Baldur's Gate 3 review, the RPG masterpiece that plays slow and remembers every choice

What Baldur's Gate 3 is and why it changed everything

Let's start with the basics, for anyone new. Baldur's Gate 3 is Larian Studios' RPG that adapts the rules of Dungeons & Dragons —fifth edition— to a video game, and drops you into the Forgotten Realms with a serious problem lodged in your eye, a mind-flayer tadpole threatening to turn you into a monster. From there, you decide absolutely everything.

It launched on PC in August 2023, reached PS5 in September and Xbox Series in December, and along the way it took Game of the Year at The Game Awards and near-perfect scores across the board. And it didn't settle for selling well; it reordered the entire genre and left everyone else running to catch up.

Real freedom, not the brochure kind

Here's the first reason it hooks you so hard. Most games promise freedom and then walk you down a corridor with forest painted on the walls. Baldur's Gate 3, by contrast, actually delivers, and the most absurd idea you can think of usually works. Stack crates to skip a wall? Sure. Convince an enemy to jump off a cliff instead of fighting? That too. Talk to an animal, a corpse or the villain himself? Go ahead.

Combat is turn-based, pure Dungeons & Dragons, with twelve classes, a pile of subclasses and hundreds of spells that combine with the environment itself, with oil, water, fire or electricity. And the map is full of nooks, corners you reach out of curiosity to find a whole story waiting. Peeking into any random cave eats two hours before you notice.

A Baldur's Gate 3 hero holds a lantern in a gloomy wasteland — Image: Larian Studios

The game that remembers everything you do

And if you ask me what truly made me fall for it, it's this. Baldur's Gate 3 remembers everything. Every decision you make, however small it seems, leaves a mark, and a character you helped in the first hour reappears twenty hours later, someone remembers that lie you blurted out, and a petty cruelty comes back to bite you when you least expect it. Very few games make you feel the world is genuinely paying attention.

Its companions are half the soul of the game, full protagonists and not mere helpers with one line of dialogue. I fell hard for Shadowheart —I'll admit it, I'm a little in love with her— but it doesn't matter who you pick, because Astarion, Karlach, Lae'zel or Gale each have their own story, their wounds and their way of looking at you depending on what you do. They stay with you long after you switch off.

Astarion, one of Baldur's Gate 3's most memorable companions — Image: Larian Studios

A slow burn, and not for those in a hurry

Now, an important warning, because this isn't a game for everyone or for every moment. Baldur's Gate 3 is a slow burn. It asks for time, calm and the will to read, to talk, to experiment. A single playthrough can run seventy or eighty hours, and that's going straight through. If you're short on time and want twenty-minute sessions, this isn't your place, and that's fine.

For anyone with a season to spare to live another life, what awaits is staggering. The art direction is simply stunning, Borislav Slavov's soundtrack gives you goosebumps, and the voice acting and Spanish localization are top-tier. It's a world to inhabit, not to rush, in the vein of the best RPGs you can play right now.

Lae'zel, the githyanki warrior of Baldur's Gate 3 — Image: Larian Studios

The one thing I'd flag, and why it's still a ten

To be fair, it's worth pointing out what isn't perfect. The third act, once you're in the city of Baldur's Gate, feels a bit more hemmed in than the marvel of the first two, and back in the day it arrived with performance dips and the odd bug that could jam a quest. Larian has polished it patch by patch, and today it's far better than at launch, but it's the one thing that would keep it from a perfect score in many people's eyes. If you want to keep digging through its community, there are even mods that reinvent it in third person.

It doesn't stop me. I've finished it twice, first as a dragonborn following the path of the Dark Urge and then as an elf, and both times it left me the same sense of having lived something enormous. For its freedom, for how it remembers every single thing you do and for what it made me feel with its characters, to me Baldur's Gate 3 is a flat-out ten. If you have the hours, don't let it pass; and if you don't, carve out the time, because it's more than worth it.

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