Baldur’s Gate 3 Review: The Most Freedom I’ve Ever Had In A Game And It’s Terrifying

I have played a lot of RPGs. A lot. And I thought I understood what player freedom in a role-playing game actually meant — different dialogue options, branching quest lines, maybe a moral choice system that nudges the ending in one direction or another. Baldur’s Gate 3 looked at all of that and decided it wasn’t even close to enough. This game gives you a level of freedom so complete, so uncompromising, and so genuinely consequential that it took me several hours just to fully understand what I was actually holding in my hands. By the time I did understand it, I had already made a series of decisions that sent my playthrough somewhere I never planned and couldn’t course correct from — and I didn’t want to. That’s Baldur’s Gate 3. That’s what Larian Studios built. And it is one of the most remarkable things I have ever played on PC.

I went in as a Rogue. Stealth, sneak attacks, picking locks, staying out of sight and hitting hard when I chose to be seen — that felt right for me going in,n and it turned out to be a perfect lens through which to experience this game. A Rogue in Baldur’s Gate 3 is someone who observes everything, commits to nothing prematurely, and then acts with precision when the moment is right. That is also, it turns out, the exact mindset this game rewards. My Rogue and I understood each other completely by the end of Act 1 and never looked back.

Around 80 hours later I finished it. I immediately started thinking about what I’d do differently in a second playthrough. That should tell you most of what you need to know.

A Dark Setup That Immediately Pulls You In

Baldur’s Gate 3 starts in the belly of a Nautiloid — a Lovecraftian spaceship piloted by squid-like creatures called illithids. You create your character, pick your class, and immediately get a parasite implanted in your brain that will slowly transform you into a tentacled mind flayer if you don’t find a cure. That is the central premise,se and it is a brilliant one — dark, urgent, and immediately personal. It also does something really smart by giving every character in your party the same problem. Nobody is adventuring together out of friendship. Everyone is together out of desperation. That tension underneath every relationship in the party makes every interaction more interesting from the very first conversation.

The overall plot — find a cure, save the world — is not especially complex on its own. What makes it extraordinary is everything built around it. The characters, the decisions, the way the world reacts to every single thing you do. Larian Studios understood that the story wasn’t going to be the thing that kept people playing for 80 hours. The freedom was. And they built every system in the game around making that freedom feel real and meaningful.

The Companions Are The Best Part Of The Entire Game

Baldur’s Gate 3 has ten potential companions,ons and every single one of them is written with more depth and care than most games manage with their main protagonist. Karlach is a tiefling barbarian with a mechanical heart and an energy so warm and genuine that I felt genuinely protective of her from the moment she joined my party. Lae’zel is a battle-hardened warrior who starts almost completely insufferable and becomes one of the most compelling characters in the game as her worldview slowly gets dismantled by everything she experiences. Shadowheart is guarded and mysterious in a way that makes you want to understand her even when she’s actively pushing you away.

And then there’s Astarion. My favourite character in the game, without question, is and possibly one of my favourite companions in any RPG I’ve played on PC. He is a pompous, flamboyant, sharp-tongued vampire rogue who uses charm as armour and cruelty as deflection — and underneath all of that is a character whose history is genuinely devastating once you uncover it. Playing as a Rogue alongside Astarion felt completely natural. We had the same energy. We operated the same way. And the moment his story fully clicked into place for me — the moment I understood everything that had happened to him — I sat back from my monitor for a solid minute. The writing around his character is exceptional. I cannot overstate how good it is.

What makes all of these characters work beyond just strong writing is how they respond to your decisions. Every choice you make affects your relationships. Push Astarion toward his darker tendencies, and he becomes something genuinely sinister. Steer him away, and you get something completely different. Clash with a companion too much, and they leave. Permanently. No reload prompt, no second chance — they are just gone, along with their entire questline and character arc. That consequence is real,l and it changes how you approach every interaction in a way that most RPGs never manage.

The Combat Is Endlessly Creative And Never Gets Old

Baldur’s Gate 3’s combat is built on Dungeons and Dragons 5th edition rules turn-baseded, action economy-driven, dice roll-dependent. If that sounds intimidating, it is slightly, for the first few hours. Then it clicks and becomes one of the most satisfying tactical systems I’ve used in a game on PC. Every character gets an action and a bonus action per turn. Attacks and spells use actions. Secondary things like jumping or using items use bonus actions. Hidden dice rolls determine whether attacks land. It sounds rigid on paper, and in practice,e it is completely the opposite of rigid.

The flexibility of the combat is where Baldur’s Gate 3 genuinely surprised me. The game rarely tells you that you can’t do something. I turned a genuinely threatening boss into a goat using a polymorph spell and had Karlach kick him off a ledge. I used my Rogue’s sneak attack positioning to set up kills that created chain reactions with environmental traps I hadn’t even placed deliberately. I had one fight where I used a Wall of Fire spell from a scroll I’d been saving and then had my party members throw timed explosive traps into the blaze to knock enemies into it. Was it efficient? Absolutely not. Was it one of the most satisfying moments I had in 80 hours of this game? Yes. That creativity is available in almost every fight, and the game rewards you for finding it every single time.

As a Rogue,e the combat felt particularly rewarding. Sneak attack damage when positioned correctly hits harder than anything else available that early in the game, and learning how to set up those positions consistently — using shadows, using party member positioning, using the environment — gave me a constant sense of mastery that built over the entire playthrough. By Act 3, I was doing things with my Rogue build that I couldn’t have imagined in Act 1, a nd the escalation of that power curve feels completely earned.

The Freedom Is, and And So Are The Consequences

The thing that separates Baldur’s Gate 3 from every other RPG I’ve played is that the freedom isn’t just cosmetic. It isn’t choosing between a red ending and a blue ending at the finish line. Every decision you make has consequences that ripple forward in ways you often can’t predict and sometimes can’t recover from. Miss a key moment in a companion’s quest, timeline,tline and their arc goes unresolved. Make too many choices that clash with a party member’s values,s and they walk out permanently. Push the story in a direction that removes key characters fromthe equation, andd Act 3 becomes a fundamentally different — and genuinely emptier — experience than it would have been otherwise.

I made several decisions in my playthrough that I didn’t fully understand the consequences of until much later. One questline I thought I’d resolved cleanly in Act 1 came back in Act 3 in a way that completely reframed something I thought I understood, and the emotional weight of that moment only existed because of choices I’d made 50 hours earlier. That kind of long-form consequence is extraordinarily difficult to design, and Larian pulls it off consistently across an enormous amount of content. It is genuinely impressive.

It Looks and Sounds Like Nothing Else At This Scale

For a game with this many variables — this many branching paths, this many possible outcomes, this many different combinations of choices — Baldur’s Gate 3 is presented with a level of craft that still impresses me thinking back on it. Every conversation is fully voiced and cinematically framed. Characters are expressive in a way that makes even minor NPCs feel real. The camera cuts between dialogue participants with the kind of intentionality you’d expect from a much more linear game. Larian built all of that for a game where almost every conversation can go in dozens of different directions depending on what you’ve done before it. The scale of that achievement is difficult to fully articulate.

The game has a sense of humour too,o and it’s genuinely funny in a way that surprised me. The comedy mostly comes from failed dice rolls, bad decisions, and unexpected combat interactions rather than written jokes — which means the funny moments feel specific to your playthrough rather than something everyone experiences the same way. My Rogue had a completely sincere heart-to-heart conversation with Lae’zel at sunrise that was beautifully written and landed perfectly. It would have been a standout scene in any game. I had accidentally spent the previous hour wearing the most ridiculous hat I found in a vendor’s inventory because I forgot to check my appearance before the cutscene triggered. The combination was perfect in a way no writer planned for.

It Can Be Overwhelming — Especially Early

Baldur’s Gate 3 is not always easy to engage with,th and I want to be honest about that. The early hours ask a lot of you. The class system, the spell slots, the action economy, the camp management, the companion quests, the exploration — all of it lands at once, once, and there is no gentle onboarding that takes you through it step by step. I spent my first few hours making decisions I didn’t fully understand and building habits that I had to unlearn later. That learning curve is real, and for some players, it will be a barrier that’s hard to push through.

My honest advice is to push through it anyway. The game opens up in a way that is difficult to describe to someone who hasn’t experienced it. Act 1 is the game teaching you its language. Act 2 is the game showing you what that language can do. Act 3 is the game speaking it fluently and trusting you to keep up. By the time I reached the final act,t I understood why people put hundreds of hours into this and still feel like they haven’t seen everything. Because they genuinely haven’t.

Final Verdict

Baldur’s Gate 3 took me around 80 hours on PC for my first full playthrough as a Rogue, and I could have easily spent another 80 making completely different choices and having a fundamentally different experience. That is not an exaggeration — it is a description of what this game actually is. The freedom is real, the consequences are real, the characters are some of the best written in any RPG I have played, and the combat rewards creativity in a way that never stops feeling satisfying, no matter how deep into the game you get.

Astarion’s story alone is worth the price of entry. Karlach’s ending almost broke me. My 80-hour 80 hour journey through Faerûn produced moments I will remember for a long time — some planned, most completely accidental, all of them mine in a way that no other game has managed to replicate. A character in the game says near the end, “too much freedom can be frightening.” They are right. Baldur’s Gate 3 is frightening in exactly that way. It is also one of the greatest RPGs ever made, a nd I don’t think that’s up for debate anymore.

Final Score: 9.5/10 — One of the greatest RPGs ever made. A landmark achievement in player freedom, character writing, and systemic design. Essential.

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Mr. Sano

Hello! I am Mr. Sano Ethan, a content creator, variety gamer, and the driving force behind Kick Of Draft. With over 6 years of hands-on experience across PC, console, and indie gaming,