Baldur's Gate 3 Review

Most role-playing games sell you a fantasy of freedom and then quietly police it. Larian built the freedom first and wrote the story around whatever wreckage you leave. Shove a questgiver off a cliff, polymorph a boss into a sheep, talk to the dead about their own murder, or skip an entire act by teleporting a corpse: the systems permit it and the writing acknowledges it. That reactivity is the achievement, and it is why the difficulty of making this thing sits at the top of the scale.

Turn-based combat inherits fifth edition's rules but sharpens them with verticality, surfaces and shove economics that make positioning the real damage stat. The companions carry it emotionally, Astarion and Karlach in particular, written with enough specificity that romance and betrayal both land. Act three's density strains under its own ambition and the frame rate knows it, but the seams show only because so much is loaded in. Nothing else this decade holds a branching narrative together at this weight.