Tails by the Foxfire

Baldur’s Gate 3 Review

It doesn’t feel like 3 years since Baldur’s Gate 3 first captured the hearts of millions, but our world is currently an existential hellscape and time has a funny habit of getting away from us. So, here we are: 2026 somehow, and I’ve finally finished this mammoth of an RPG. Not for lack of trying, either; I think this was my third attempt at a playthrough, and every time I hit Act 3, another amazing patch would drop and break all the mods my excitable husband had set me up with for a heightened gameplay experience with deeper customization options. Thankfully, Larian did me the immense favour of baking the mod manager into the game last time they updated, so once Patch 8 rolled around, I was able to carry on my campaign without a hitch.

And I finally did it. I saved Baldur’s Gate. But at what cost?

Dungeons, Dragons, and Why Baldur’s Gate 3 Intimidated Me

Due to ADHD-related attention issues, bullying and numerical dyslexia intertwining my anxiety inseparably from the very prospect of interacting with numbers, and the fact my friends and I are all working adults, I’ve had a pretty on-again, off-again relationship with Dungeons and Dragons. Nothing against it; I’ve watched some of Critical Role and dabbled in Brennan Lee Mulligan’s campaigns over on Dropout, and I’ve enjoyed the bits I’ve seen thoroughly. As well, the Fighting Fantasy book series by Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone were a big part of my childhood and shared many of the same earmarks, so I knew Dungeons and Dragons had all the ingredients I’d love: storytelling and character creation, imagination and improvisation, fantastical worlds full of wondrous sights, and pretty pretty dice, but I just couldn’t get into it. There was something missing, and the gameplay mechanics always felt highly overwhelming, so initially I didn’t pay much attention when Baldur’s Gate 3 dropped. ‘Not for me,’ I thought. ‘Probably too mechanics heavy, slow, and full of references I won’t get. And while I wasn’t exactly wrong, I also wasn’t right.

What is Baldur’s Gate 3?

For gamers like me who had no idea what all the hype was about,the Baldur’s Gate series of RPGs was based on the Forgotten Realms campaign setting of Dungeons & Dragons. The original Baldur’s Gate was first released by BioWare in 1998 for PC and followed the story of an orphan raised in Candlekeep monastery, who braves the land to find their foster father, fighting for their own life all the while. Released in 2000, Baldur’s Gate II continues this story, and kicks things off with the party’s violent capture. 

 Baldur’s Gate 3 was developed and published by Larian Studios in 2023 and brings an unrelated, standalone story to the table, though references to the previous games can be found in its locations and expansive cast. I can confidently say that as someone who hasn’t played either of the previous games (yet), I didn’t find this off putting or confusing; when your party members do recognise someone, it just comes across as them having lives before they met up with Tav (the protagonist), which is fine–believable, even, and goes a long way towards making the world and its inhabitants feel alive. Truthfully the references to previous games likely goes even deeper than I realise, and I only know the ones I have clocked because I was interested enough to read more about them on the Wiki. 

The Learning Curve

The upside of multiple playthroughs was that it gave me plenty of time to familiarise myself with the various skills and subclasses the game has to offer. My husband is a long-time Dungeons & Dragons enthusiast, so found Baldur’s Gate 3 most satisfying modded to hell and back with classes, subclasses, spellbooks, and feats he knew and enjoyed from his years of playing. For me, I found Baldur’s Gate 3 to be the perfect entry level to Dungeons & Dragons mechanics, presenting me with plenty of choices without becoming overwhelming. Best of all, I didn’t feel like I’d exhausted all my options in the one complete playthrough. Whenever I boot up a new campaign, it can be with a completely different character and a brand new strategy, keeping even retrodden ground feeling relatively fresh.

Choosing to Live, and How

Now we come to the part about Baldur’s Gate 3 that I love most as a fan of RPGs and visual novels: the characters, their stories, and how their outcomes can shift depending on your choices. I’ll be getting a bit more into the specifics of their arcs and the latter end of my playthrough here, so if you haven’t played Baldur’s Gate 3 yourself yet, I advise you stop reading here and go do that! It’s available on PlayStation, Xbox, Windows, and Mac, so go nuts! Once you’re done, I hope you’ll come back and let me know how things turned out for your Tav and their companions! 

[SPOILERS BEGIN HERE]

My Tav was a half-elf rogue assassin named K’vara. Her background was Urchin and she hailed from Baldur’s Gate. Despite this, she was the most oblivious ditz when it came to traps and hidden rooms, and it usually took one of her companions passing their perception checks to tell her, “Hey, there’s something here, you know?”

Initially, it had been my intention to have K’vara romance Shadowheart. They hit it off really fast, and I figured Shadowheart’s obsession with Shar fit well with K’vara’s Urchin background, since I thought she’d probably known some amount of the loss Shar likes so much. But as it turned out, K’vara ended up far more invested with her romance with Halsin, as Shadowheart’s relationship arc never actually… finished. I guess she needed her space after everything with her parents and the House of Grief, and honestly, I respect that; poor Shadowheart didn’t exactly have a picnic even setting aside the parasite, as she had to process betraying her goddess, her goddess betraying her first, and her whole life being a lie spun by Shar and Viconia DeVir. Not only that, but she listened to her parents’ pleas and sacrificed them to save herself, accepting that the cost of her freedom was never truly knowing them or who she used to be, and having to swallow the bitter and bloody pill that she has spent years being lied to and groomed as Shar’s prize showpony–a pawn in Shar’s sick game to spite her sister. 

This is only one example of the anguish and depth of the character arcs in Baldur’s Gate 3, and.. Wow. Truly. Wow. I felt for Shadowheart every step of the way, not least because of a showstopping performance by Jennifer English, who mastered the balance of Shadowheart’s soul-wrenching pain and her attempted moments of levity. Obviously English wasn’t alone in her incredible performance, either; each member of the cast in Baldur’s Gate 3 went the extra mile to ensure these people felt real, and that we really felt for them. It’s a remarkable thing to behold and I enjoyed every minute of it so deeply.

And that’s why the ending hurt so much. 

At the end of a campaign where The Emperor had supremely rubbed me the wrong way, I relished telling him to pound sand and that I was going to free Orpheus from his prison. I’d admired Lae’Zel and Voss in their push for Githyanki freedom from the dread queen Vlaakith, and I figured since we’d come this far, I wasn’t going to be the one who snatched the dream from their clutches. Unfortunately, this left me in kind of a pickle, since it turned out that the Elder Brain’s evolution into a Netherbrain meant that we needed a full illithid to have a hope of stopping it. The candidates? Orpheus: the storied Githyanki Prince of the Comet, the single hope of all Githyanki, and the only one who could hope to fell the evil Queen Vlaakith…

Or me.

Well, I figured the Githyanki might be a touch reluctant to follow an Illithid, and Orpheus was going to have a hard enough time as it was loosening Vlaakith’s grasp on them, so I put on my bravest face, did some of the funkiest and most gruesome breakdancing the Astral Plane has ever seen… and grew myself a set of nice new tentacles.

Lovely.

We came, we saw, we conquered. I had the Netherbrain destroy both itself and the parasites it had wiggled into the eyes of people across the Sword Coast, the people were fighting back against the Illithid as they fell in the streets, the sky cleared, the oceans calmed, and my companions were celebrating. I was of the mind, though, that peace could never truly exist while a Mind Flayer still breathed. The Narrator had compared me to the Emperor, after all, and he was fucking annoying. He’d even told me himself once about how Gortash had been able to twist him to his designs and deliver him back to the Elder Brain–what if some new tyrant came along with the same designs for me? I decided to stab myself in the gut and neatly sidestep such a possibility, but by removing Tav from the ending, you kind of remove the ending, too. Karlach died alone, Lae’Zel flew away on the back of a dragon, Withers had some words about how it wasn’t my time, and… well, that was kind of it. I was disappointed, to say the least; not just that, but I’d outright lied to Karlach, as I’d promised her I’d be there for her when her time came to die. My fear was, though, that even being there would be breaking the promise–I’d be some squidling, not the friend she’d made on this long and crazy road.

Still, “that can’t be it,” I thought. It just didn’t sit right. I was satisfied that I’d done the morally right thing, sparing both my companions and the world the threat of another Mind Flayer, but I had to see if that was… it. If so, I was about to be wildly disappointed, truth be told. The story of Baldur’s Gate 3 had been so deep, engaging, and impactful that I had wondered what ending would possibly tie it all up in a way that felt fulfilling, so I reloaded–just to take a look.

My future was mine to determine, the narrator said, as I elected to put off my execution until I began to notice any untoward urges arising. Everyone remarked on my new look, so it seemed they would still accept me. My heart twisted at the warmth and fear and love that Samatha Beart injected into Karlach’s farewell dialogue, and I saw her as the sweet Tiefling kid she is, scared but at least not alone. Then Wyll said we were going to Avernus, and you know what? I’m a horrific squid monster now. I’m going too, I thought. So, off we went, into the Hells, where Karlach briefed us on the war that waited for us there. She was herself again, impossibly cool and wholly recovered. Maybe it wasn’t the most glamorous future, but at least we gave her one. At least I found somewhere that I could live with my friends and do some good, without striking fear or PTSD into the heart of anyone who laid eyes on me. Seems like an absolute win, so long as you don’t consider how long you’ll spend washing devil blood out of your clothes. It meant leaving Halsin and Shadowheart behind, but I’d always have the memories.

And it was a beautiful thing, I realised, over The Most badass rendition of Down by the River I’d heard all game; it was a beautiful thing that the game had me choose life so I could see it to completion. Because wasn’t that what we’ve been striving for all along? Every single one of us fought to break the chains that bound us to an abuser, a lie, a failing. Every single one of us chose to live our way, to define who we are, even if it meant losing everything. Because we could build it again, and better. We could find our new selves in this vast and wondrous world that we’d saved. And had K’vara not been there for them, just as they had been there for her, none of us would have made it this far; these misfits who had been trodden down, beaten, broken–they had become some of the most important people in the world, and to each other. Every single one of them mattered.

I love this game. I love it so damn much, and the party Withers throws together at the end was just the icing on the cake. To see everyone again, living the futures they were never promised–it was everything. It was worth it. 

But what undid me was Halsin; he has a special place in my heart, all respect to the other companions. Dave Jones was a great choice, bringing a disciplined, warm performance that rounded Halsin out as a character who’s trying to be wise, trying to do right (or at least fairly) by all involved, making him a comforting presence in camp who soon became one of my favourite characters. At the afterparty, Halsin told K’vara all about his new life, how he finally found something worth setting down roots for, and then he presented me with something he’d whittled for me: a wooden duck, because he remembered telling me he liked them. There was something so genuine and human about that, that it got me. Because no matter how much K’vara had changed on the outside, he still saw her as she had been during their travels. He and the others still greeted her as the friend she had been, with no thought given to the monster she had become in appearance. And I imagined that on the day the Mind Flayer did take over, if it ever came, the adventurer to strike it down would loot it and find that duck from Halsin, and maybe they’d wonder why she’d had it–who she had been before. 

Maybe it feels silly, but I didn’t regret my decision to become a Mind Flayer in that moment, even though it had kind of been thrust upon me as not much of a choice at all. I saw that wooden duck and realised that K’vara’s adjustment to her new life resonated with me as a physically disabled person, especially in the wake of Covid’s impact on my body. It’s not easy to recognise it these days, with its aches and pains and other such oddities of struggle and age. Swollen ankles, my disfigured spine, structural weakness and shortness of breath, aches and chronic nerve pain, stretchmarks and creases and scars. As I age and change, I also hope that people will see me for who I am, and maybe wonder who I was. But much like K’vara, I keep comfort in the people who know me–my family, my current friends and those I’m yet to make. No matter how I change, no matter how unfamiliar I become to myself, they’ll always remind me. 

[SPOILERS END HERE]

Is Baldur’s Gate 3 Worth It?

“Yes” doesn’t even begin to cover it, but it’s the answer I’ve got. If you love rich story-filled worlds, heartbreak, wit, grit, and unforgettable characters (and honestly, who doesn’t?) then you won’t want to miss out on this. Overworld exploration is decidedly moreish with plenty of treasures and quests to discover, character interactions are charming with fleshed-out dialogue trees that make every playthrough feel unique, and turn-based combat feels smooth and intuitive. Aside from Dragon Age: Origins, I was completely unfamiliar with this tactical style of turn-based combat, but quickly picked it up once I got some practice with it. You’ll be hours into a session before you know it, I’m certain. 

See you again next time, down down down by the river, for more Tails by the Foxfire!

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