Recent reviews by philipborg

The lack of polish, especially with the camera, made me unable to enjoy this game. Mechanics were added compared to the first which only distracts from what makes the game enjoyable. Honestly, just go for the previous entry instead which imho offers a better experience.

I am a Johnny player[magic.wizards.com] who loves TTRPGs and tactics games. I have about 500h of pen & paper D&D 5E experience as well as several other TTRPGs and digital/physical tactics games which influences my view.


The world is simply amazing. It feels alive and reacts to you. This is an amazing digital recreation of the forgotten realms. The world isn't just simply vast, it's deep as well. Everywhere you go there are things to explore. Often hidden requiring ingenuity to discover. The narrative instantly hooked me and made me want to explore it further.



There just isn't depth here. Your interesting build decisions pretty much end at choosing subclass. This is faithful to D&D 5E, but it's also the one of the worst aspects of D&D 5E for Johnny players. There are ways to game the system to min/max your character build, but there isn't opportunity to express your ideas and creativity. Instead the feeling of expression is just getting to select one of the predefined builds.

Leveling up truly highlights the lack of player expression. Very often you don't get any decisions at all, they are made for you based on your previous choice of subclass. This makes the game more accessible, which was one of the major design goals of D&D 5E, but it also makes the character build decisions very dull.


Leveling for me should serve the purpose of keeping the game fresh by changing how it's played. A good approach to this is by giving the players new tools to play with and solve situations. Leveling in BG3 is very often just numerical increases to what you were already doing and good at. Combined with the monotonous combat, which I will come to later, little changes as you level as to how the game is played. You will often just be doing the same thing as before but with higher numbers.



The combat environments are often amazing. Larian studios has done a magnificent job making them as interesting as possible to overcome the monotonous combat design of D&D 5E. Unfortunately, it's in my opinion not enough. Because once combat actually starts the core combat mechanics steals the scene and they aren't delivering.


Let's start with the worst offenders, martial classes. They almost solely just spam basic attacks. There isn't a whole lot of risk/reward. The attack of opportunity mechanics even punish you for trying to do something other than continuing striking the closest target, which means the player is actively discouraged from making tactical decisions.

Other tactics games like the XCOM series can get away with a limited set of actions as there is such a high degree of tactical importance to positioning. In BG3 that barely matters. Martial melee classes almost always just wants bum-rush the closest target. Ranged just get a minuscule bonus from height advantage and can stand behind cover between turns. Combat encounters, and even turns, often play out the same. There is a lack of tactical decisions.

Spellcasters have it much better, they actually make some meaningful choices by selecting when to use spell slots and which spell to use it for. But outside of choosing what to spend their spellslots on they face the same issues with lack of tactical decisions. Cantrip spamming, which is what most of the lower levels are spent on, plays like a ranged martial which isn't a compliment. Often the best spell to use is pretty clear as well, though this may be a consequence of my extensive D&D 5E experience where I almost solely played spellcasters.

The combat relies on die rolls and I am fine with chance playing a part. But chance in a tactics game is best served as uncertainty in a risk/reward decision. That also means that the player should have agency in the odds, which isn't the feeling for me in BG3. I don't feel anything whether something succeeded or failed if I had no agency in influencing that outcome or making a meaningful decision to make that roll at all. There just isn't enough tactical decisions to make to tip the odds in your favor.


Having just the character which initiated the conversation really mattering in most cases creates conflict between narrative and optimal play. Narratively you want either whichever character is most suited to hold the conversation to do so, your own character or all of those present. Mechanically you are strongly discouraged from doing so and instead encouraged to use whomever has best charisma or other stat if you know beforehand which matters. Playing mechanically optimal feels bad because it hurts the narrative. Playing narratively optimal feels bad because you know there is a mechanically optimal different choice.


You have to spend a lot of time housekeeping your inventory and it really breaks up the gameplay. This could be heavily improved my something as simple as the ability to automatically mark certain items as trash. It's just tedious to mark the twentieth identical trash sword I find to be sold. I would prefer even bigger changes but simple quality of life improvements would go a long way.


The game crashes, a lot. I know they are working on improving this but it's pretty bad at the moment of writing.


BG3 is a faithful D&D 5E adoption. D&D 5E, the TTRPG, has strong points like ease of rules, accessibility and fulfilling a power fantasy. The ease of rules and accessiblity is great when playing it as a TTRPG, especially for beginners. That's way less relevant in a digital game which handles most of that burden for you. D&D 5E relies on non-standard actions to make things interesting. But by the nature of the media that's a lot harder digitally as you don't have a DM to pitch your creative actions to. It would massively benefit from formalized non-essential actions, like how PF2E TTRPG does it.

In my personal preferences as an experienced TTRPG player D&D 5E is mechanically dull. It doesn't allow me as a Johnny player to express myself and as a tactics player it's just shallow. This issue becomes magnified in BG3 as a digital adoption. I deeply wish BG3 wasn't an adoption of D&D, though due to the nature of the IP I can understand why it is. The core design goals of D&D 5E just aren't suitable for a video game adoption. It feels like what Larian has brought to the game like narrative, characters, environment, dialogue and so on is amazing. It's just completely dragged down by being a D&D 5E adoption. There are other TTRPGs much more suitable for a faithful digital adoption or it could just be less faithful of D&D 5E.


Baldur's Gate 3 is an amazing game. Probably one of the best ever in terms of production value and narrative. I entirely understand why so many love it thoroughly, there is a lot to love. I don't expect most to share my opinion, it just isn't for me and players like me. Experienced tactics and TTRPG Johnny players.

Currently whenever the mechanical elements shows themselves I get bored, and they are a massive part of the game. I will play more and may update this review in the future, it just takes time when I don't want to start it again after it crashes. Maybe it gets better, but it's still a bad thing if a big time investment is required for it to be good.

Tight and fun rogue-like. Good tactical options though sometimes there is a tendency towards a dominant strategy; which can be fun admittedly when you end up building a rare insane build which kills everyone in one to two turns. The enemy design is interesting and varied. The disciples (player characters) are also varied and have lots of interesting builds and combinations between them.

Overall, I recommend the game.

Best game evar

[+] Solid interesting thriller.
[+] Beautiful pixel art.
[+] Good "fast" logic puzzles.
[+] No moon logic.
[+] Good length for the content.

[-] Too obvious progression steps.
[-] Little thinking required for the detective parts.

If you are looking for a good story with some fast logic puzzles then I recommend this. If you are looking for a heavy puzzle point & click game then this isn't it. Overall a good game for what it's going for.

An incredibly well designed puzzle/mystery/detective game. It's one of the rare puzzle games where you never even want to peek at the solution using neither the hint system or online. You just want to peek around yourself till you have it all mapped out. Astonishing design work frankly and very clever use of resources.

Strong recommendation for any puzzle game lover or someone wishes to live out their detective fantasy. I strongly recommend avoiding the hint/clue system and peeking online unless you are really stuck for hours. It's such a rewarding feeling to finally figure out the missing piece. There is no moon logic at all, everything is deductible using logical reasoning.

Abstract: Well balanced puzzels, appealing story, refreshing art style and good voice acting.

Momentarily slow dialogue and it was easy to trigger the same dialogue twice unintentionally, but overall the dialogue was good. The comedic elements where really a hit or miss, as the jokes were either perfectly dark or so light they felt almost out of place in the story. That is not to say that all the lighter moments where misplaced with some being used skillfully to set the tone, especially in chapter 6.

The story is good and bittersweet with some nice characters. Although it has an understandably controversial finally (which I personally felt was a mixed bag), overall I found the sixth and final chapter by far the most intriguing and that is not holding anything against the previous chapters either. The overarching story is great, although there are some things scattered around that are less than gracefully executed. Some characters with quiet a bit of story-occupation where kind of one-dimensional while others were much more nicely fleshed and interesting.

What you should be aware of is that this is not a game that allows you to project yourself into Anna. It felt more like you were actually role-playing the character of Anna instead, a young and naive but smart young child trying to navigate her way in a world which does not always have her best interest in mind. Personally I found it interesting that my choices were limited to the choices which Anna could have made, but I also know that this can be a big turn off for a lot of people. I think however if you are aware of this being the case you can place yourself in an more open mindset and enjoy the experience way more.

The exploration puzzles where great and well balanced between being challenging, logical (for a point-and-click) and exciting. The puzzles are in the old-school style of adventure puzzles and not as deeply logical as some more modern adventure puzzle games (e.g. Sherlock Holmes), but that is neither good nor bad and just something to be aware of. I personally enjoy both style, but the old-school style is in my guesstimate less palatable for the majority of puzzle games consumers. Puzzle wise this is however one of the best Daedelic games I have played so far.

The art was atmospheric, felt fresh and often being highly enjoyable. The aesthetics were highly consistent which retained the immersion. The audio quality was crisp, although almost all the sound were dialogue and BG music. It could have definitely improved with some well placed sound effects, but that is just something minor that one quickly forgets about while enjoying the game.

Summary: If you enjoy old-school point-and-click adventure games then I strongly recommend Anna's Quest.

Metal, platforming and well designed levels, what more could you ask for?
If you enjoy 3D FPS platforming then I recommend you pick up this game. It is not perfect, but for the price (especially during sales or bundled) it is a solid choice. I will definitely come back to this game from time to time, climbing the leaderboard.

I did not enjoy the puzzles all that much. The "figuring it out" part was unstimulating and the game could not really decide if it wanted skill based puzzle execution. The puzzles were built as if for a puzzle execution game but the execution just felt like time consuming labour.
The story feels heavily inspired by The Talos Principle but nowhere near as good and fleshed out.

The game is OK but in my opinion not actually good and I can therefor not recommend it. It is not shovelware and it is noticeable that they cared about the game, unfortunately it did not fully deliver on the game design.

4/10 (On a scale where 5 is actually average.)

(Written at 04:00, so give me some leeway for my english.)

A really neat little party game. As with all party games there is a high chance of successfully starting verbal warfare, simply wonderful.