Recent reviews by Doctus

An excellent game.

Has an interesting story and setting with a likable cast.

Character customization is extensive and allows you to produce parties that play very differently, despite being based on simple, general mechanics without long pages of special rules for every class. This is achieved mostly through elegant design of active abilities and equipment.

I didn't feel there was a single area that was a slog, which was surprising given that the game is far longer than I initially expected.

It also has quite a few good music tracks.

Highly recommended.

It's a very small game, and it's difficult to explain exactly what I liked about it, but somehow the cadence and... je ne sais quoi of the ending had a powerful emotional resonance.

Bright, fun style. Design is pretty consistent and cohesive, with some creative ideas scattered in. Balance is sometimes janky, however. I enjoyed the writing.

Takes the basic mechanical systems of Rift Wizard and completely alters the flow, rhythm, and strategy of play. In particular, longer-term resource management is de-emphasized in favor of permanent build decisions. It's distinctly different from its predecessor — enough so that it certainly doesn't feel like more of the same — but there's probably a very large overlap in the sets of people who would enjoy each.

Although there are some things I'd describe as objective improvements (e.g. clarity of some UI elements), there are also things I'd say the first game did better (e.g. simplicity and consistency of some rule interactions), so I'd hesitate to describe either as clearly better or worse.

As such, I'd recommend it overall unless you already played and disliked Rift Wizard.

Surprisingly fun and re-playable despite the small scope. Great style, both visually and musically.

Also, I find I'm strangely fond of the ability to rearrange the game's sub-windows so freely. "Why did conventional UI design stop trusting the user like this?" I wonder, while wistfully dragging around my character sheet.

I've greatly liked it; probably my favorite thing I've played on the steam deck so far.

Probably my favorite Slay the Spire-type game. It has well-communicated mechanics, supports a broad range of viable builds, and strikes a good balance where improving your strategy tends to be satisfactorily challenging: neither trivial nor obtusely counterintuitive.

It's not bad, really, but on the whole I can't recommend it. It's essentially a Divinity game, so if you liked or disliked one of those, that will be much more predictive of whether you like BG3 than your feelings on earlier Baldur's Gates would be.

The production values are mostly good, but a number of points dragged it down for me:

• The game's content is far too densely-packed, and it tries far too hard to push it at you. You can rarely proceed a single screen-width without running into numerous quests, chests, NPCs, and points of interest. This might sound like a positive thing, but it quickly becomes overwhelming; if you try to do any particular thing that catches your interest, you'll be besieged by countless hooks for other stuff. There's no sense of pacing with suitable breathers between events, and the points where you can finally feel finished with a particular area and ready to move on to the next are on the scale of 10-20 hours apart. The design seems not to trust the player to engage in self-directed exploration of the world; this might be the right choice on average, but it doesn't suit me.
  
• There's no true pause available: you can go into a "turn-based mode", but that only affects a small area around your party, and doesn't work for some things. Besides being inconvenient, this further contributes to a feeling of constant pressure and overly-intense pacing.
  
• The 5th Edition D&D rules are designed for tabletop play. They're not fully suited to a computer game like this. For example, tabletop D&D has the fundamental problem of needing to keep people interested during combat when they only get to make occasional decisions between a lot of laborious calculations; BG3 doesn't necessarily have to worry about that, but the combat systems are still heavily adapted to it. (This was something of a problem for earlier Baldur's Gates as well. 2e was jankier and less deliberately designed, and — largely by luck — a number of things kind of cancelled one another out and made it mostly work.)
  
• The party members are too-clearly written according to some kind of framework or rubric. They're superficially varied, but little effort was put into disguising their similarity at even one level of analytical abstraction. Moreover, none of them have rough design edges left over, but neither do any of them have passion or a soul behind them. I've certainly read many worse characters; at the same time, I'd rather read successes and failures alike than the output of a method that produces neither.
  
• The cinematography is the same kind of garbage you see in typical modern films and television. (Based on the popularity of the style, I don't think most players will dislike it, though. I'm just being an annoyingly artsy type.)

"House Feud" mechanics are so detrimental to the game that I felt I had no choice but to disable the DLC, regardless of whatever other content it might include. At present, feuds can easily result in every member of your dynasty being constantly targeted by multiple murder schemes. I strongly recommend avoiding this one.

Very good.