back of my 200~ hours in this game, I began thinking of something I read years ago while talking about Three Kingdoms China. I think it’s from Sun Tzu’s ‘The Art of War’?

There’s a limit to how far something can travel before it needs more maintenance, food and water than it can transport. This goes for animals, humans, and software too.

Baldur’s Gate 3 needed either more money, staff and resources than Larian had, or more realistic ambitions. The foundation required to support their ambitions just wasn’t there.

This game has already won a ton of awards, and will likely win even more in the coming year. For many people, it’ll be their first experience with Dark Fantasy and their views on the genre will be coloured by it. It’ll take five or so years for critical retrospectives to exist without getting shouted down by manic Astarion fans. Even now, all over social media, excitable gamers hold it aloft as an example of what games “should be”, and executives will nod their head and agree. It is, after all, the AAA way to launch unfinished and fix it later.

I have no satisfactory ending for this review. Which, given what game I'm reviewing, is apt.

[POST-SCRIPT STUFF STARTS HERE]

After posting this review, I lay down to rest my ancient back and primordial eyes, and I had a thought.

This game has problems with sex, Asian people and trans people.

Just to rattle them off without a script or proofreading:

1) Sex is treated weirdly, like Bioware's attitude but worse. It is a reward, something you get from engaging in the uncomfortably transactional romances or from doing sidequests. Alternatively, it's treated as a kink in and of itself, and that people who have it are freaky, which is very obvious with both Minthara and the fucking incest twins. Lastly, it tends to pop up as a punchline but in a very annoying way where it's the only punchline. There is genuinely an encounter early on where the '''joke''' is "haha look! Ugly people fucking!"

2) There just aren't any important Asian characters in this game, with the most prominent being a one dimensional baddy who is ultimately irrelevant outside of Astarion's questline and the rest being NPCs with one or two lines of dialogue. It really sticks out, especially given the undeserved praise this game is getting for representation. Hell, the Black characters aren't treated any better; Wyll is a non-factor thanks to Larian gutting him to appease whiners, and his dad is another man's plot token. Neither of them have any agency within the story, with Wyll always putting the fate of his dad in your hands. The playable cast is so fucking white too, my god.

3) Much of what I said up above applies to trans people, essentially confirming what I said last time. There are only a handful of trans NPCs, and there are no body options so if you decide to be a trans woman you're stuck with bolted on tits, and trans male characters are stuck looking buff as fuck because everyone in this game shares one of 4 body types. Sure, you could use one of the other body types, but faces are sex-based and there's an aggravating lack of sliders there's no real option besides femininity or masculinity. Fun! There's one major trans NPC who appears in Shadowheart's quest, but that's really it for trans people in Faerun.