This has to be the funniest marketing gimmick ever made. Honestly. It makes the Hatsune Miku Dominos promotion or the Saint's Row 4 ultimate edition seem tame.

For starters, it's just a copy of Portal with an RTX Remix injector bundled on. It comes with the dev menu. If you want to play Portal 1 for free you can get this, push Alt+X and disable everything. [This ended up not being true, I forgot that I owned Portal 1.]

But if you want to actually experience the shitshow that is Portal With RTX, you can also just open the menu and undo the shitty DLSS upscaler preset the game comes with. Setting it to any of the normal presets massively boosts performance. Yes, the default settings are an attempt to convey to laymen that their RTX card isn't good enough and they need a better one.

As for the actual game, it's a fascinating look into the minds of people obsessed with 'graphics' as a concept to such an extent that it becomes a detriment.

Portal With RTX looks terrible. Just absolute dogshit. I think whoever signed off on this should be forced to do a Drama course in University using only Garry's Mod models and lighting.

The original Portal has a very intentional, meticulously refined aesthetic. It is very bright, cold, and unwelcoming. Almost nothing in Aperture is rounded, with most of the geometry being angular brutalist walls and panels that look about as inviting as a field of landmines. It's very obvious just from 5-10 minutes of Portal that nothing lives in Aperture and nobody has been there in ages. Later on, you literally pull back the curtain of the testing chambers and run through back corridors, maintenance shafts and warehouses which completely turn the aesthetic on its head... By design. Intent. Yes, that's the word we're focusing on: 'Intent'.

Because Portal With RTX takes a sledgehammer to that meticuously crafted aesthetic. Chambers are now much darker, being lit up by overtuned light sources cast by either the few ambient lights, the lights bolted onto doors, or the red buttons. The latter in particular bathe everything in a sickening red glow that's so overdone it makes many Garry's Mod maps seem like professional work. There isn't really much of a difference now between the chambers and the lategame areas as a result.

But.

But.

There's a worse problem.

Whenever I talk about game design to people I'm friends with, I will more likely than not bring up Valve's amazing ability to signpost things without explicitly having a character say "go here", or having a big flashing arrow on the HUD telling you where to go. Most of the time they'll simply have lights, a literal sign, or clever lighting to guide you. Portal 1 in particular was great for this.
Portal With RTX is horrible. The 'modern' lighting gives equal importance to everything, and in a game where the lighting was handcrafted, this means player guidance is at an all time low. I cannot imagine this being your first experience with Portal, or Valve games.
Now, I'm a Portal autist, if you put a gun to my head and told me to run this game blindfolded, I'd be done before you had the gun loaded. For someone whose first experience with Portal is this game, though? They're in for a world of hurt, because in some chambers the lighting is so bad that it can be difficult to see cubes or doors at first. The later areas are sometimes pitch black, which is an awful statement to make about a mod for a game where nothing is pitch black BY DESIGN.

When I say "This is just Portal 1 with an RTX injector", there's no word of a lie there...

...Which means the developer commentary is still there. Yes, you can listen to the minds at Valve Software elucidate you as to how they very intentionally, carefully and almost neurotically tailored every single aspect of this game to perfection, all while playing a mod that's about as carefully created as AI art.

And you know what? AI art is a good comparison, because this feels like AI art. There's no regard for design, or consistency, or that magical keyword intent. Just a manic, soul-destroying fixation on 'looking good'. Beauty doesn't have to mean anything to these people, it just has to look good at a cursory glance. Spiritually, there's no difference between this... """product""", and going onto Midjourney and typing "portal realistic". This is very clearly a product made by and targeted at an audience for whom the word 'better' automatically means 'prettier'.

I was neutral on raytracing before actually getting a card capable of it, not really caring for the whole debate. I found devout shooters of it to be annoying, and devout haters of it to be wasting their time on what I perceived as the little brother to PhysX and HairWorks - two of Nvidia's other gimmicks that everyone replicated with ease.
After this, and seeing how ineffectual it is in Cyberpunk 2077/Mechwarrior 5/Resident Evil 4? Raytracing is a scam, dude. You can do better shit with Reshade, and it's free.

The original Portal is ten dollars. On sale, it usually becomes a dollar. Go play that instead.

[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.

In 1997, a game called Fallout spilled out into the world. Under the guidance of a nerd named Tim Cain, it was initially a hobby project until more and more people latched onto it, adding their talents and thoughts to the potluck that would eventually spawn the most annoying group of cryptofascists this side of Warhammer 40,000.
Drawing on their love of pulp fiction, retrofuturism, XCOM, sci-fi movies and a tabletop system they liked (GURPS, which is absent from history for a very good reason), this vast pool of influences eventually calcified and become Fallout 1.

This story had already played out several times across modern culture by the time Fallout came into existence. It is the basis of Star Wars, modern western comics as a medium, Gundam, Warhammer... Really, you can pick any longrunning and influential franchise to find the same story of one passionate person and their team of equally passionate collaborators drawing on a huge pool of influences to make something unique.

Fallout 1 is a great game. If I ever made a list of games you should play before you die, it'd definitely be up there. Rather uniquely for the post-apocalyptic genre, it's more focused on humanity pulling itself out of the ruins of a long gone civilization than it is on the long gone civilization itself. Compared to what came after, it's a far more somber and reserved experience where the potential of combat occurring is more like a sword of damocles than a regular occurrence. Sure, it has every trope you likely expect from the genre (mutants, bandits, factions mimicking old world stuff like cowboys), but those tropes are more of a deconstruction than anything; they're portrayed as kind of pathetic for having an obsession on old iconography, because there is a now in front of you and it needs help to be built and maintained. There's a reason the BoS are assholes in this one.

Sadly, much like every example I gave two paragraphs ago, Fallout has succumbed to what I nowadays refer to as the Lucas Horizon. George Lucas combined his love of westerns, samurai, Kurosawa movies, WW2, Flash Gordon and sci-fi to make Star Wars.

The people making Star Wars after him are using their love of Star Wars to make more Star Wars.

Despite calling it the Lucas Horizon, however, I feel Fallout embodies it more than any other franchise. Even starting with Fallout 2, the series began to develop an obsession with itself. Rather than letting the influences and references form a foundation to build a work upon, they became the central part of the work. Now, Fallout 2 isn't as bad about this as every game that came after it, and indeed it at least bothers to expand on Fallout 1's themes, but at the end of the day it's ultimately more about pop culture and Fallout stuff than anything else.

Fallout 3 is where the series begins to veer off into the Lucas Horizon for good. After two games that were about the gradual rebuilding of civilization and the ways in which people built a new life from the wreckage of American civlization, 3 did a massive 180 and focused specifically on the wreckage, setting itself in a wasteland literally called The Capital Wasteland, with all of the progress from 1 and 2 seemingly undone.
The game opens with a hollow recreation of Fallout 1's intro, once again narrated by Ron Perlman and featuring shots of a ruined world set to a dissonant song by the Ink Spots as the first game did, before revealing yet another person in power armor. The difference, though, is that while Fallout 1 used it as a prelude to the story, Fallout 3 uses it to signal just how much it adores the wreckage and the retrofuturism and the distinct Fallout iconography that Bethesda yoinked at a garden sale. Fallout 3 rolls out its new power armor model to make you go "wow, cool!" while Fallout 1's intro prominently displays the T-51 being worn by American soldiers extrajudicially murdering prisoners of war.

If you've spent any amount of time in gaming circles, either directly or indirectly, you've likely heard the phrase:

"It's a good game, but a bad [franchise] game".

Personally, I hold this phrase in contempt as it's almost often deployed as a means to avoid any indepth examination of what it means to be a [franchise] game, and is often code for "it's not like the games I love".

Fallout 4 is my one exception. It is a good game, but an atrocious Fallout game. We'll be talking about the latter part exclusively, you can infer my thoughts on 4's gameplay from the Starfield review I did.

Why is it an atrocious Fallout game?

Because it's not about the rebuilding of society. It's not about the struggles faced by those seeking to carve new life out of the bones of the old. It's not even about kitschy pop culture references or the ways in which veneration of the past drives one straight into the past's sins.

It's about Fallout. It's about Vaults, Vault Suits, power armor, the Brotherhood, retrofuturist shit, dandy boy apples, whatever comes to mind when you think "Fallout", that's the core of Fallout 4.

Now, don't get me wrong, there are some themes present in Fallout 4, but they're superficial at best. Any talk of 'rebuilding' is just a pretext to shove the settlement mechanic on you, and this game treats a question as intense as "If artificial life possesses humanity, is that natural humanity or is it as artificial as its host?" with all the seriousness of The Room tackling breast cancer.

Discourse surrounding this game points to the voiced protagonist as the source for many of its woes, but I'd argue that the protagonist being a pre-war survivor does more harm than anything else. Intrinsically binding the player to the old world means everything encountered is filtered through the lens of that world. For all its faults, Fallout 2 having the player be an insulated tribal whose confusion at the world around them stemmed from their post-war experience was a much better angle than simply having the protagonist be a 200 year old.
In the non-Bethesda titles, the pre-war period is explicitly associated with the concept of rot and decay. The Brotherhood donning the armor and imagery of pre-war America led them to become just as paranoid, isolated and self-righteous as pre-war Americans did. Ghouls, ancient pre-war survivors, were rotting zombies in the most literal sense of the word. Shady Sands becoming the NCR was explicitly portrayed as a bad thing, because its citizens assumed a mantle of relative safety in exchange for shouldering the foolishness that led to the state of the world as it is now - to the point of recreating American jingoism and oil barons in the new world.
Most obviously, the Enclave were the last bastion of the US government and their very existence is seen as a virus purely because they wish for some inane ideological and biological purity. Fallout 3, despite having more flaws than I can count, at least got it right by involving a literal virus in the Enclave's plans just to make it obvious.

In New Vegas, the Enclave's power armor has been forgotten by almost everyone. Those that are aware of it consider it to be either a hate symbol or a bitter memory of a failed state. You have to go through a long and messy quest to get it, and it's given as a 'reward' once you're told that the Enclave was a dream doomed to die from the start. The game rubs your face in how pathetic its remnants are; sad old people who struggle to deal with the cognitive dissonance resulting from them missing the Enclave yet being fully aware it was just another death cult. Should you convince one of your party members to don it in support of the """best ending""", he's immediately identified as a war criminal and given a life sentence.

In Fallout 4, it starts spawning at level 28.

But really, it's the Brotherhood who embody this complaint more than anyone.

In part because they've become the Enclave, complete with vertibirds and racism.

In a better work, this would be remarked upon. Someone would point out that there's a bitter, harrowing irony to be found in the Enclave's biggest enemy stumbling into their ideology, or that a group that was once positioned to be the country's heroic saviours were now out enforcing curfews and killing people without trial. That something once considered a reassuring symbol to the wastes had now become something people dread.

Fallout 4 instead trips over its own feet, because it's more concerned with making you - the viewer - think the Brotherhood are cool. They debut in an epic, memorable cutscene where a fucking blimp flies into the map alongside a vertibird swarm and a dramatic announcement, potentially accompanied by Nick Valentine quoting a passage from The Raven in dismay. Your personal introduction is given an equal amount of weight, featuring a cool vertibird sequence up to the Prydwen which caps off with a rousing speech from a guy deliberately designed to look like modern neo nazis. Progress the story, and they bust out Liberty Prime - Fallout 3's giant death robot who rants about communists in a hammy voice and literally can't be killed.

Being a queer person who has several other characteristics that make me a target for fascists, I'm very sensitive and hypercritical of how they're portrayed. One of my most strongly held beliefs regarding the creative arts is that, much like suicide, a creative should be very considerate of how they depict fascism as I feel it can have very very very lasting real world harm.
See, the other thing Fallout has in common with those other IPs I listed up above is that all of them have had their iconography co-opted by fascists, because all of those IPs eventually doubled down and made their in-universe fascists seem cool to the average viewer. Star Wars doubled down on the Empire's cool visuals, Gundam gave tons of screentime to Zeon, Marvel keeps bringing back The Punisher uncritically, and Warhammer 40k continues to glorify the Imperium even as queer people are made to feel unsafe and ostracized within the community.
I'm only speaking from personal experience here, but the Fallout fanbase is rife with nazis. For a time, Enclave iconography and visuals were pretty much synonymous with the more rightwing elements of the fanbase. Despite New Vegas being popular among queers, the series as a whole doesn't get much discussion because said discussion is mostly driven by rightwingers. The reactions to The Frontier mod contain a lot of the word "degenerate", which I think speaks for itself.

For Bethesda to try so hard to make the openly and textually fascist Brotherhood seem cool and admirable feels irresponsible given the franchise's history. There is a very good reason most other videogames do not give you a "bad guys campaign" when they're approaching anything political, after all. Even Skyrim, this game's immediate predecessor, handled the subject with infinitely more grace.

Such problems are the natural consequence of Bethesda equating "good writing" with "there is a Fallout Thing present". The moral, social and political implications of The Institute being a 200 year old ancient conspiracy who rule an entire region from the shadows are glossed over in favour of "Look! Synths and pre-war aesthetics!". Almost nothing touches on the messy politics of the Railroad and their written goal, which is altruistic on paper but in practice has accidentally become a supremacy movement that carries out 'justified' violence for the sake of the violence itself. The Vaults are no longer horrific dungeons of suffering that represent the sheer moral decay, disregard for life and ruthless exploitation that occurred under Fallout's late stage capitalism, they're a thing you can build if you buy a DLC.

This game's intro, while not as egregious as Fallout 3's, is still a sign of what's to come. Slapped into a pre-war house filled with the worst of Bethesda's fixation on that god awful retrofuturism aesthetic they've concocted, you waddle around interacting with things for a few moments before you get to see the bomb drops in person, run past the military (clad in power armor, naturally) and get admitted to a Vault.
It's all very... theme park. "Look, you can SEE the bombs drop!" doesn't really work when the core of Fallout isn't specifically that the bombs dropped, but what caused them to drop. The erasure of context in favour of simple imagery is a rare moment of honestly from Bethesda, though perhaps an unintended one.

It is not, however, anywhere as honest as Nuka World, a DLC which turns the Fallout world into a more theme park by being set in a literal god damn theme park. Most people have already said it, but the DLC forces you to side with deeply evil raiders to even experience it which is a bad start. Not as bad as the rest of the content, though. Peeling off their mask to reveal their intent, Nuka World shoves you through a series of dungeons utterly caked in Fallout's iconography and original stuff, so much so that it feels like a self-parody from Bethesda at times.

The ultimate tragedy of Fallout as an IP, and specifically the Vault Boy, is that both were very heavily rooted in criticisms of the uniquely insidious ways in which capitalism will weaponize things for its own goals. The peppy and cutesy marketing in-universe was meant to cover up a deeply rotted hyperfascist surveilance state which was willing to annex its neighbours due to deeply rooted Sinophobia. The Vault Boy in particular is a goofy, cutesy cartoon mascot meant to encourage people to sign up for sickening, amoral experiments headed by a company so detached from humanity that it saw a nuclear war as an opportunity.

Bethesda sadly now own Fallout, so the Vault Boy is merchandise, used to entice people to sign up for sickening, amoral experiments headed by a company so detached from reality that they thought Starfield could stand on its own merits.

I'm aware that I already sold all my credibility down the river by going to bat (hehe) for Honkai Star Rail, and if you somehow still trust me, I'm here to write a cheque for the rest of my credibility.

I enjoyed Palworld. I’m not crazy about it, it doesn’t consume my every thought like Honkai Star Rail still does a month later and it’s not got me ruminating on the merits of nostalgia and the pitfalls of longrunning franchises the way Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth has, but it’s kept my interest and I don’t hate it.

Unfortunately this means I’m now honorbound to write a fair review of it. Tsk.

I like Open World Survival Craft games. You might know OWSCs by their biggest examples: Ark Survival Devolved, The Forest, Rust, DayZ, Subnautica, Lego Fortnite, and Breath of the Wild. I like them so much that I am just a pernicky miserable cunt about the entire genre. Oh god. I am so miserable about these games. I love them so much, but they are so painfully derivative. They are so painfully samey. They all want to be one of the games I listed up above.

And Palworld is no exception. It is perhaps the worst offender. Breath of the Elden Fort is horrifically derivative. It yoinks from, in order of noticing: Pokemon, Breath of the Wild, ARK: Survival Devolved, Elden Ring, Jump Force, Fortnite, Factorio, Xenoblade, and probably a ton of other games I missed due to simple human error.
It is a game where the first NPC you meet wears copyright-safe Monster Hunter armour while holding an M1014 shotgun, while a tower from ARK lights up the skyline alongside the tree Yggdrasil.
The opening moments are set in an environment I can only describe as "Nintendo hired that man", and the first boss looks like a Vtuber concept that was left stillborn on the marketing floor.
On the way to this boss, you will almost assuredly run into a Xenoblade World Boss that's 30 levels higher than you, and be greeted by numerous Xenoblade area prompts that’re then accompanied by DMCA-dodging versions of the BOTW discovery jingle.

It is, in nearly every sense of the phrase, a 'fake game'. Something one would see for 15-20 seconds during a Law & Order episode, an animation kitbashed by underpaid new-hires whose only animation credit will be that episode. By all rights, under every star and every law and every creed and every culture, this game should be terrible.

And it's not. It should be, but the matrix glitched and instead it's... I try not to make snap judgments about early access games, but I'm gonna make an exception here:

Assuming the development doesn't fuck up massively like what happened to Starbound or MASS Builder, this will probably be the greatest OWSC game ever made.

Much like with Honkai Star Rail, I need to gripe about other OWSC games to really illustrate what Palworld does well, though fortunately it's easier here.

The opening hours of most OWSC games are what I call the "copper phase". Whether it's copper or some other resource, the overarching goal of the copper phase in each OWSC is to, after starting with literally nothing, build up a base and acquire the resource which allows you to progress on the technology tree - often while acquiring millions of wood and stone in the process.
This is a remarkably simple part of the OWSC, and the vast majority of them fuck it up. Seriously, my Steam library is a wasteland of games I binned for fucking up the copper phase.
This might seem harsh, but there's a good reason for this: The copper phase is essentially the game's cover letter. It's fine to not play the entire hand here, but in those opening hours an OWSC NEEDS to show off what it's all about here. It's why I left Valheim to die, but V Rising gets a pass. There might be a conversation to be had about intentionally slowing the pacing, yes, but we’re so long into this genre’s history that fumbling this part is unforgivable.

Palworld’s copper phase is obscenely difficult to quantify, and… I don’t think it even has one.

Rather uniquely for the genre, Palworld acknowledges that automation games are just OWSC titles but for autistic people (me), and cribs a few elements from them. As a result, you’ll get access to wood/stone/ingots/not-Pokemon materials relatively early. You can get acceptable weapons within about an hour or two of play depending on how much you explore, and there’s not much in the way of shortages.

The roadblock, then, is not the resources. It’s processing the resources. In other automation games, you use machines and conveyor belts. In Palworld, you use not-Pokemon. And there are not-Pokemon everywhere. Capturing them is almost always a net plus, because it gives the same resources as a kill and is one more cog for your machine.

Immediately, within an hour of play, it’s obvious this solves an incredible amount of OWSC issues. Other players aren’t explicitly needed to facilitate a smooth gameplay experience because not-Pokemon fill a lot of the boring downtime that comes from creating a ton of resources.
You’ll have to cook some berries manually very early on, but once you get a not-Pokemon capable of cooking it’s fire and forget. Pun not intended.
I mentioned wood and stone in passing here and it’s clear the developers are experienced in OWSC games, because two of the earliest facility unlocks are an endless supply of each resource that’re best harvested by - you guessed it - not-Pokemon.
Some things, primarily player-centric upgrades, are best made by the player, but even on this front most of the not-Pokemon capable of work will come over to speed it up.
And hey, for some not-Pokemon there’s not even any need to hunt them - they can be ranched, and will be handled by not-Pokemon capable of farming.

A lot of other OWSC games, even the good ones, often can’t decide whether they’re meant to be a base maintenance simulator or an exploration game. I’d go out on a limb and say that this is one of the few OWSC games where the Open World, the Survival and the Crafting feel congruous.

Now, you may be thinking that these observations based on an hour’s play may fall apart later, and so did I. Even other OWSC games that nail the first hour drop off later.

Palworld doesn’t.

It’s… almost scary in how much the devs have done their homework.

Not-Pokemon drops aside, there aren’t actually that many overworld resources, and they’re leveraged in such a way that there’s always a need for more. The facilities and craftables soon scale up, meaning you’ll always need something. You’ll always need not-Pokemon to process things. Frequently, you’ll unlock a facility and think “Why would I ever need this?” only to stumble on something in the overworld that benefits from it. Trust me, you’ll need heaters and coolers.

I’ve mentioned the not-Pokemon a lot, and if it isn’t obvious yet: They’re scarily well integrated into the gameplay loop. Like in actual Pokemon you have a limit to how many can fit in your team, and each base you construct has an ever-growing limit of workers, but owing to what I said above there’s an eternal need to keep some not-Pokemon around, even if they’re seemingly awful.
Even when my level was reaching the 30s, I still made it a point to catch the low level deer not-Pokemon because my orbiter bases absolutely needed woodcutters. My boxes are full of the generic sheep, cat and chicken not-Pokemon because there is an omnipresent need for wool, versatile labour and eggs to cook food. When my friends and I make expeditions across the map, we frequently take detours just to catch a few not-Pokemon we could use back at base.

More importantly, though, the not-Pokemon solve a lot of issues endemic to the OWSC genre.

Like crafting.

Oh my goodness, I don’t think I can play this genre anymore. Palworld ruined me with crafting alone.

Perhaps my biggest grievance about this genre is how even many of the greatest titles will see you sitting at a bench holding E or Space for about an hour while listening to an endless series of TING-TING as metal bars/tools/torches/whatever are crafted.
Palworld has this too… For about 20 minutes? After that, the not-Pokemon can take over for you. The option is there to do it yourself, if you’re insane, but the game clearly wants you to just queue up the 500 arrows/berries/whatever you need and then go play the fucking game, and it’s mercifully not as indepth as automation games. Again, the game is pushing you to play it.

I find it telling that later unlocks on the tech tree do indeed turn the game into a lite version of the automation genre, though how far you lean into it depends on how cruel you’re willing to be.

That said, there is a pretty prominent issue with regards to not-Pokemon distribution. The default starting point has everything one could ever want within trebuchet-firing distance, but many of the alternate start points are lacking. Which sucks, because many of those alternate starts are absolutely phenomenal for base construction thanks to flat planes and open spaces. They’re useful for satellite bases I guess.

That said, while I do admire Palworld pushing you to play the game, there is a part of the game that I just view with utter scorn:

Boss battles.

For most of Palworld’s runtime, the combat is sufficient. Incredibly basic third person shooter shit with a pet summon on hand, but nothing more. It doesn’t have to be, because overworld encounters are fairly brief kill-or-be-killed affairs that end as quickly as they began.
Boss battles, however, are long. They have beefy health pools, deadly attacks and weak spots that only marginally increase the damage taken.
They’re unfortunately required for progression, and while in most games I often put off boss battles for the sake of enjoying what’s in front of me, in this game I only beelined for them to get them out of the way. Now, the game is EA, that could change, but I think it betrays how little I expect it to change that I’m even griping about it in the first place.

As for the game world… On a mechanical level it’s fine enough, the distribution of not-Pokemon means exploration rarely feels wasted and there’s enough chests/statues/whatever dotted around that I don’t think I ever felt like I was just walking through dead air.
On a geographical and visual level though, it’s utterly banal. I’m very much an “exploration is its own reward” type person, I don’t think an open world needs to have tons of trinkets and loot for it to be meaningful. It’s why, despite hating the game to its core, I liked Breath of the Wild’s Hyrule.

Palworld, for as much as it wants to be Hyrule, is nowhere near it. It’s a series of bog standard environments with the occasional eyebrow raising piece of geometry lying around. The snowy regions look nice, sure, but that’s my inherent bias towards arctic/winter regions coming out in full force. It’s a visually sterile game that meets a bare minimum of beauty but never goes above it.
Even the not-Pokemon abide by this, being decently okay designs that at least have the benefit of having distinct silhouettes, but aren’t really inspiring. I don’t think a machine made these designs, but if they did there’d probably be more creative sauce on display.

Now, I told myself I wouldn’t gripe about anything that’s likely to get changed later on, and until now I’ve held to that fairly well. This once, though, I’m going to let myself kvetch:

Base building in Palworld is predicated upon Palboxes, placeable constructions that erect a large circular AoE around them which facilitates the management of not-Pokemon and their labour.

This is fine conceptually, but the AoEs are too small even on flatter areas with no obstructions and likewise many of the structures are too large. Ostensibly this is to facilitate satellite bases, but limit increases on base count aren’t given out freely and they’re best used for things like mineral processing or batch cooking. There’s a strange gap between smaller things like furnaces, cooking stations and egg incubators and absolutely monolithic facilities like ranches and uh… ‘daycares’.

All in all, Palworld is… Fine.

That might seem anticlimactic after the mostly glowing praise it just got, but it’s still an OWSC. ‘Fine’ within that genre makes it one of the best, but genres don’t exist in a vacuum compared to other games. This isn’t going to make anyone’s GOTY list and to be entirely honest I’ll be surprised if it even meets the honourable mentions for my 2024 top 10.

Food metaphors in reviews are old hat, overdone like crazy, but considering the nature of this game, I consider the next lines to be acceptable:

Palworld is fast food gaming.

And sometimes, I don’t really want a home cooked meal with meat from my local premium butcher, I just want a Big Mac.

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.

I'm not usually one to hop on trendy flavour of the month multiplayer games of my own volition, but I adored the first Helldivers and word-of-mouth for this game was positive, so once my IRLs took the plunge I happily saluted the sky and fell backwards into hell.

Helldivers 2 is simple: It's a third person shooter, I assume you've played one. Every now and then you do a series of fighting game inputs to summon a nice gun/big explosion/several explosions/your dead friends back to life/a nuke/etc and they're on cooldown until you do them again. You do all of this to kill lots of insects, or very angry robots, usually in service to an objective or three. The controls and movement all feel very fluid and snappy, there's no mechanical or physics-based resistance at play here.

Where Helldivers stands out is in the capacity for things to go wrong, and the potential for situations to break a team's resolve. If you advance slowly, only fire while standing, use your strategems on big swarms, and never split up? This game is easy. Very easy.
The game knows this, and its idea of 'challenge' is trying to hammer you against an anvil with different implements. Difficulty levels don't bloat the stats of enemies, but you'll suddenly experience enemies flanking you and firing from cover in ways that're meant to make you panic. It's telling that the Machine Gun you start with has a fire selector for those especially terrifying moments.

The highlights of this game aren't really the easy victories. Clearing harder difficulties without much bother is boring, honestly.

No, the highlights are the skin-of-your-teeth victories where you and your team get scarily into the role. Moments that are... Filmic. That's the only word I can use. This game gets very filmic when the action kicks in.

Advancing through wide open plains while a fog slowly sets in, obscuring your visibility and forcing you to blind fire into the mist at shapes that could be either your death or some background detritus. Eternally afraid to turn around because what once provided comfort via visibility is now an endless murky sea of potential ambush spots.

Summoning your 3 dead teammates back to life at the cost of your own, screaming "LIIIIIIIIIIIIVE" as you throw the beacon out of the fight, using your last reinforce and watching as someone picks up your grenade launcher and avenges you.

Walking out of a brutal fight in closed spaces, dashing to 'freedom', and seeing a sea of enemies descend upon you. Forcing your weapon off of burst fire and emptying your magazines into the swarm one by one, unsure if you're doing anything but agonizingly aware of just how finite your resources are.

Those mad dashes to extraction once enemy hordes appear, dodging your allies' artillery fire and explosions more than any enemy. Sprinting towards an ever-louder chorus of explosions, gunshots, shouts and screeches.

More than any game that actually tried to do 'war is hell'', Helldivers exemplifies it with missions that leave me needing a 15 minute break after they conclude regardless of victory or defeat. The sound design really adds to the effect; the explosions and gunshots here are on par with Killing Floor 2 or ARMA 3, but used to arguably more terrifying effect.

Progression moves at a smooth pace, within the few hours I played I'd already acquired a decent amount of stuff just from doing objectives and mowing things down. I'll admit to not liking the pseudo-battle pass format that much, but after my time with Helldivers 1 I do admittedly like having some say over what I unlock, and mercifully both Strategems and more specific ship/player upgrades are separate from it.

I think the best indicator of how much this game hooked me is that my "first quick session" went on for 4 straight hours with nobody taking a break besides the obvious snack/drink pickups. It's rare for both me and my regular crew to get hooked so easily.

10/10 would kill my best friend with rocket launcher backblast again. Please nerf rocket robots.

Going back to things you loved in your youth is always an uncomfortable gamble, because there's a 50/50 chance you'll either find a brand new appreciation for it in your old age or you'll suck air through your teeth every five minutes and murmur "Ah, jeez." to yourself.

Portal 2 is a unique oddity for me in that the 50/50 chance rolled 100/100 and I had both experiences, sometimes consecutively and sometimes concurrently. It's not helped by me being on a bit of a Valve kick and this was at the end of my replay list, which really highlights its status as their most oddball game.

Before I begin, it's absolutely worth restating just how much of a massive chokehold Valve had on nerd culture in the 2000s and very early 2010s. Having grown up around nerds and spent the vast majority of my education studying IT, the word 'cake' made me flinch up until around 2015. Even had I not actually replayed this game, I could likely recite the entire script because near enough every single line had been parroted and warped into some bizarre facsimile of humor by one specific corner of nerd culture.
I am not going to pretend I'm above the people I'm dunking on, because as late as June this year I made gauche "Grabbin' pills!" references while playing Project Zomboid and my last L4D2 runthrough with a friend saw me play necromancer to a host of jokes older than my nephew. Some diseases don't get slept off I'm afraid.

This Valve Mania was a precursor to a lot of modern developer worship cults, and like those it left a not insignificant amount of people with a general unwillingness to approach Valve games as anything other than holy relics. I, again, was one of those people for a time.

And... Having replayed all of their other singleplayer games till now? I get it. Even with flaws that're apparent as an adult, all of their games have airtight pacing, design that's still barely matched by a lot of their contemporaries, amazing unspoken player guidance and a phenomenal blend of narrative and gameplay - in part due to having the former take a backseat 99% of the time.

Except Portal 2, which stands as an oddball among their SP catalogue because most of those don't apply.

The original Portal is as close to a perfect game as the medium gets, really. Its pacing is sanded to a monofilament point, it discards more obvious handholding/directions with gentle nudges and intuitive signposting, the story runs concurrent with the gameplay but never usurps it, the comedy is rapidfire and laden with jokes that betray a lot about the setting as a means to not do exposition, and a slow but methodical rollout of mechanics that keep the game interesting until the credits roll. Plus, shirking the trends that were already endemic at the time, the game was set in this cold, sterile and lifeless testing facility that somehow looked more inhumane than the endless greybrown corridors of early FPS games.

It was a huge hit, and as humans are unfortunately prone to doing, people just wanted more. More Portal, in our mouths, Mr. Valve. Please.

We got Portal 2, which isn't what I'd call more Portal.

The intro alone signals to an observant player just how different they are.

Portal 1’s is hilariously brief. You awaken in a featureless bedroom and wait a moment. There’s a brief spiel by GLaDOS introducing the game, she glitches out, a portal opens and boom. In general, Portal 1 is really short for how much impact it had on the world; Undertale clocks in at a longer runtime.

Portal 2’s is overlong. Like Portal 1 before it, you awaken in a featureless bedroom. The announcer asks you to walk around, look around, and adjust the camera up and down. Then the jokes start. And they don’t stop. Jokes, jokes, jokes… Then Wheatley appears and I stare at my monitor, dead-eyed and slack jawed, wondering how I found this funny a decade ago.

I could write a really, really long spiel going through this entire game and tearing into just how obnoxious it is in every chapter, but it’d be repetitive even by my standards and I don’t really talk in circles so much as I do ouroboroii. There’s also no need, because the problems that start in the first chapter are the same all the way until the credits.

In the early 2010s, English culture began exporting itself all over the world thanks to social media. This mostly manifested as what I refer to as Gervais-isms; snarky, observational comedy carried out by overly bitter and unmarriageable white English dudes where most of the actual ‘humour’ comes from how fast they talk. It’s the entire foundation of BBC Sherlock for instance.

While this trend thankfully died a violent death, it infected a lot of works in its death throes. Portal 2 was one of them, sadly.

I will admit my biases outright before continuing: I cannot stand Stephen Merchant on any level, especially as a comedian. The trio he formed with Ricky Gervais and Kar Pilkington was a blight on the world and eventually gave birth to Hello Ladies, which reads more like an incel manifesto (as that is Merchant’s usual wheelhouse) than a sitcom. So it colours my view on this game pretty heavily.

I encourage you to read through the list of GLaDOS’ lines from the first game. and really take them in. Portal 1’s sense of humour is subdued, oftentimes difficult to pick out from GLaDOS’ otherwise normal dialogue, and when it’s obvious the game just moves onto the next line without clearly telling you ‘this is a joke’. Your reward for clearing each puzzle is a brief interlude by GLaDOS and then another puzzle.

In Portal 2, your reward is jokes. Sometimes you don’t even get a puzzle as a reward, just an endlessly white, beige or brown corridor where you spend the vast majority of your time scanning the walls for a single patch of portal-compatible surfacing. The jokes themselves are not only far greater in number, but greater in length. Portal 1 is about 3~ hours long, Portal 2 is twice that. 2x the length, 2x the jokes? That’s a fine and understandable metric.

Portal 2 is 2x the length, 10x the jokes and it’s…

This document has sat in my drafts for like three days now, after that ellipsis my brain just stopped because I could not put my figure on why the jokes sucked beyond “it’s very MCU-ish”, but I think I know now after spending two days playing XCOM 2 and Ultrakill ad infinitum.

Portal 1 is designed around the assumption that you like Portal.

Portal 2 is designed around the assumption that you like Portal’s humor.

Only, the humour in Portal 2 is not the humour in Portal 1. Portal 2’s comedy is grandiose, over the top, and assumes you always want more of it. It’s why Wheatley says stuff like “We’re escaping, that is what’s happening, we are escaping!” [No, really] for a full 5 minutes as you move in a straight line while barely engaging with the mechanics except to build a metaphorical bridge with portal spawning more simplistic than the first game’s onboarding puzzles.

Honestly, I could single out Wheatley as the sole offender here, but pretty much every character with a speaking role and more than five lines goes past the Joke Event Horizon at some point. The best part of this game is the first third set in the Current Aperture, because Wheatley is a minor character and most of it is devoted to either good ol’ Portal Puzzlin’ or the intense psychosexual nightmare yuri occurring between GLaDOS and Chell.

The worst part, though, is the middle section. Old Aperture.

Old Aperture makes me feel like a rat scurrying about a maze, solving puzzles for cheese. Except I don’t get cheese, I get snippets from a show where JK Simmons rambles to himself while stuck in traffic. The maze itself is a grim, brutalist remake of Splatoon where you don’t so much “‘think with portals’ as you think with adult colouring books.
Portal 1 had this fantastically lonely, sterile atmosphere to it that’s completely thrown out for 2, and it was meant to be replaced by the overgrown, decrepit Aperture you see in the first third.
This in itself doesn’t really work because the underlying design of Aperture changed between games, so it’s less “here’s the facility you love from 1 but fucked up” and more “here’s a fucked up facility”. It also doesn’t work because you spend the bulk of the game in Old Aperture which is primarily sewage, concrete and industrial warehouses followed by a redux of New Aperture which shows off just how much the underlying design changed. Really, this feels like a sequel to a completely different game.

But back to the Old Aperture griping for a sec, there’s something to be said about how mask-off Portal 2 is about its aspirations in this area. It’s not really interested in actually being a sequel to Portal 1 so much as it is competing with every other FPS game that was popping up around this period and also Valve’s other big series Half-Life. This was the game to make the Half-Life connection 100% canon and it shows in the way ‘Narrative’ as a game design element is so much more prominent here - arguably moreso than in the other series.

Much of what is only subtextual in the first game becomes decidedly textual in Portal 2, often to the game’s detriment as it gets repetitive early. GLaDOS referring to your stay in the ‘relaxation vault’ as a detention is Portal 1’s first clue that Aperture kinda sucks, but in Portal 2 there’s an uncomfortable volume of “HEY APERTURE SUCKS” text that feels extremely redundant, especially in Old Aperture. Yeah, the JK Simmons bits are mildly amusing, but they’re also excessive - for lack of a better word. “Aperture made testing products out of stuff that gives you lung cancer” is a bit unnecessary for a series where the first hour gives you instant kill sewage pools and GLaDOS reading off a health disclaimer that suggests the end-of-level fields can melt your teeth.

I focus so much on the non-gameplay stuff because the gameplay front is… Odd, very odd, and I’ve been putting it off on purpose.
Portal 2 has an incredible amount of mechanics in the pot: Portals, buttons, light bridges, laser redirection, aerial faith plates, speed gel, bounce gel, gel that creates portal surface, gravity bridges, reverse gravity bridges, and probably something I’ve forgotten.

They aren’t very well leveraged, and the way they’re contributes to the game feeling like three overlong setpieces as opposed to a Portal game. The first third gives you a portal gun, light bridges, lasers and aerial faith plates. You go through tests that feel like a glorified tutorial on them, get 1-2 tests where you really have to apply that knowledge, and then the act ends.
You’re then shunted into Old Aperture, where the three gels come into play. As before, you go through some glorified tutorials, get two tests to apply that knowledge, repeat.
The last third is no different.

When this game was released I was still in academia, and playing it in 2023 makes me feel like I’m back in academia… In the sense that nothing in the game’s metaphorical curriculum actually matters, because once we know we’ve passed the potential fail state we’re shunted onto something new that has no real relevance to what came before, even in the graded final unit. Which is doubly fitting because the lecturer who taught me networking protocols, Sam, admitted he had only ever played two games: The first Portal, and Civilization V.

To dispense with metaphors though, I’d argue Portal 2 is overdesigned. There’s a lot here and, given how much screentime is devoted to straightforward interlude corridors where you’re talked to by either Potato GLaDOS, Wheatley or Cave Johnson, it all just feels extraneous. A vain attempt at making you hype for the next text chamber, without actually thinking about how to tie it all together. Much of the joy in Portal 1’s later chambers come from applying everything you know to get through the puzzles without stalling halfway through, from detaching your sense of space and accessible terrain from what’s immediately in front of you and viewing the chamber through the lens of where you could go with portals. This is, after all, what ‘thinking with portals’ even means.

Portal 2 doesn’t want you to think with portals. It wants you to think with aerial faith plates, gel and gravity.

The interludes… God, the interludes.

In Portal 1, deviating from the test chamber formula was a shock. Meant to throw the player off and put them in an unfamiliar, uncontrolled situation that both looked and felt weird. In Portal 2, it’s… Every few puzzles, sadly. I’ve said it numerous times, but the bulk of this game’s is spent in what I’ve been calling ‘interludes’; they contain no puzzles, just large spaces that require you to scan the room for patches of portal-compatible terrain, so you can make a very banal A-B portal to cross. These segments don’t really engage with any of the mechanics up above, which is especially jarring given many of them feel designed explicitly to do that. The game would feel a lot more cohesive if using the other mechanics in uncontrolled situations was more prominent, and not just something that happens in the last boss.

One last note that almost slipped the script: Portal 2 has a bit of an issue with signposting. Oftentimes it devolves into pixel hunts (again, interludes), or the way forward requires the game to flash a prompt on screen saying “HEY, YOU CAN INTERACT WITH THIS!”. It’s so very weird given Valve often excel at this, even in the VR space.

The unique thing about Portal 2 compared to other games I rag on incessantly is that the developers addressed every single problem I have with the game… Within the same game. It’s called Portal 2 Co-op and it fucking rules dude.
I played it about two years ago with my stepdad (because I know he would grief me and I him) and it was like peering into an alternate universe.

In co-op, none of my complaints exist. There are no dogshit interludes that get in the way of puzzles, so you and your partner can focus exclusively on the puzzles. The puzzles themselves leverage mechanics a lot more evenly, and in general just felt like they demanded more brain power than singleplayer’s relatively banal puzzles. The supporting cast are gone entirely, it’s just GLaDOS managing to blend her Portal 2 self with her Portal 1 self. It’s just, in every way, so much better. Sure, there are some levels that mirror Old Aperture and feature gratuitous gollops of gel, but they’re a sight better than their counterpart.

And this wasn’t even a post launch addition. It was in at day 0, the two co-op characters were a fixture of the marketing, and they’re on the cover art. If you play only Portal 1 and then Portal 2 co-op, you have a cohesive and well rounded experience.

Still, despite everything I just said, I do have to give Portal 2 credit for something that probably wasn’t even intended:

GLaDOS’ dynamic with Chell is delicious. To keep it brief: GLaDOS spends all of Act 1 trying to hate and belittle Chell for various things (her weight/face/bone structure/parenthood/apparent lack of morality/lack of speech/etc) but it’s just… It’s all a veneer, one that quickly shatters when Wheatley enters the picture. Wheatley, unlike Chell, can’t withstand GLaDOS’ emotional abuse and lashes out destructively. In turn, GLaDOS realizes that Chell is her only source of companionship, which reduces her to a pitiful creature who tries to rationalize why Chell should empower her again, a far cry from her usual domineering self. I know some Portal fans have spent a decade arguing it’s an act, but it’s really obvious given that her first words after the finale are “Oh thank god, you’re alive” followed by Want You Gone, which is a breakup song to the letter.

It’s… Shit dude, it’s the most accurate depiction of a mutually abusive relationship I’ve ever seen which is doubly impressive since Chell is so mute she doesn’t even have a credited VA. It’s all helped by Ellen McLain’s legendary performance, which to this day is still the best voice acting I’ve heard among the thousands of games I’ve played.

In the end, though, there’s only one real takeaway I can have from this game, and that is:

It’s really obvious why Valve stopped making single player games until Alyx. They’ve made it abundantly clear that innovation is their philosophy and an inability to meaningfully innovate killed a lot of potential sequels/games in their studio. Portal 2 is their one exception, and it shows. This game was by no means bad, and it was a huge massive success that put the company on the map for a whole new generation of people.

But it’s decidedly not much of a Valve game.

It is absolutely a 2010s videogame, though.

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.

Note: This review hasn't aged well because I decided to do a re-review to reassess the game, so I no longer stand by much of the praise given here.

Two disclaimers before I continue this review

1) I am going to compare this to Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous an incredible amount, as they’re both CRPG adapting a TTRPG that share similarities but also core differences worth discussing. If this grates on you, quit now. Divinity: Original Sin 2 will also come up with regularity.

2) This game is VERY buggy and VERY unfinished. A lot of what I say here may end up ageing like shit. Honestly, I don’t normally bring up technical issues when reviewing newer games, but BG3’s are BAD and notable.

It is a shame that Backloggd does not have two separate entries for ‘Baldur’s Gate 3: The Game’ and ‘Baldur’s Gate 3: The Story’. Meaning that I, unfortunately, have to do two fundamentally different reviews. I wish this weren’t the case, that there wasn’t such a canyon-wide gap between the two halves of this game. It’d be easier if they were both good, or both bad.

I’ll get the good out of the way first.

On the gameplay front, BG3 is a masterpiece. Its immediate competition is Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous (which I also reviewed), both of them being adaptations of a popular TTRPG format that opt for accuracy over simplification. Whereas WOTR went for an all-in approach, BG3 is far more conservative with its choices. In lieu of adding the kitchen sink, it merely yoinks things it considers meaningful or useful.
This is most obvious in how it approaches buff spells. WOTR simply added nearly everything a class had in terms of spellbook, which meant some classes often ended up with an obscene amount of buff spells that were all but mandatory later on. BG3, however, only adapts some buff spells, which is impressive given 5E already cut down on them. The few buff spells that remain are primarily ‘Concentration’ spells - meaning you can only have one at a time.

This is a twofold benefit: Combat stats are scaled back and more manageable, lacking WOTR’s insane 40 AC demon enemies, and buffs are no longer mandatory - just useful. Similarly, it’s infinitely harder to make a non-starter build; with less overall buffs and a fair allocation of prepared spells/spell slots, there’s always something to cast. The same applies to non-magical classes and their unique resources.

If you’ve come here from DOS2, it’s worth stating: The armour system and action points are gone. Here, we use armour class (a stat that influences dice rolls to hit you) and actions (main, bonus, movement).

And I gotta say, the action economy is excellent. It was far, far too common for characters - martial ones especially - to have turns where all they did was move in both DOS2 and WOTR. BG3 heaps options on you, which primarily benefit martial characters. Throwing things is now a viable option, and the entire class of Thrown weapons scales obscenely well, preventing ‘dead’ turns.

Hell, just the sheer presence of the Throw, Improvised Weapon and Shove actions add so much depth to the combat’s tactical layer.

Throwing a bottle of water and shocking it is a great idea for AoE damage, using someone as a melee weapon to force them prone will open them up to devastating attacks from your party rogue, shoving enemies to their death is a strategy that works right up until the end of the game. Really, this game’s combat excels precisely because it allows for the kind of off-the-wall scrabbling actions that occurs in real tabletop RPGs. Sure, you can minmax, but it’s much more fun to kill an enemy by repeatedly batista bombing them through furniture. It helps that the game is rife with grenade-type items to throw at enemies.

Lastly, levels feel meaningful in this game. Even something as simple as ONE level 2/3/4/5/6 slot feels like a significant option, and feats especially can drag some builds into relevancy - especially for Barbarians. Well… This one isn’t so cut and dry. Progression feels great until levels 11 and 12. The original level cap in early access was 10, and it really shows here. For most classes/subclasses, it’s better to just take a two level dip into something else unless you’re HELLBENT on seeing your main class to 12. For melee classes especially, there’s little reason to go beyond level 10 since a two level dip into Fighter gives you an entire extra action.

And… The no-catch good is over. Let’s start complaining.

The actual actions one can take are exciting, but the source of them - the classes - aren’t. This is mostly on the developers, as they insisted that the game would only adapt things from DnD 5E’s base. So no sourcebooks or modules, all vanilla. Now, I’m no DnD guru, but even to me it’s obvious that Warlock and Bard suffer from not having access to Tasha's Cauldron of Everything or Xanathar’s Guide to Everything stuff.

The companion Wyll shows up really early. He’s a warlock brandishing a rapier and the title ‘Blade of Frontiers’. So you might think he’s a Hexblade, right?

Nope. No melee cantrips like Booming Blade, and Hexblade isn’t even implemented. He’s a Fiend Warlock, and like all Warlocks his endgame in this game is spamming Eldritch Blast.

Classes in BG3 aren’t mechanically interesting, they’re just picking a variation on the same flavour. Sure, there’s some class-unique mechanics but the vast majority of them are, again, variations on a theme. Sure, Monk doesn’t have spell slots and instead has ‘ki points’ but for all intents and purposes you’re just casting spells. Most casters draw from the same spellbook with a few differences, Bard/Ranger/Rogue are essentially the same class with some minor variations, and all martial classes except Fighter are ‘gimped Fighter’ once their resource runs out.

In the end, you’re honestly just picking one of three categories or Monk, and which roleplay flavour you want. We’ll get to that can of worms when I discuss the story, however.

Hell, even character customization feels barebones. There’s a total lack of eye shape/nose/eyebrow/whatever options. There are only preset faces you slap makeup/hair/extras on and then adjust the colours of.
Last little note, but the Feat selection is AWFUL. A lot of them are entirely near-entirely useless, while others are so strong that not taking them is stupid even if you’re a hardcore roleplayer. Seriously, the +2 to any stat from Ability Improvement is MONUMENTAL.
As a bridge between story and gameplay, though, we have to talk about ability checks, and two specific spells.

When faced with a dialogue or thieving check in this game, you roll a dice. It’s meant to mimic the tabletop, that good ol ‘roll charisma to fuck the dragon’ shit.

There’s just one problem. One teensy tiny problem.

These rolls are completely superfluous.

Early on, Shadowheart and some of your other companions can learn Guidance, which is a 1d4 bonus to a roll. You also start getting Inspirations, which let you reroll a failed check. On top of this, spells like Charm Person and Thaumaturgy start popping up, allowing you to stack an obscene amount of bonuses to rolls. Barring a Nat 1 crit fail, past a certain point in Act 1 it was obscenely rare for me to fail a check.

And… That didn’t matter either. Many checks will either let you progress normally, or not matter anyway. Taking some cues from immersive sims, a lot of quests can be advanced by just snooping around and clicking everything that the Highlight key… well, highlights. I don’t inherently hate ‘failure as progression’, it’s something I think Disco Elysium nailed, but this game? Nah, it just doesn’t hit.

Compounding this are three spells: Speak with Dead, Detect Thoughts and Speak with Animals. Narratively, they are cheat codes. All three allow you to gleam vital information for progression and the overall story, and carry no downsides beyond Speak With Dead having a strict requirement on corpse integrity. Sure, some of the dialogues are funny, but they’re so straightforward that it’s honestly kind of sad. Granted, the real downside is that Speak With Dead has a cutscene involved even if the corpse has nothing to say, which is AGONIZING when you’re probing corpses after a long and intense fight.

As for the actual story… First, let’s talk about TTRPGs. While some minmaxing nerds like to view TTRPGs as the ultimate evolution of combat systems where they can grind their players down unless the players are hardcore munchkins, the actual point of the medium is to make a character - good at some things, bad at others, potentially with baggage that colours how they interact with the world and other players - and roleplay them in a party setting.

And… You just can’t do this unless you pick an Origin character, with a decidedly preset class and appearance - except the Dark Urge. Custom characters can be fully customized, sure, and even have a Background option! But unlike other games, your background is pretty much irrelevant. If it confers any new dialogue, I haven’t found it. You have no chance to define a character background, and all your dialogue ignores the topic entirely. Sure, there are class and racial options, but many of these are just diversionary set dressing and they also stop appearing as much outside of Act 1 - which is a problem we REALLY have to talk about later.

The potential for roleplay as a custom character just isn’t there, a problem shared by its predecessor. You can try to stick to an alignment or ideals (though the alignment system was nuked) but you’re not really a character, you’re a class.
You may be thinking ‘Well, at least picking a custom character will let me get lots of companion NPC dialogue, right?’

And the answer is… Yesn’t. Yes, you’ll have the full suite of companions available in camp without occupying one of them yourself, but if you expect them to chime in with the frequency of Bioware companions then you have another thing coming. It’s rare for even one Origin character to chime in during a topic, having two or three would be beyond belief had I not seen it - once. I can’t help but wonder if the game is bugged, and only allowing one character to chime in even when others feasibly should. The end result is that adventuring with a party of Origins and a party of Hirelings (mute NPCs meant to fill a slot) doesn’t feel all that different besides some on-field quips.

This specific gripe might seem like a strange thing to open with, but I promise you it’s a canary in the coal mine.

Let’s talk about Act 1, IMO the game’s best act and also the setting for the entire Early Access period.

Act 1 has had YEARS of polish, and it shows. It is the only time where the game is what it pretends to be. It is incredibly reactive, possessing dialogue and outcomes for so many possibilities. The Druids who’re racist against Tieflings have dialogue for being a Druid, being a Tiefling and being both, as do other NPCs. Every little thing you can be or do has an appropriate reaction, from the obvious (Goblins afraid of Drow will let a Drow player character walk by without the need to roll a dice) to the outlandish (Killing Astarion, resurrecting him and then trying to fuck him or killing and reviving Gale three times). There’s still enough mystery to be enticing, and your companions’ stories are just opening up.

It’s great!

I love it!

It’s also rife with obvious cuts from Early Access!

This is an odd thing to bring up, because… Hey, they could fix it in the inevitable Definitive Edition, right? And most of the playerbase won’t even know because they didn’t play the EA version. But… It’s jarring. It’s really really jarring.

In Early Access, the tone of this game was decidedly dark. You had a tadpole in your head that was actively egging you to use it, using a seductive form to coo suggestions into your ear. Your companions were at odds with one another, you, and their own tadpole which was influencing them in different ways. That tadpole in your head would grow stronger, more dangerous and more assertive if you used it. Companions would castigate you for feeding it, and even using it to subjugate some goblins fed it.

Even Wyll from before was a different character; a folk hero struggling with the rage he feels towards goblins for slaughtering his village and the unfortunate love he felt towards his abuser.

In the full game, this is all gone. The tadpole is a relative non-entity, used only for telepathy. Using it is consequence free, and there’s a standard Videogame Skill Tree to upgrade it - which also has no consequences. All the strife and struggle is omitted, Wyll is just a nice guy struggling because his patron is a dick, and the entire tone is very… Bioware.

Especially with regards to morality. ‘Evil’ in this game is laughable, just an utter joke. Being good rewards you with a mountain of tadpole upgrades, loot, allies, money and opportunities to make things easier. Being evil uh… Sometimes gives you rewards, most of which are infinitely worse than being good. Perhaps the reason Larian omitted a morality meter is because your only options are “lawful good”, “chaotic good”, “true neutral” and “chaotic evil”. Stupid evil, more like. At least WOTR had the sense to include stupid good options. Every ‘evil’ choice is petty, spiteful, and needlessly dickish. There aren’t even any flavourful dialogue options to justify it as, say, you being desperate to get the tadpole out. You’re just being a cunt.

Act 1, again, emphasises this. The ‘good’ path is to expel an invading force, convince a shadowy cabal to leave innocents in peace, and rescue a spiritual leader from captivity.

The evil path involves killing refugees, children and natives of the land. And then having to kill the invading force anyway. But hey, at least you get an unfinished and buggy companion who kinda sucks by virtue of being a gimped Fighter (Paladin)! Except she’s not even ‘the evil companion’ while in your recruitment she’s simply pragmatic and understanding of extreme actions. They do try to explain it, but the explanation exists in a vacuum using a mechanic that other characters are party to, and contrasts pretty heavily with them.

It’s very Bioware. I bring Bioware up a lot because the original BG games were made by them, and they’d go on to make works rife with obnoxious tropes, shit politics, tonal disconnect and blatant character/route select forcing. BG3, unfortunately, only omits the shit politics. This is a Dragon Age game through and through, with the fascist-leanings and antisemitism filed off. It even has that brief pause in dialogue while the game scans your save for event flags. ‘Dragon Age without the awful American-centric politics’ is an easy sell for some, but not for me.

There’s a quest in Act 1, near the end, about a minute’s walk from the gate to Act 2. You approach a burning town, and are told that some people are inside. If you rush in and brave the fire, one of the people you just saved offers you a quest.

If you stand still and let her die, another NPC walks up to you and goes “Oh, that sucks. Anyway, here’s a quest for you.”

This is a minor thing to fixate on, but it’s emblematic of the wider problem:

Consequences don’t exist in this game.

You may think I’m being excessively mean, considering I’m only discussing Act 1, but this is a game wide problem. Baldur’s Gate 3 seems to believe that ‘consequences’ means ‘characters bring up your actions in dialogue’. Which is neat, but there’s problems here:

Obviously, these are not actual consequences. Actual consequences in BG3 tend to be immediate, and cleanly marked. Tellingly, most negative consequences come from picking dialogue lower on the list, with the good/safe options being up at the top. Not how I thought top/bottom discourse would manifest in 2023, but alas. Jokes aside, there aren’t really any long-lasting consequences.

You can straight up murder an NPC in Act 1, and when they return in Act 3 they’re merely a little irritated with you before starting a fight. If you don’t, they’re not irritated with you.

They then start a fight.

Even the tadpole is of no consequence, as using it religiously only elicits approving or disapproving dialogue from certain NPCs. Your skill tree is locked off early on, but you can still acquire that juicy upgrade in Act 3 even if you’ve spent the entire game calling the NPC who offers it a soyboy beta cuck. As you might have guessed it, all that changes is dialogue. Not even taking that super upgrade invokes any meaningful consequences beyond making you look like shit.

Now, looping back: Here’s the thing about Act 1, right. It’s still good, it’s the peak of this game. Even with all the obvious cuts and rewrites and shitty morality and blah blah blah. It’s good, okay?

But Act 2 isn’t. It’s really not. It nearly made me quit, in fact.

Pathfinder WOTR and DOS2 both excelled here, having Act 2 be the point where the game truly opens up and its scale becomes readily apparent. BG3, however, crushes the scale. It primarily takes place in a blighted hellscape, where the player is required to carry a light at all times for fear of being subs- Haha no just kidding, this only applies for like five minutes before you get a magic lantern that nullifies the mechanic.

With the mechanical despair nullified, you’re now free to walk through, uh… A blighted hellscape with barely any NPCs to interact with, the same 3-4 enemy types, a crushing lack of landmarks and barely any content. Or you can go to the mountain pass, which serves no purpose other than to progress someone’s questline and foreshadow a sidequest in an Act 1 area that you can revisit. It’s so empty that I actually assumed I’d just missed stuff, but no. It really is tiny.

So in the main area, all you can do is wander around and gorge yourself on like… An hour or two’s worth of content? The bulk of the area is made up of a dungeon that would be fine at the endgame but is FAR too lengthy for the halfway point and especially in relation to how utterly barren the rest of the act is. Act 2’s actual climax is shorter than that dungeon, for reference, despite containing its own dungeon. That certain events can make the finale go even faster does not help.

Perhaps what makes Act 2 feel duller than the rest is that there’s very little going on with your companions for the most part. Shadowheart’s questline occupies the bulk of the companion screentime, with Lae’zel getting a brief but missable dungeon at the very start and Gale’s storyline making a modicum of progress after a camp event. Other than that, though, everyone is… Static? It’s strange. Characters like Wyll, Astarion and Karlach will hit you with some sense of urgency, a goal that needs tending to now, only to kind of just sit there while you meander about the miserylands.

And, on the topic of Lae’zel’s dungeon, it very clearly illustrates this game’s relationship to both consequences and player choice.

Immediately, Lae’zel is placed in a situation where the game will tell you repeatedly that she’s going to die. You can make a choice here, but it impacts neither your relation with NPCs in the dungeon, or Lae’zel herself. She cannot die. You’re just picking flavour again. The road is linear, and you will walk it the way Larian demanded.

Following this, you’re placed in a meeting with a leading member of the Githyanki species. Here, the game compounds my complaints about the consequences only being ‘instant’, alongside a healthy dosage of linearity.

You can mouth off to this character and immediately die for pissing them off. Or… You can pick any of the other options. I’m gonna get into some light spoilers here, but the character demands you kill your dream guardian.

You can agree, carry it out, and the guardian will live anyway. You and the party then become enemies of the Githyanki people.You can agree, back out, and the guardian lives. You then become an enemy of the Githyanki people. You can disagree, and become an enemy of the Githyanki people. You can refuse to even start dialogue, then turn around and leave. At which point… You become an enemy of the Githyanki people.

This isn’t the first time this issue pops up, it’s just the most indicative of how this game feels about letting the player meaningfully influence the narrative. As early as Act 1, you’re offered an incredible amount of ‘options’ that don’t actually matter what, you will never remove the tadpole and you will always make an enemy of the goblins. In Act 2, you will always be an enemy of both the Githyanki and the Cult. You can make other, more minor choices, but these are ultimately just for roleplay flavour. It doesn’t actually matter whether you scorn certain deities, leave the miseryland coated in misery, genocide the few allies you have available or just murderhobo everyone in Act 1 and 2.

Why?

Because Act 3 is basically a different game entirely.

Well, I’ll admit I’m being slightly unfair to it. Act 3 is where a lot of companion quest lines actually climax, where a lot of side quests you’ve been doing all game show off and help you out. It’s the point where you arrive in the titular city, and get embroiled in the local politics that will help end the game.

But there is a disconnect between it and the rest of the game, even when it’s deliberately calling back to itself.

For starters, regardless of how you treat your companions, their quests will pop up so long as they’re present. This isn’t too jarring for characters like Karlach or Wyll, but even more guarded characters like Shadowheart and Astarion will urge you to push on with their quest - potentially ignoring that you’ve spent the entire game either neglecting them or outright bullying them.

Within these quests lies yet more of the game’s problems with morality. In fact, Act 3 is rife with it.

Your choices are, in the end, do something that’s a common sense good option or be a petty and spiteful chaotic evil asshole who does bad things with all the same forethought of a cat slapping a cup off of a counter. There’s surprisingly little room for nuance, you either do the good thing or the terrible no-good thing. This is particularly apparent in Astarion’s questline, where you can either convince him to do the thing he’s spent all game craving OR you can turn him into what Twitter and Tumblr thought he would be in pre-release.

If you’ve ever played Dragon Age: Inquisition, the companion quests are much the same here. You get a nice, good option that is never a challenge because if it has a skill check it’s very low (barring one exception), plus it’s at the top where all the good is. Or you can just be a dick and make things worse for everyone by picking the bottom option. Do you remember Iron Bull’s quest, where you can either convince him to be a free man or have him continue to serve a quasi-Spartan fascist empire? This game pulls the same shit.

Secondly, you may recall that I gassed up Act 1 for having lots of reactive dialogue and race/class/subclass specific dialogue. Well, it begins to slowly dry up in Acts 2 and 3. Basically nobody gave a shit that I was a drow or a Paladin after leaving Act 1, and I got more options for my Fighter subclass than I did Paladin. It’s so strange, to see the game’s multiple creation options just cease to matter entirely.

For a moment, though, let’s focus on the sidequests.

Because they also don’t mean shit.

My go-to example for this is a questline I’m going to call ‘The Race War’. The Race War is mentioned early on, and you can save a few key players involved in it. If you save them all, The Race War begins in earnest. BUT, because you saved a specific gnome, you can avert the worst outcome and mend the ideological differences, while still getting your objective cleared.

One problem, though.

You don’t actually have to do any of this. Mending the difference is possible no matter what, and the overarching goal of The Race War is achievable even if everyone from Act 1 and 2 fell to your Eldritch Blast spam. Sure, doing it the ‘right’ way is easier and has less punishing checks (or checks hands down), but this is redundant due to how obscene the bonuses to checks become later on.

You might be looking at my gripes and scowling, thinking ‘Mira, this is a roleplaying game. It’s wrong to approach it from a minmax angle’.

And you’re right. Truth be told, I approached the game from a roleplay angle, at first. With games like these I typically prefer to roleplay even if it hurts me. My Paladin did not allow Astarion to pickpocket, did their best to save innocents, refused the tadpole, obeyed the law and all that jazz. I even gave them a little Oathbreaker arc in Act 2.

The problem, at least for me, is how the game felt as though it was going out of its way to laugh at me for doing this. Abstaining from a lot of what the game dangles in front of you feels like self-gimping, because there are no consequences for engaging with it. Pickpocketing is easy gold, not a soul gives a shit if you let unnamed civilians die, the tadpole is just a skill tree with little bearing on the outcome of the story, and the law is easily supplanted. I managed to avoid truly min maxing on my first run, but I’m not sure I’ll resist the second time. Coupled with how difficult it is to actually roleplay narratively unless you pick an Origin character, and it’s kind of maddening to consider how this game was marketed.

Now, to tie the last few complaints together, let’s talk about the word ‘arbitrary’. To be arbitrary is to defy any system, rule or reasoning in favour of personal whims and impulses. In law, this would manifest as a judge making a decision in the moment rather than basing it off of legal precedent, past cases or the jury’s counsel.

In BG3, it manifests as morality-based dialogue options being available no matter what.

I never thought I would ever say this, but this game needed an alignment system or alignment locks. WOTR having it and locking dialogue off that would be ‘out of character’ was a genius idea.

It is so utterly jarring that, even when a game lets me console someone and be their confidant as they talk about their emotional & abuse AND lets me be a holy god-fearing Paladin, it still gives me the option to make them suffer. There are so, so, so many opportunities for even good characters to backstab people for no reason, with no option to justify it. Even to characters you’re romancing. Perhaps these were added to sell you the illusion of choice, but they just seem ridiculous. There’s one in particularly that you can only get by picking the goody two-shoes path in the first place!

Romances… God, I didn’t want to talk about them but I think I have to at this point.

A pretty common criticism of Bioware romances is that they essentially boil down to you sexually harassing someone until they give in and fall for you. Cullen’s in DA:I stands out; for as much as I hate the character, his romance is you harassing a drug addict until he becomes dependent on you.

BG3 decides to be forward-thinking by having some characters sexually harass you instead. Lae’zel and Gale especially.


I’ll be honest and say that I didn’t mind Lae’zel coming onto me because I wanted her anyway, but it doesn’t take much brainstorming to understand how someone might see her dialogue as either a thinly veiled rape threat or just deeply uncomfortable. If you don’t find her sexual aggression - or her - endearing then it must come off as being cornered. Though, mercifully, she does back off.

And Gale… At first, I thought Gale being a clingy ‘nice guy’ with a penchant for emotional manipulation and compliment bombing was a deliberate commentary on how the leading white men in Bioware games tend to act. But as time went on, and he got a bit more incel-y, I noticed that my dialogue options for dealing with him were either “Yes, we are bonded for life, you are the best person ever” OR telling him to kill himself. I realised that even if his horrible elements are intended, the developers certainly want you to like him.

Both of these characters are very easy to earn the love of, even if you laugh at their plights. The romances in general aren’t great, mostly just you treating people with decency until they fall in love with you. These aren’t really romances, they’re trauma bonds. You can’t even buy your beloved flowers or something, and this is one thing Dragon Age got right! If you’ve ever been around trans puppygirls it’s like corralling a party of them.

It’s really weird coming from Pathfinder WOTR, and I think it’s a problem of timescale. BG3 takes place over a nebulous time period, like a few weeks at least, whereas WOTR takes place over a potentially years-long crusade. So while WOTR allows romances to slowly bloom and take form, in BG3 they kinda just spring up. Hell, even Dragon Age 2 averted this by having it take place over years.

Romance is a little obnoxious, but few things are as bad as the polyamory ‘representation’.

So, I’m gonna bitch at length about how the game made me feel as both a trans person and a polyamorous person. You can scroll down, it’s just pure vitriolic kvetching.

Ahem.

Holy fuck. What is wrong with the writers?

Marketing the game and going ‘hee ho some party members will be poly :)’ only to offer utterly dogshit options is such a kick in the gut. And in terms of sheer offensiveness, this game made me feel worse about being poly than DA:I made me feel about being a lesbian or another thing I won’t mention here.

You can only be poly with Halsin and one other party member. Halsin explicitly states that he’s poly because he’s spent so much time in the animal world that he’s given up on monogamy. Whether it’s intended or not, the message here is “Halsin is poly because he’s an alien”. And the two party members he’s compatible with - Shadowheart and Astarion - are both explicitly and implicitly stated to be ‘super kinky’, with the further implication that polyamory is a kink to them.
Every other party member reacts viscerally to the idea of polyamory, browbeating you into picking ‘them or me’ or in some extreme cases just dumping you outright. It felt terrible, emotionally impactful for all the wrong reasons. Either the writers were using them as a mouthpiece to yell at poly people, or they didn’t consult any poly people at all and thought this was okay. The end result is awful all the same, and it actually soured my opinion of every character involved out of spite. That many party members consider engaging in an incestuous threesome to be less abhorrent than loving two people just compounds it. Truly, this is the worst poly rep I’ve ever seen in my life.

As for trans rep… Eesh. On the sexuality front the game is great, every romance is bi and same-sex couples appear with regularity, either mentioned in passing or shown outright. It’s great, gold star, no complaints. But when it comes to transness, there’s a pretty big problem. There are no trans companions, and barely any trans NPCs. So far, in my 105~ hours of playtime, I’ve ran into two NPCs who might’ve been trans (as they used ‘male’ voices on the ‘femme’ body). One of them was a minor NPC standing in a bank that I only knew of via posts from friends, and another was a shapeshifting doppelganger that tries to slaughter you.

Sure, the player can be trans in any flavour, or nonbinary, but in light of how scarce trans people are… This doesn’t feel like representation, it feels like fetishization. While bodies are not labelled ‘male’ or ‘female’, the ‘masc’ and ‘femme’ bodies have entirely different faces available. Femme bodies struggle to be distinctly masculine or even just butch, while masculine bodies are perhaps excessively masc unless you pick the slightly androgynous elves. More focus seems to have been placed on letting you be a “chick with a dick” or a “boy with a pussy”, which is only further compounded by a startling lack of body options. ‘Tis incredibly telling that all the femme bodies have decently-sized tits that you cannot adjust at all, and even the twinkiest masc body has some musculature.

It sucks. It is entirely possible to play the game as the only trans person in Faerun. One of the Hirelings is non-binary, I suppose, but an entirely mute doll meant to fill a party slot for murderhobos is hardly a character let alone representation. There was a drag queen coded character, I guess…? Alas, while the game is delightfully not heteronormative, it’s so cisnormative it hurts.

Back to the story, and specifically my criticism of Act 3 feeling disconnected. A pretty significant part of this is that, for all intents and purposes, the plot ends up being hijacked by two new characters. One of whom had token references in prior arcs, and one functionally appears out of nowhere. Some argue that the presence of these characters was foreshadowed, and I can’t really agree. A loading screen tooltip and one optional scene having some barely noticeable Bhaal iconography don’t really constitute foreshadowing. Sure, Big Bad 1 is mentioned a few times by a companion, but Big Bad 2 feels like… I don’t know. As if the devs looked at the first two games and inserted something familiar. Or they were just THAT hype to work with Lady Dimitrescu.

But just in terms of tone Act 3 feels like a whole other game. It is obnoxiously in love with its own sense of humour, with many of the opening diversions being near-entirely comedic in nature. The interesting elements, like the titular city struggling with a refugee crisis, are instead put on hold for a carnival, bad and kinda insensitive jokes about sex workers, having sex with twins and other such tripe. It tapers off once you’re in the actual city, but it’s incredibly jarring given how hard the stakes are in this Act.

Which is, in all hilarity, the same issue that befell DOS2. Like that game, BG3 does not respect its own stakes. Act 3 is a slower paced, almost casual experience where you jaunt between landmarks in the city for Designated Stuff Happening moments and probe NPCs who either have nothing to say or are throwing another quest in your journal. Most of these quests, too, are just kinda worthless. Acts 1 and 2 are far more reticent and creative with their sidequests, less-is-more and all that. 3 has… A lot, and they’re not very good. Calling half of them fetch quests would not be unwarranted.

The other half are, essentially, main quests in disguise. You’re given a few broad goals and these side quests guide you towards them. This isn’t bad, most of my favourite CRPGs do this. It’s literally the entire first half of New Vegas, for instance. But man, this game’s not-side quests are kind of exhausting, with a lot of them being either fetch quests with lots of dialogue (summoning horrific memories of FFXIV) or long dungeons that get tiring as you approach later levels. That it’s impossible to tell whether they’re truly optional or whether they’re your only option doesn’t help.

This is also where the cuts start being obvious. Like, glaringly. Larian showed off the city’s Upper City district as late as June but it’s just gone. A plot-important confrontation happens within an hour of the act starting, in a location deeply unfitting for what’s actually occurring. It’s even sequestered off in a separate, unoptimized cell. You’re then half-heartedly shunted out into the Lower City, which is expansive yes but nowhere near as big or ‘living and breathing’ as Larian made it out to be.

Characters sometimes appear and talk as if they lived through a quest that does not exist, which makes some plotlines feel like watching a film with some chapters cut, really apparent when Lae’zel is around. Astarion’s personal plot progresses way too fast and gets too much faux-gravitas, which in turn betrays the cut content associated with the other NPC involved in the story. I’ll admit, it’s strange that Astarion’s constantly-mentioned big bad is less important to the story than a guy Karlach mentions a couple times in Act 1. But again, story cuts. Hell, the game’s only true late-game companion will dump about two acts worth of chats on you, as if he was meant to appear earlier.
If you dig deep into companion chats, a lot of them mention either a history with Baldur’s Gate or people they know/knew there, but most of this comes to nothing. This is especially prominent with Wyll, a character who absolutely should have more of a connection to the city but barely says anything.

But most importantly, the titular city just feels kinda barren. It’s really obvious where Stuff will happen despite the density, and the size feels like it serves no purpose other than to tank my framerate due to all the moving NPCs. Act 1 and 2 were mostly empty spaces with designated event areas to poke around, and 3 is no different. It just pretends it isn’t. Act 3 makes it apparent that the game just isn’t finished, because if the Lower City feels so empty then how bad was the Upper City going to be?

And, in terms of the main plot… It honestly kind of stalls here? It boils down to little more than two questlines to get macguffin and then a confrontation with the Big Bad. There’s not much of an investigation because important characters will just exposit anything you might be missing to you, and the prior act answered a lot of things definitively - too definitively, one could say.
In particular, a lot of plot points are just painfully obvious if you’re familiar with either DnD fluff or you’re keenly attuned to how adaptations tend to present information from the source material. It does not take a great, keen mind to understand what the true big bad actually is, given that the game all but beats you over the head with certain imagery. I unfortunately had the plot clocked by the middle of Act 2, but I was still insistent that Larian would surprise me.

They did not.

There wasn’t much catharsis in pushing through BG3’s third act. I wish I could say more, but I don’t want to spoil this entire game. Honestly? It was mostly frustration. Frustration at the game for pulling the ol’ Larian upscale and making some fights a slog, frustration at the story for running out of steam, frustration at the writers for half-assing so much but keeping tons of comedic diversions, frustration at how the romance was handled, frustration at how little consequences there actually were, and…

Frustration with the Origin companions.

Yeah. Sorry, I’m just not that invested in these people. They’re way, way too Bioware for me. Besides Karlach (a very obviously late addition), they kind of exist just to Have A Point about something. Like the natural conclusion of “remove everything that’s just artistic flair” discourse. While they do comment on things in line with their alleged alignment, it’s rare to talk to them about things that aren’t story-relevant. Fuck sake, even Cullen was willing to talk to you about how he got cucked. And he sucks!

In place of broad personalities, they exist to ruminate on radicalization, self-determination, cycles of abuse, the price of altruism, the hubris of academics, and the pitfalls of religious zealotry. Beyond that though, they’re very one-dimensional. Being funny and having fetishes is nice, but the mere fact it’s obscenely difficult to get party members to leave of their own accord (barring three instant losses in Act 1 - hey, there’s those instant consequences again). Even DOS2’s companions had more depth than this, and character writing was not that game’s strong point. Hell, I’m gonna be extreme here: The Witcher 3 was better about this, and I fucking hate that game.

Also, as an aside: Astarion’s quest is neat but as a character he’s just R18 Sebille from DOS2. It’s really obvious in the resolutions.

Karlach is the exception, but for as much as I like her she does feel as though she was added as a reaction to people complaining about how evil-aligned the party was in early access. She is just a golden retriever in a tiefling body, and yet she was added even after they made everyone more polite and less contentious.

That’s kind of this game’s core issue, actually. It is obvious, at least from my point of view, that Larian tapered down a lot of this game’s darker and more contentious elements for fear of alienating people - yet I STILL see people bitch that Shadowheart, the adorable puppy girl, is too mean for them. I can’t help but wonder why they did it: Was it truly to avoid alienating normals? Were the rewrites that massive? Did they have a change of direction? I don’t know.

But, I don’t know. I like them despite everything - except Gale. They’re frustratingly shallow, but the points they exist to serve are where this game’s writing shines on the intended path. They’re all excellently voiced too, everyone in the game is yeah but the companions put their everything into it. I can’t fucking believe the guy who voiced Zeon - the worst Xenoblade 3 guest party member - is voicing a character like Astarion. I’ll give them sincere credit, they nailed it. This game’s acting in general is very theater, which is a nice break from the grim mumbled boredom that most western games have fallen into, or the clarity-first-personality-second acting that’s made a lot of contemporary animanga adaptations feel stilted and wooden. A lot of major side characters - Raphael and Mizora especially - are just treasures. Some of the best in class. Even when this game was boring, I sat through the dialogue for entertainment value.

Except in one instance, where the game doubled down on something I hate.

Look, I’ll just say it outright: This game kinda hates the original games even though it’s eager to retread old ground. Returning characters have a horrible time, with some of the best character writing from Throne of Bhaal getting mercilessly stepped on. Without spoiling it too deep, ToB’s best companion has their arc belittled and made fun of to the viewer, for no other reason than to force a connection between BG2 and BG3. Larian promised that the game would have ‘connections’ to justify this game being called BG3 and the game genuinely would’ve been better off without them. They are hamfisted, unwanted and needlessly spiteful towards the source material.

In the instance I alluded to, BG3 took such a steaming dump on Throne of Bhaal that I actually mashed through the dialogue out of sheer disgust. It’s bad, so bad. Bringing along a certain companion hangs a lampshade on how bad it is, but it’s fleeting. I hate saying this, but that scene well and truly should not have been in the game.

Sigh, look. I know I’ve been harsh on the game for the entire duration of this review so far, but I really did enjoy it in Act 1 and most of 2, plus the gameplay is a treasure. There’s a reason the score isn’t as low as you’d think. It’s a blast in multiplayer too, particularly if your party members - and you - are stupid as fuck.

It’s just such a mess. I didn’t even get into the lackluster ending, unfinished epilogue, my gripes with how loot works, the bad economy, or the BUGS! Copious bugs! Softlocks, quests not progressing, crashes, freezes, missing NPCs, rolls not applying bonuses, bugs bugs BUGS.

I hope this review ages like shit. I really do. I hope Larian release a Definitive Edition or something that makes most of this moot, but I think some of my complaints will always exist.

This is a game people gassed up for not being ‘like other AAA games’. And yet, it is incomplete on release, is a technical mess, has lots of unfinished/dead end content, and the devs have promised to fix/add to it later.

It is, unfortunately, not special as far as modern AAA games go. It’s not special as far as CRPGs go either.

It's just another in a long line of Bioware games.

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.

This is a rough one.

I think it's a fantastic little game, but I don't think I could ever give it an unconditional recommend. There's a lot of asterisks.

Dredge is a simple game: The Fisherman (That's you.) goes out to catch fish and other shinies through a series of varying-but-limited QTE prompts. A Tetris-style inventory and Amnesia-esque panic mechanic ensure you can't go out for too long, thoguh upgrades can alleviate this. At night, things take a turn for the worse and weird spooky threats come out to play.

Despite the simplicity and relative repetition, I like it... For the first 60%. Dredge is perhaps the only time where 'cozy horror' has been appropriate, rather than a joke. It is repetitive, and kind of dull, but there's something about the monotony of your day job contrasted with the unknowable horrors around you. Yes, there are awful things beyond your window, but they're not targeted at you directly and you still ultimately have a job to do. You are just a passive but employed observer to the horror, and you better clock in at the start of your shfit. It reminds me of working retail in the 2010s.

It carries on into the dialogue, too. Everyone is either mad, desperate or withdrawn. It may not be the end of the world, but it's visible if you squint. You can do small gestures of kindness here and there, but that's all you can do. Much of the 'horror' with the NPCs is far more human than mutant fish or demon sharks; grief driving a man to mania, the inherent horror of distance from one's family, the weight of being unable to feed the mouths of those you love so dearly, the emotional and social isolation of being a woman in a highly androcentric field, so on so forth.

And I liked the loop too, honestly. The routine of find new fishing spots > get more cash > get upgrade materials > get better upgrades > find new fish > repeat is nice for the first few hours. It's decently interspersed with the plot and the game mercifully doesn't have you hang around one spot for too long. All of this is bundled up in some excellent visuals, tight controls, and great music.

So why isn't a 5 star? Or even a full 4 star?

Because once the game runs out of tricks, there's still a pretty hefty amount of game to go, and it never really iterates on itself. There's no curveballs, unique mechanics, or remixes in the actual fishing/dredging mechanics. Unlike, say, Stardew Valley, there aren't even any fish with unique patterns to tackle. There are increasing environmental threats, sure, but those want for variance as well. It doesn't help that it's very easy to max all the upgrades by the third island (of five), leaving you with little to work for but the plot.

Many Lovecraftion videogames make the player ask how they'll avoid such unknowable horrors in their path. In Dredge, the answer is "Have an engine speed above 55 knots". No, really. If you spec into engines early on like I did, the threats are just speedbumps. Get used to the turning curve, and not even the narrow paths in the last area will let them threaten you.

And the plot honestly ruined a lot of nicer things I had to say about the story. That whole spiel up there praising the dialogue and feeling is torpedo'd by the end of the game. Without spoiling it, the lategame turns you from a passive observer to an active participant followed by a frankly annoying last minute ending choice that reeks of someone on the devteam going "Oh bother, we're a Lovecraft story". This is certainly one game that would've benefitted from not having a story.

That said, for a debut game by a small studio? This is still a fantastic effort. I may not be Dredge's biggest fan, but I honestly do like it for what it is and am absolutely keeping an ear to the ground for the devs' next game.

A delightful little nightmare, and also the exact kind of difficulty spike I needed from Rimworld.

Dragon's Dogma 2 being a bit shit admittedly took a bit of the wind from my sails, giving me a hefty case of Gamer Block™ that's inhibited any attempts I make to start something new. Which is a shame, because I really want to play Library of Ruina.

Fortunately, for whatever reason, the games industry has collectively decided that April is update/DLC season, so every game I play on the side is shoveling new stuff down my throat. Between Dwarf Fortress, Ultrakill, Big Ambitions, CK3, an upcoming Total Warhammer 3 DLC and other stuff I'm probably forgetting, I'm hardly lacking in games to revisit.

But it's Rimworld's Anomaly expansion that's grabbed my attention the most.

I really like Rimworld. No matter what, I always come back and roll a new colony eventually. Compared to most colony sims, Rimworld manages to be an enjoyable experience even with very few colonists, and I'm eternally surprised at just how differently a lot of my colonies play out based on a combination of the colonists/map/terrain/storyteller.

But, sad as I am to say, once you've adjusted to Rimworld's particular eccentricities, it becomes rather easy. Each DLC can alleviate this in some way, but they don't offer much challenge beyond "mood debuffs" or "alternative humanoids to fight" on the difficulty front - even if their other offerings still make them worthwhile.

Anomaly, then, was much needed.

Somewhat uniquely for a Rimworld DLC, Anomaly does not initially fire when enabled. Besides an odd Monolith on the starting cell, some of the DLC gear appearing at vendors and the odd single Shambler (zombie), there are no real signs Anomaly has even enabled itself.
It's not until your curiosity gets the better of you, and the investigation of the Monolith starts, that Anomaly kicks in.

Anomaly's primary offering is in both difficulty and difficulty variety.

A single enemy stalking your base doesn't seem threatening, but it's invisible. Even a proximity detector only tells you it's hanging around, it won't show itself until it decloaks. It's smart, too! If you have pawns that work in separate areas away from one another it will absolutely wait until they're alone before decloaking and feasting.
Even then, there's a similar monster - the Revenant - that only comes out at night and snatches pawns away without picking a fight. For once, building separate bedrooms is no longer the safest option.

And sure, Rimworld has had events that boil down to "lots of things come to kill you" before, but Shamblers are uniquely terrifying in their volume. They also don't feel pain or suffer from organ damage, and while fire is effective against them it's also risky - wildfires are a very real threat, and if they breach your defensive lines it could be parts of the whole colony that go up in smoke.

There are lots of horrors in Anomaly, I won't go through all of them because some are best experienced blind, but my favourite is the Metalhorror which is... The Thing. Yes, that Thing. It slips into one of your pawns and goes out of its way to spread, and it is horrifically clever. If it infects a pawn on kitchen duty it'll slip food into the colony's meals. Infected doctors/surgeons will lie about examination results. Did you build a communal barracks to deal with the Revenant? Congratulationss! That's an infection vector!

Most basegame threats in Rimworld are easily subdued by catch-all solutions, which is was a huge contributing factor in the game being relatively easy even on naked brutality starts. Anomaly's threats not only require more specific countermeasures, but the threats you even receive are entirely randomized. There are no pre-prepare easy tactics, my friend.

Your reward for engaging with this threats is the ability to play Lobotomy Corporation, or Diet SCP. Unlike human prisoners, extradimensional horrors require much more intense containment measures in exchange for much grander rewards. Bioferrite is plucked from said horrors and makes for an excellent crafting material, and archeotech shards help turn pesky uncooperative prisoners into mindless Ghouls that regenerate all ailments/wounds absurdly fast and have no needs beyond raw meat - give them a Nuclear Stomach, and even that one need is moot. Take part in some dark rituals, and you can make colonists immortal by sapping the lifespan from an unwilling victim, or even warp a random person through the void to your colony for whatever nefarious reasons.

Despite writing 'reviews', I actually don't ever go out of my way to formally recommend things. I'm a glorified blogger yelling to myself, not a buyer's guide, I don't know your history or preferenes or exact mechanical icks or tolerance for girl guro.
That said, I don't recommend Anomaly as anyone's first Rimworld expansion. Not because of it's quality, no, but because it synergizes so well with Biotech (Sanguophages especially) and Ideology that it should come with a warning on the store page. Anomaly is phenomenal for 'evil' or unscrupulous colonies, and it adds so much to vampiric runs that I can't imagine one without all it adds.
Also, as a little post-gdocs addendum: Mechanitors feel infinitely more useful in Anomaly, in part due to robots lacking consciousness which makes them immune to the very concept of horror - and very resistant to Shamblers!

Lastly, if you're a prospective Rimworld buyer: Don't get Anomaly immediately. Or, if you do, don't fuck with monoliths. This is a hard DLC even for experienced Rimworld players, and it can feel 'unfair' at times. It's best bought once you're familiar with how Rimworld works, what makes a good colony, and how to handle disaster.

Ultimately, my only gripe with Anomaly isn't even a dealbreaker. Without touching the Monolith, Anomaly just doesn't activate. I would've liked to see toned-down versions of the various horrors appear as random events, but I can understand why given the ease with which they'd decimate newer players.

I don't really have a cool sendoff for this. You guys play uh, Balatro?

EDIT: Literally as soon as I posted this, Ludeon announced they were changing how Anomaly integrates. Amazing.

I've had to let this one stew for a bit, honestly.

I picked it up for myself as a late birthday present out of curiosity more than anything. I'd heard a lot of unflattering comparisons to Vampire Survivors (a game I very much despise) and clicker games (which I also despise! Wow, patterns!) which had put me on edge, so I was a little surprised to find out that none of those comparisons are apt.

I can understand being skeeved out by the direct usage of Poker iconography and terminology on display, but the truth that's apparent to me is that Balatro is ultimately another roguelike deckbuilder. You match symbols together, try to play to synergies, and pray for one of your random drops/powerups to be the one that enables a certain playstyle or tactics. If anything, despite my relative apathy towards deckbuilders (I play YGO, so slapping a roguelite aspect on just repels me) I admire this game for its honesty and relative lack of illusions.

Still, I find myself in an odd position.

Despite admiring it, I'm not really smitten with it.

One of those games where I can see why it's considered a mindmelting trap for people with ADHD, but I personally don't get much out of it. Would honestly rather play Suika Game. Incremental micro-unlocks and "pick one of 3" powerups and glorified slot machines in the form of card packs don't really enthuse me.

At a base level, the basest of all levels, I do think the mechanics are somewhat engaging despite the simplicity and comparison to blackjack more than poker. Compared to its contemporaries I also think it has infinitely more impactful decision making, especially with how finite money is and how little shops actually offer.
But Balatro - and indeed, nearly the entire roguelite genre - has an awful habit of playing their entire mechanical hand early on and then hoping it's enough to hook you. While it works for some games (Isaac, FTL, Dead Cells, Synthetik) I don't find it works so well for deckbuilders. There aren't enough interesting twists on the core mechanics for me to want to keep playing, and if anything its iconographical honesty might actually make it worse.

Sure, the game is addictive, but I'm older now dude. I creak when I wake up, I say "Mmm scrumptious" when I buy a pastry from Greggs, I tend a garden, I play Granblue Fantasy, I've got an inanimate object I collect.

'Addictive' is no longer enough to satisfy me. Life is addictive, pastries are addictive, math is addictive, the world I live in is addictive.

[Semi-related ramble that I was gonna post as a comment on someone else's Balatro review before remembering I don't like to barge into other people's posts and go "Nuh uh".]

I so direly wish higher profile indie games would have a design core that isn't just "addictive". Having seen roguelites come into existence over a decade ago, it feels like every other popular indie game is trying to make players chase the same kind of high that Binding of Isaac or FTL did all those years ago. In turn, they miss out on just being good games at their core.

Fucked up that Hitman: Freelancer is the best of these games I've played in years, and it was free DLC.

Despite my love for it, I don't have much to say about this one in depth.

Feels like stepping back in time to 2016-2017 where every game was obsessed with setpieces, and given the game started development under Platinum it's not unlikely some older DNA bled into this game.
Granted, unlike AAA titles from the 2010s and Platinum's mediocre back catalogue, setpieces are used cleverly in GBFR and they don't ever repeat.
The first turret section is the last, and the one time it reuses the rising lava gimmick setpiece it's as a ludonarrative character capstone to make you go "OH SHIT".

The story is, at its core, the most quintessential JRPG-ass JRPG ever made, which fits given it's a Granblue Fantasy game and its parent title is mostly the same. It's a breath of fresh air in its simplicity, not shooting for the moon but instead the familiar horizon and all of its hits land because of it.
In an era where Naoki Yoshida and other big JRPG franchises are ashamed of sincerity and keep making edgy ~subversive~ bullshit, it's doubly nice to see something sincere without being an obvious 'tribute game' like the other side of the Modern JRPG Coin.
If you've ever seen a Shonen Jump movie you'll be familiar with GBFR's format: It's not an adaptation of Granblue's story, it's an original work sandwiched between existing arcs with a cast of fan favourites and wholly new supporting cast. Arguably it works better for games than movies, for while the One Piece movie villains are boring as hell I think Lilith might be in my top 5 Granblue characters alongside Vira, Apollonia, Shalem and Belial. Yes, I'm gay, what made it obvious.
There isn't much to spoil because it's so straightforward, and while I think simply calling it "good" defeats the purpose of even having a backloggd, it is. The emotional beats land, it doesn't waste any time, it managed to turn FF1's "go kill these primals" plot into an excellent GBF title, Narmaya is there. Perfect all around.

Gameplay is the star of the show though and wow. It's like a mirror into a world where Platinum Games regularly make titles that aren't garbage.
Their influence is clear, aye, but with GBFR having 19 characters it's opted to sprinkle mechanics onto each of them to keep it fresh.
You're baited into assuming this is yet another piece of licensed Platinum slop by Djeeta/Gran's boring Dynasty Warriors-esque combo mechanic only to stumble into Narmaya's infinite stance combos, dodge cancellable iai draw attacks, and butterfly stacking mechanic.
Or Siegfried, who plays like Hi Fi Rush and actually made me better at that game due to having a rigid but reliable timing mechanic that can actually be dodge offset.
Or Secret Character, who has a devil trigger.
Or Lancelot, whose attacks are centered around mashing and also gave me a minor RSI which still hurts a few days later.

Trash mob fights are almost always you and your party trouncing them while dodging ranged attacks. Fine enough, but the boss battles are the star of the show and their focus in the postgame is why you'll see other reference Monster Hunter. There's an excellent blend of mechanics and spectacle on display here that, again, puts other character action games to shame.
If you've ever played FFXIV you'll likely be right at home dodging AoEs and yelling at your party for something that so very easily could've been negated. God, I hate Siegfried mains who refuse to use his hyper armor.
They're all very lovely to look at, and towards the end of the story the spectacle starts approaching levels heretofore unseen in the character action genre besides Bayonetta (the one good Platinum duology). The final boss was just... Mwah.

On the presentation side, Cygames have long since been the kings of gacha presentation and with GBFR they're expanding that to the action RPG genre. Everything about this game is beautiful. Areas, outfits, characters, Narmaya's narmaya's, music, you name it.
The music deserves special attention though. Tsutomu Narita is one of the greatest game composers of our time and he's applying his decade of composing for GBF mobile to this game. The returning compositions are gorgeous yes, but the new ones for the original fights are jaw dropping and the final boss theme had me pause the game just to let it wash over me. It is some divine work, I hope they keep Zero (a 13 minute prog metal song) when Lucillius debuts in the next update.

Post-game is an amazing encapsulation of the browser game and I'm frankly astounded they managed to keep the experience intact but without the gacha/live service stuff. You grind to build up weapons, buff grids and other stuff ad nauseaum while tackling harder and harder fights that you meet with stronger and stronger characters.
Characters tend to really come into their niche here; you can get by with flailing before post-game, but if you're a Zeta main and you can't land your timed hits you gotta go play Percival or something. Buffs go from being useful accruements to utter gamechangers and I swear to fucking god if I run into another Cagliostro who's afraid of Phantasmagoria I'm gonna flip.
In short: The Monster Hunter comparisons are valid.

All in all... Psh, I really do wish I had more to say. I had the time of my life playing this game, man. I haven't loved a JRPG this much since Yakuza 7, and it's a nice reminder of what the genre can be like when it's not helmed by Naoki Yoshida's eternal shame at having made JRPGs in the past or endless nostalgia bait.

I wish Lilith was real. Happy that Maggie Robertson got to voice act in a game that wasn't terrible.

I have this annoying problem where, whenever I play a truly transcendental videogame that wows me from head to toe, I enter a state of post-masterwork malaise where even other good games just look worse.

And Library of Ruina was phenomenal. Truly the best game I've ever played, which naturally meant playing anything else was an impossible task.

But I'm old now, and I know how to cure this: I need to play something terrible. Something that, top-to-bottom, inside and out, is just irredeemable. Something not only indefensible, but laughable.

Every brilliant light casts an equally dark shadow, and as Library of Ruina stands at the zenith of gaming, I must look to the nadir for guidance.

Having slogged through the entire game and it's DLCs, I think it's time to put the pin in this journey.

It's interesting to consider just how much Bethesda lucked out with this game.

Soon after its release Fallout: New Vegas would be birthed in a haste at Obsidian's hands, proceeding to dominate the overall population's idea of "Fallout" for a good few years before Fallout 4 came out and the conversation became an eternal NV vs. 4 debate, underscored by endless quibbles about voiced protagonists and that one "yes/yes (sarcastic)/no (yes)/no" meme about FO4's dialogue. In the midst of all this is Skyrim, a game so influential and popular despite its flaws that Bethesda are "The Skyrim People" to a not-insignificant number of people on Earth.

All of this is to Bethesda's benefit, because it means people have forgotten about Fallout 3.

Not me, though. That's my curse; I'm a career hater, I can't forget bad games.

But let’s put 3 on the backburner for a moment.

Let’s talk about Oblivion.

Even a decade on from its end, people are still trying to figure out which games defined the 7th generation of consoles the most. I’m going to throw my 2 cents into the ring:
The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion was, by far and bar none, the most defining title of 7th gen.
Not to say that other titles weren’t influential, of course, but even though we live in a time where the words “Ubisoft open world” have entered most people’s lexicons, I think the progenitor of said open worlds was Oblivion and Bethesda.
Oblivion was a game with a very clear message: You don’t need to meticulously design every part of a game for it to sell well or be beloved. You don’t even need to meticulously design a small part of it. All you have to do is make a big empty bowl, put in some markers that allude to it being bigger than it actually is, and then give it a clutter pass before dotting some reused fortresses/caves/mines into it. There’s no need for a personal touch in every corner, merely the illusion of one.

But I can forgive Oblivion for a lot of things even if it is terrible. It was one of the earliest titles released in 7th gen, and the first of its scale. It took four years to make in a time where that was an incredible abnormality.

Fallout 3 gets no such mercy from me.

In part, because it’s worse.

Most RPGs either force a goal onto you but let you pick your motive, or they force a motive onto you and let you pick your goal. These are streams that’re best left uncrossed. Fallout 3, for some reason, attempts to do both.

F3 opens with you, the player character, being born and causing your mother to die of postpartum cardiac arrest. This is already a horrific indicator of how obsessed it’s going to be with its own unearned sense of profundity and much like the actual act of being born, it gets infinitely worse.
Just to get this out of the way: This sucks. It sucks on a creative level - Bethesda clearly couldn’t figure out how to stoke player investment without giving you a dead mom, a sad dad and showing your birth - but it also just sucks as the opening to a Fallout game?
This observation is so common that even comparatively normal people who don’t engage with Gaming as a culture often make it: Fallout 1 and 2 open with “oh yeah some shit’s fuck, go save your home”. Fallout NV starts with you getting shot in the head, and sends you off after a brief intro.
Fallout 3’s intro, then, sticks out like a sore thumb even compared to its more immediate sequel.
Afterwards you get warped to a birthday party filled with named NPCs who share voice actors and who you don’t care about. After that you get warped to a school test with the same named NPCs who share voice actors and don’t actually speak more than one or two lines, who you still don’t care about.

After that most of them die and the game tries to make you feel sad about their deaths I guess, but it’s moot because you finally get to leave the Vault and I’m incredibly confident 99% of people regardless of age or maturity felt elation at not having to wander through boring, visually bland corridors anymore.

Unfortunately, that’s all Fallout 3 has to offer outside the Vault too.

Over the years I’ve started to take incredible amounts of umbrage with the establishing shot of DC the player is greeted with upon leaving the Vault.

It promises a grand, open world - a reprieve from the suffocating Vault you just slogged through!

Springvale School is just down the road. It looks like this. Walk a bit further and you can find a metro. It looks like this. You can even find some sewer tunnels. They look like this.. Maybe, if you go a bit further, you’ll find an office building. Looks like this!.

Okay. You’ve now seen 99% of locations in Fallout 3.

Before we get ahead of ourselves, let’s just have a little design chat.

I’m not a game dev, but I’ve played so many open world games and developed a fondness for them that I’ve managed to figure out some criteria that helps measure how good these games are on a technical level.

To wit, a ‘good’ open world is dotted with areas where one or more of these applies:

A visual reward, in the form of a lovely view.
A progression reward, in the form of loot that directly makes you stronger.
Something you can’t see or obtain anywhere else in the game world.
Depending on the world structure, it should lead to somewhere else that’s only accessible via a specific location.
At the very least, for more out-there or hidden areas, there should be some acknowledgement that you made the journey successfully.

Right, all that is out of the way.

Fallout 3’s open world is badly designed, but to really dig into why we need to talk about the other parts of the game that’re badly designed, and I think the topic of loot is perhaps the most pressing.

The first shotgun the player can acquire in Fallout New Vegas is the humble Single Shotgun. It does respectable damage for how early it drops, but true to its name it only carries a single round and its short but frequent reloads can leave you wide open against hordes or particularly tank enemies. It also uses 20 gauge shells as opposed to 12 gauge, so while it hits hard early on it ultimately stops being useful fast.
Later in the game’, the player can luck into possession of the venerable Riot Shotgun, an absolute beast of a weapon that boasts a 12-round drum magazine with 12 gauge shells as its primary ammo type, on top of a high rate of fire and respectable reload time.

Meanwhile the first shotgun the player can potentially find in Fallout 3 is the Combat Shotgun). It is, like the Riot Shotgun, a veritable moment that can dish out respectable damage and uses 12 gauge ammo. In the Capital Wasteland, this is an extremely common weapon with an extremely common weapon type - 20 gauge does not exist, so all shotgun wielding enemies are walking topups.

To really illustrate this issue, we need to talk about damage.

New Vegas uses two types of defensive stat: Damage Resistance (percentage-based) and Damage Threshold (flat reduction).

All incoming damage taken is reduced by the DR value at a percentage. So if you, for example, take 100 damage and have 50 DR, you take 50 damage.
Next is the DT value, which is a flat reduction. Seeing as we’ve just taken 50 damage, let’s imagine we have 20 DT. Since it’s just a flat subtraction, all in all we’ve taken 30 damage. This goes both ways.

This hypothetical only involves a single instance of damage. Shotguns, as they fire multiple pellets per shot, have the formula applied to each individual pellet. The end result is that despite high damage stats and seeming to be catch-free, shotguns in NV do a lot less damage than you’d initially think - though, as NV is a competently made game, this can be circumvented with alternative ammo and perks.

Fallout 3, however, only uses Damage Resistance. This is alarming on its own, but it gets worse as you learn that DR in Fallout 3 rarely if ever gets above 40. Most non-humanoid enemies don’t even have any DR stats, just health.

This is where the problem really starts to take shape.

While this does still impact the individual shotgun pellets, the reality is that a 10% reduction applied to 10 damage is incredible miniscule, so the Combat Shotgun becomes a weapon sent down by the gods to smite anything with a pulse.

The Combat Shotgun is incredibly powerful, uses bountiful ammo and is incredibly common. As are the Hunting Rifle, Missile Launcher, Assault/Chinese Assault Rifles, and Laser/Plasma Rifles.

Final result?

Most loot rewards are utterly worthless and incredibly unsatisfying.

99% of Fallout 3’s generic, copy-pasted dungeons end with you getting little more than some sellable stuff, a few caps, a handful of consumables, one weapon which you already have 15 of in stock, and a surplus of ammo that you’re probably already overflowing with. Fuck dude, even a lot of main story stuff just dumps excess on you. The final ‘dungeon’ doesn’t offer anything you don’t already have assuming you’ve bothered to go for a walk between the midgame and then.
I can only really describe this game’s world design as a sort of maniacal creative ADHD. You’ll find a marker or something to gawk at every couple of minutes, yes, but in actuality all of the stuff you find is superfluous gunk that at best rewards you with thirty 5mm rounds and a stimpak.
A couple of years ago I replayed Deus Ex: Human Revolution. While that game has many issues, the only relevant one is: Loot scarcity. In a sort of dim, artificial attempt to keep the player ~on their toes~, Deus Ex HR frequently has players break into hidden vaults and armouries only to find at best a weapon they already have and some ammo.
Fallout 3 has both this exact same issue and the opposite problem: Loot excess. Because there’s so little of it, and because it’s all so strong, the simple act of finding things is simultaneously unsatisfying and unneeded. What am I going to do with some leather armor and a knife? I found a weapon to kill god in a bin.
Lastly, there’s a very strange issue running through Fallout 3 wherein loot containers that need skill investment to unlock often have worse loot than random bedside cabinets. In the game’s final dungeon I cracked open a Hard-difficulty terminal, and behind it was… 19 10mm rounds, a Stimpak, some drugs, and one missile. Opposite, in a random footlocker, was a useful amount of money and a significant handful of Microfusion Cells.

Truthfully, though, all of that isn’t the actual problem - New Vegas also has its fair share of dud locations. The actual problem is that there’s a lack of loot progression. You get a Combat Shotgun or a weapon of your choice and you’re basically set for life. Besides Mini Nukes there are no rare ammo types, and caps are plentiful - in part due to loot itself being plentiful - meaning it’s easy to just cycle around each vendor and empty their ammo stock if you need .44 Magnum or .308 ammo.

There are some unique pieces of equipment here and there, but they run into a teensy tiny little problem:

They’re overkill.

Fallout 3’s greatest sin, looping back to that discussion about damage earlier, is that it’s an easy game.

Most enemies rarely have health in the hundreds, and basically everything besides the .32 pistol and the Chinese pistol is capable of outputting that with impunity. Conversely, unless the player cranks the difficulty right up, enemies don’t deal enough damage to be a threat unless they’re in large groups and even then it’s incredibly rare to fight groups of enemies in open terrain. Indeed, the first real swarm most players will find during the main quest is fought with tons of cover and chokepoints to exploit.
It’s not until the DLCs that enemies start appearing with difficulty attached, and said difficulty is little more than them getting a +30-40 extra damage for free. They do have bloated HP, but realistically if you’re at the recommended level for the DLCs then you have enough damage output to ignore that.

In most other open world games where loot is a frivolous, tacked-on system with no merit, usually exploration is its own reward. This sentiment carried BOTW to many people’s good graces, after all.
Fallout 3 has no such luck: The Capital Wasteland is a horrifically unappealing place. There isn't much in the way of landmarks and the ones that do exist are so… American. I suppose it may be resonant and even disquieting if you’re an American with any degree of patriotism but I’m an embittered Scot that views the entire country as a disease that’s gone on too long. The sight of the Washington Monument in disrepair makes me feel about as much as the styrofoam box I get my chips from.
It’s easy to throw up one’s hands and say “Oh, but this is a post-apocalyptic game, Mira! Of course it looks like shit!” which isn’t an entirely unworkable stance, it just ignores that pretty much every other famous piece of post-apocalyptic media - especially the Fallout game released immediately after this one wrapped - managed to nail this while still being ‘ruined’.
I have a relatively good sense of direction, to the point where my friends instinctively put me in charge whenever we need to find somewhere in Glasgow. With that said, I find it incredibly easy to lose where I am on Fallout 3’s map, for once the player leaves the downtown DC region the Capital Wasteland is little more than a grey/brown wasteland dotted with the same 4-5 ruins for miles upon miles. Most of the notable map markers are in the southeast of the map anyway.

Not helping this is that, as opposed to having regional spawn lists to spruce up the act of exploration, Fallout 3 uses a global spawnlist which deposits the vast majority of enemies into the world at random.

Which sucks because there’s not that many enemy types. Humanoids, Radscorpions, Radroaches, Yao Guai, Deathclaws, Botflies, Feral Ghouls, Super Mutants, Centaurs, Dogs, Mirelurks, Mole Rats, Ants, and robots. There, that’s basically every enemy in the game. You will most likely encounter all of them within 20 minutes of following the main path.
Oblivion has a similar problem of dropping random enemies all over the map, but that game’s level scaling is kind enough to replace enemies rather than simply dropping reskinned versions of them with higher HP in the same places.

The enemies, I feel, are where every issue I talked about up above comes to a head. Bad loot variety? Human enemies attack with the same 5-6 weapons. Bad location variety? You kill the same enemies with the same gear in samey locations. Bad quest variety? Regardless of context, you’re hitting the same things in the same gear in the same locations for only slightly different reasons.

And, as is the trend for Fallout 3, enemies being miserable to fight is both a culmination of other issues and introduces its own!

Namely: Combat is, at a very base foundational level, deeply unsatisfying.

Normally I wouldn’t repeat criticisms that other people have said uniformly for decades, however as a career Fallout 3 hater I reserve the right to do so.

It’s accepted by now that Bethesda games lack weight in their combat. Melee feels floaty and impactless, and every gun regardless of caliber or damage feels like using a BB gun. Nobody reacts to damage besides the odd grunt and maybe a canned stagger animation until they die, at which point they either limply collapse like a puppet with severed strings or explode in a shower of gore which is… Honestly, kind of juvenile? And I say this as a certified gore whore.
This in itself is an extension of the game’s nauseatingly childish fixation on gore; raider camps have dismembered corpses impaled on hooks, many areas are filled with random bits of internal organ, and Super Mutants carry entire fishnet bags filled with gore.

But on a technical level, shooting things in Fallout 3 is both deeply unsatisfying and badly designed.

FPS games were some of the first to really crystallize as a genre, and by the time Fallout 3 ripped itself free into the world there were already certain ground rules that not even outsider games dared to break.
If a gun sways, it’s accepted that it should aim where it’s pointing. If a gun’s projectiles have spread, it’s commonly accepted that the gun itself should be steady. Easy enough, right?
Fallout 3, for some asinine reason, does both.
On some level I can vaguely maybe kinda possibly appreciate the attempt to recreate the experience of trying to fire a gun in Fallout 1 with low stats at a target far beyond its effective range, but the problem here is that that experience was temporary until you powered up and here it’s a permanent fixture of gameplay. Weapons have less sway as you increase their respective skill, but unless your Int stat is high (because skill points are asininely tied to it) then that’s a relatively slow crawl - doubly so when there are other skills to increase.
What really hurts shooting is that hit detection is wildly inconsistent. The hitbox for projectiles is seemingly tiny, and it often gets caught on terrain or misses ‘direct’ shots by one thousandth of an inch. Said terrain seems to be poorly constructed, as wafer-thin bits of rebar will obstruct bullets around them and cause them to seemingly clatter off of thin air.
Call of Duty is terrible yesyes but this game came out a year after CoD4 had already introduced the average person to snappy, responsive and satisfying shooting which also lets you shoot through chainlink fences. I have no idea what was in the water to make people believe this game’s shooting was enjoyable.

As a brief aside: I discovered only now that oftentimes projectiles in third person mode don’t even go where you aim them. My metric for how good shooters are at a base level revolves around how good it feels to fight in close quarters, and because of this Fallout 3 feels even worse.

“[Developer] made a competent [genre] and didn’t bother to make the rest of the game” is a phrase that popped up a lot around the late 00s and early 2010s as more and more people began trying to blend genres together. See: Alpha Protocol.
Fallout 3 is unique in this front because Bethesda not only failed to make a competent shooter, but the corpse of an RPG around it isn’t very good either.

Let me just quote myself, from earlier:

Most RPGs either force a goal onto you but let you pick your motive, or they force a motive onto you and let you pick your goal. These are streams that’re best left uncrossed. Fallout 3, for some reason, attempts to do both.

Fallout 3 gives the player a rigid, established backstory and also an annoying rigid, established goal. It’s quite alarming to come across as an NPC related to your father and see every dialogue option be variations on “where my dada :<”.
But even beyond that, there isn’t much room to actually roleplay in this game. The Lone Wanderer as a protagonist is painfully straight forward, and their two forms are “person with human decency” and “guy who condemns kids to slavery.”
Fallout 3, like any other RPG, has quests but I hesitate to call them that. They’re more like guides towards shooting galleries that sometimes stop and ask you if you want to be a nice person, if you want to use a perk/skill to bypass a third of the quest, or if you want to be unfathomably and needlessly cruel.
Even within the main story, there isn’t much framework to roleplay because the Lone Wanderer assimilates their father’s purpose without even giving the player a morton’s fork dialogue choice.

As for the actual main story… I’ve always hated it for the same reasons most other Fallout 3 haters dislike it - it’s flimsy, way too short, has no room for player choice, is entirely linear, etc etc - but as I replayed it, something stood out to me.

Do you know what the Great Man Theory is? In short, and in layman’s terms: The GMT is the belief that Great Men aren’t necessarily nurtured or cultivated, but are simply great from birth. It is these Great Men, and only these Great Men, that are allowed to dictate the course of history. It sucks, I hate it. We don’t use the phrase “product of their environment” for nothing.

I’m gonna take a hard pivot here. Bear with me.

When you think of the word “fascism” you likely have a strong image in your mind. Goose-stepping Nazis, death camps, red hatted Americans screaming in hordes, the most boring European men in suits putting uncomfortable emphasis on the word “superior”, that kind of thing.
Those aren’t invalid. Good on you. Fascism sucks.
But my mental image is defined by a lot of uncomfortably up-close experience with these kinds of people, and it’s boring.
My mental image of Fascism is the dark underside of the Great Man Theory. Of people who believe that, if Great Men are simply born, then Un-Great or ‘Degenerate’ Men are also born. If there are enough Great Men, why shouldn’t they rule? Why should the world cater to Degenerate Men when Great Men can be classified? We should keep Degenerate Men from usurping our Great Men! So on, so forth.

What I mean to say here is that Fascism as a belief system often manifests in incredibly boring ways that’re so banal they often go unnoticed even by people that’re otherwise keyed into such things - at least when they’re not like. Insane.

Fallout 3’s main story is passively Fascist, then.

I don’t think Bethesda Game Studios’ writers are Fascists. I feel you could probably convince Todd Howard to write “1312” on his shirt with a mild amount of transgender Charisma. There’s enough queer people in this IP that I don’t think they hold any real malice for anybody, albeit in much the same way I don’t think they hold any beliefs at all.

But they are incompetent writers, and they’ve accidentally made a story which has awful undertones.

Your first real hints as to the game’s nature come up if you take a walk around DC. There’s a lot of veneration towards the USA Founding Fathers that at first seems quaint and in line with the setting’s propaganda, but…
As the story goes on, it’s made abundantly clear that the player’s father was a Great Man, being the only one capable of rallying a team of scientists and the only one capable of actually putting Project Purity into motion.
When he inevitably dies thanks to the Enclave delaying the ending of my suffering by 2 hours, it falls to you - only you, nobody else - to follow in his footsteps. Because you’re a Great Man too!
In the original version of the game, you die activating the Purifier, and a statue of Thomas Jefferson looks down at you - unmoving, yet seemingly approving… BECAUSE HE’S A GREA-

There’s also the matter of Three Dog’s radio commentary which gets a little… Suspicious, I’d say? It starts out innocently enough, but even a neutral Lone Wanderer starts getting referred to as an actual saviour, with such overdramatic gestures such as Three Dog admitting you cured his misanthropy by being a saint. It’s rather telling that the Very Good Karma icon is a Jesus caricature.

RPGs as a genre do admittedly have a problem with sometimes accidentally stepping into the Great Man shit, it’s just the nature of the genre; to have things occur without the player’s influence or awareness is unsatisfying from a design perspective, so of course things have to be up to you. Wiser RPG devs go out of there way to ensure you’re just an everyman, or you’re woven into the setting in such a way that it avoids such pitfalls.
Fallout 3, unfortunately, leans a bit too into it. Especially with the way Raiders are portrayed, and how often Three Dog talks about them and other wasteland randoms as if they’re actual animals.

It always did strike me as odd that handing total control of Project Purity to the Enclave is rightfully seen as a mistake but handing it over to another authoritarian organization - the Brotherhood - is fine. Yes they’re allegedly benevolent but even in Fallout 3 they show a distinct disgust for ‘wasters’ and it’s stated outright they shoot Ghouls on sight. If you have a more holistic view of franchises (as opposed to my individualistic one), then Fallout 4 confirms they’ll go on to be an actual Fascist organization.

And what better topic to add into this mix than slavery?

In invoking many prominent figures from America’s history, Abraham Lincoln naturally gets brought up a lot, and so do slaves. Slavers make up a decent number of the Capital Wasteland’s population, and they’re everywhere. The few settlements dotted around the map have an eternal fear of them, and their base is perhaps second only to the Brotherhood’s in size + population.

But slavery in this game isn’t really substantial. It isn’t something to be commented on or observed or interrogated, it’s basically another vessel for quests. There’s one liberation faction, and one enslaving faction. Kill slavers, or enslave people. Enslaving people is 100 negative Karma, giving two bottles of water to a beggar is 100 positive Karma. Ethical slavery, yeah!
But even though there is a faction dedicated to the emancipation of slaves, that’s your job - if you want. The slave liberators are tucked away in a corner of the map, easily missable because there’s frankly not that much out that way. Their fate, and the fate of all slaves, is up to you.
I don’t like Fallout 4 all that much but even that game was willing to create the idea that people other than you were working to liberate the Synths.

All of this really compounds the banal and straightforward design: Arguably more than any other Bethesda game, or indeed open world game, Fallout 3 is the one that feels the most static. It is your playground because only You can do anything.

With that all said, there is one part of the game I admittedly think is decent.

Vault 101, the player’s home, is like almost every other Vault in the Bethesda Fallout canon: A social experiment under the guise of a shelter for humanity. Note that this concept basically doesn’t exist prior to Fallout 3; Vaults in 1/2/Tactics/Van Buren were simply shelters.
Vault 101’s experiment was simple: Stay closed. Never reopen. Compared to other experiments in Fallout 3 and subsequent games, this one was incredibly merciful.
Naturally, like other Vaults, 101 faces a violent reckoning when your father leaves - violating the experiment - and the Overseer reacts harshly.

When you return, the Vault has split into people who want to keep the door closed and people who want to go outside.
Uniquely for Fallout 3, there is no right answer here; barring ‘destroy the vault’, each branch of the story offers a degree of good Karma and neither are explicitly better than the others.
You could side with the rebels and open the Vault. They’d be free, and the resources of an active Vault could do good for the surrounding area and settlements… But the Wasteland is filled with a lot of people who’re pure evil, and while you might be able to survive out there there’s absolutely no guarantee anyone else will besides Butch.
Or, you could side with the Overseer and keep it closed. Despite the Overseer being authoritarian, the Vault did run fine until your dad leaves at the game’s proper start and considering future games it’s one of three depicted on-screen that actually were completely fine. Every negative about opening the Vault is a valid reason to side with him, but… It’s quietly brought to the player’s attention that the Overseer’s control over Vault Security isn’t as tight as he thinks it is, and they’re all too willing to take drastic measures to enforce compliance. Not to mention that while he might be able to end the conflict, the Vault still needs a doctor and families have been either destroyed or split asunder.

This is the only quest of its kind in Fallout 3.

Unfortunately like every quest in Fallout 3 even potentially poignant moments are ruined by the voice acting.

I have to commend Jennifer Massey (Dr Madison Li) and Erik Todd Dellums (Three Dog) for being the only voice actors who’re even pretending to give a shit about this script, because everyone else is phoning it in. This game only has a small handful of voice actors and pretty much all of them are audibly reading the script for the first time as they’re saying the lines.
More often than not, the subtitles carry a tone that the actual voice acting doesn’t. It’s marginally improved in the DLCs, but only slightly. In the base game, the same 5-6 voice actors will mumble out their lines with zero enthusiasm or variety. It does, to an extent, turn into accidental comedy when you walk into the Rivet City Market and have three different NPCs greet you in an identical voice.

There’s a somewhat sad irony to the fact that Fallout 3 can be played through New Vegas via Tale of Two Wastelands and yet it doesn’t make it better - it makes it worse. That’s really this game’s legacy, isn’t it? It needs sunlight to grow, but New Vegas is the sky and it won’t be having it.

With everything I've said, observed and read in mind, I'd ultimately argue that Fallout 3 shows more signs of a rushed, ramshackle development than New Vegas. Of the two, it's infinitely buggier, rife with cut/scrapped content and saddled with an omnipresent feeling of "this game isn't done".

As I reach the end of this review, I find myself struggling to answer a question: Why do I keep playing this game every couple of years?

It's not Schrodinger's Game, I don't need to observe it to find out if it's shit or not. Not once has my opinion on this game gotten even SLIGHTLY more positive over my various replays - which, as of writing, is the only game this sentiment still applies to.

But yet, like clockwork, I return to it. I install Fallout 3, then New Vegas, then Tale of Two Wastelands followed by the same QoL/maintenance mods I always get. I boot it, I beat it, I hate it. We're sitting at like ten full replays over the last decade. It defies all sense to me. Is this what a manic compulsion is? Something my body craves but the brain cannot comprehend? It's so very eldritch.

In typing that, I awakened a memory of the day Fallout 3 barged into my life, a week ahead of schedule thanks to a shipping error. My father text me while I was on my way out of high school for lunch: "Yer game's here". Wanting to play a shiny new game and not wanting to read The Cone Gatherers, I opted to make the lunch trip into a trip home.
Having a lot of free time these days, I decided to retrace my steps and walk that route again.

I boarded the train to my old town, and as trains do it came to a stop at the end of the route. I departed and made my way to the route I once took - mercifully, the train stops right behind where I went to school. Following my steps, I did everything as it was; popped into a cafe for a hot roll, got a can of juice from the (still open, yay!) newsagent, and took the long way around to what used to be my home.
I grew up in one of the many, many towns in Scotland whose only real purpose was to house poor people and host an ironworks/coal mine - and those were shut down decades ago. As a result, going back during the quieter hours fills me with the same kind of discomfort one can also vaguely experience in the remnants of Fallout 3's depiction of Washington DC. My old town, too, is a place mostly occupied by shambling zombies and people that might kill you if aggro'd.

You're perhaps expecting me to admit that returning to Fallout 3 is secret nostalgia, right? That I hold a soft spot for it and have been denying that?

No, I still think it's terrible, but I did find out why I keep coming back to it.

On my walk I passed by a bus shelter that, in my day, was little more than a standing rail encased in bricks with a sheet metal roof. Nowadays it's been renovated, with a bench, windows, and a bus timetable.

Looking back at it, I recalled a discussion I once had at that old bus shelter with a good friend of mine who we'll call Gary. We'd been out that day for quite some time, poking through forests and trails with our friends. It was a long day in the middle of a mild Scottish summer, something we no longer experience. By the time we were due to go home, both of us were exhausted.
Exhaustion, for teenagers, is often the harbinger of naked sincerity. The kind you can only really experience in that time where your 'golden years' are in their twilight and their end seems closer and closer every time you turn, trembling, towards the horizon.
I offer to walk Gary to his bus and he accepts. On the way, our chats are about normal things, nothing heavy. When we sit down, though, the silence around us creeps in. A busy town center, now without a soul save for the odd car. We sit by ourselves, wordless, as the last breaths of sunlight choke and die beneath the coming night.

I whip out my iPod Nano and, on the screen, is the last thing I was listening to: A song from In Flames' 'A Sense of Purpose', which at that point was two years old.
Gary scoffs, and we begin the ritual that teenage boys do where we rib one another for our tastes over and over.
But we're both tired, it's just past 8pm, and we were kinda enjoying the silence. The jabs and japes soon end without much fanfare, and silence falls in.
The bus was late. This I remember clearly. So late that Gary, a jovial and relatively stoic lad, was getting antsy.
Apropos of nothing, he turns to me.
"Mira," He asks in a surprisingly cold voice. "You know, I hate A Sense of Purpose, but I love it at the same time."
This so dumbfounded me, it did. My thinking was so very binary back then: Things I liked were good, things I disliked were bad. How and why would one love a bad thing?
"Gary, that makes no sense." I croak out, bewildered.
"Aye," So he says, like he just confessed to a murder. "Wanna know why?"
Of course I did, and nodded in assent.
"Things keep changing, and I'm scunnered [tn: tired] of it. But that album," He nods to my iPod as though it were a child - not a creature of sin, but innocently misguided. "That album is always shit. No matter how much time passes, it's always shite. I like that."
I didn't have an answer in me, much as I wished I did. It was my first introduction to the concept of 'terrible but I love it'. We sat in silence for another few minutes before the bus pulled up. I wished him well and we saw one another off.

Coming back to this memory 14 years later, I get it.

Fallout 3 and A Sense of Purpose were both 16 years ago.

In the intervening years, my tastes have changed. My top 25 from 2019 looks alien to me, the same list from 2015 utterly unbelievable. My walls are no longer adorned with band posters and game memorabilia, but shelves and stuffed rabbits I collect. While I once longed to work in the IT field, experience has made me pray that I never wear a shirt and tie again. I no longer live in the old mining town, the sun does not hit my face from the same angles while I rest. When I exit my house I do not see fields of green and distant towns, but endless houses, apartment blocks and industrial estates.

It is, suffice to say, rather obvious that not only have I changed, but so has the world around me. Indeed, I often wonder if I'm the same person as the one in these memories, or if they were simply taken from another when I was constructed at the age of 21. The changes I describe have occurred over what is now half of my entire lifespan, a period of so many years that not even my pristine memory can keep those years from occasionally blending together or faces from getting blurred.

But Fallout 3?

Fallout 3 never changes.