Larian built an RPG with real consequences for nearly every choice, and it rarely misses.
A friend who has never finished a CRPG in his life called me at midnight to describe a conversation he'd had with a squirrel, which is how I ended up buying this. Larian Studios spent six years building it, and what they built is a game that remembers. I finished it twice, once as a rogue who talked her way out of nearly every fight and once as a paladin who couldn't lie if his life depended on it, and the game noticed the difference constantly, not in stray lines of dialogue but in whole quests resolving differently depending on who I'd decided to be.
The goblin camp is where that clicked for me. My rogue strolled in by convincing the sentries she belonged there, got a guided tour of the place, and smashed their war drums before anybody thought to beat them. My paladin arrived at the same gate two months later, said one honest sentence, and spent the next forty minutes fighting everything in the western half of the map. Same camp, same quest marker, completely different evening, and ninety hours of this game are like that.
“I've never played a game that remembered so much about who I said I was.”
The combat is the actual Dungeons & Dragons fifth edition ruleset, run by a computer that never gets a rule wrong and never lets you fudge a save. You can shove the archer off the ledge, ignite the grease before he walks through it, or turn invisible and skip the encounter altogether, and the dice roll on screen so you get to watch your plan die honestly, which mine did throughout most of Act 1.
Amelia Tyler's narration is the glue holding the tabletop fantasy together. She reads like a dungeon master who likes you but doesn't trust you, and hers is some of the best voice work in a cast stacked with it.
The party carries the back half of the game, though not in the order the internet ranks them. Astarion, the scheming vampire spawn everybody fell for, is fine. The sad backstory under the sarcasm is well written, I looked hard for whatever else people were seeing in him, and after two full runs I'd still trade him for Karlach without thinking about it. She's a tiefling barbarian who escaped literal hell with an infernal engine burning through her chest, and she's mostly just happy to feel sunlight again. That character should collapse into a mascot, because cheerful people with tragic bodies usually do, and instead she's the most likable companion an RPG has produced in years, with a personal storyline quietly breaking your heart on a timer while everybody else's gets to take its time. Shadowheart, a cleric keeping secrets even from herself, is the other one I'd call essential, and Larian isn't shy about letting any of them end badly if you make the wrong call.
The consensus says Act 1 is the strongest opening this genre has managed in a decade, a forest and a ruined temple with no wasted space in either, and the consensus is nearly right. The stretch I keep replaying in my head is Act 2, where the shadow-cursed lands trade openness for genuine dread and the light around an inn is the only thing keeping you alive, and that's the part I'd put in front of somebody to explain why this game swallowed my autumn. Act 3, the city of Baldur's Gate itself, is the weak link and it isn't close, with more bugs, quests that don't close out cleanly, and a framerate that used to dip hard in the Lower City before the patches landed.
I save-scummed every pickpocket check in the game. Every single one of them, and the quicksave button is right there, and I quit to the menu rather than live with a failed roll more times than I'm going to put a number on.
Inventory management for a six-person camp hauling three acts of loot is a mess by the end of it. I spent the better part of an hour sorting through it before the final stretch and hauled all of it anyway, on the reasoning that I might at some point need forty-one candles.
You can also play the companions directly as origin characters, or as the Dark Urge, a custom origin built around a murderous compulsion you spend the game trying to resist. Most studios would announce a feature like that and quietly ship half of it, and Larian finished it, which makes Dark Urge arguably the best character concept in an RPG this generation.
My rogue took ninety hours and the paladin took seventy, mostly because I skipped every lock in Faerûn the second time through. I never worked out how much of Act 3's mess was scope and how much of it was the deadline, since Larian patched a great deal of it away without ever quite saying which, and the difference matters if you're wondering whether the next one lands its ending cleanly. The third character sheet is already rolled, a Dark Urge sorcerer, sitting in the character creator where I left it, and I keep telling myself I'll start on a weekend, which is a lie I've now told myself about four seperate weekends running.