Despite Its Unpredictability, Baldur’s Gate 3 Is Still Bound to Its Code

Baldur’s Gate 3‘s first act is a rip-roaring adventure, though it starts with grim tidings. You, whoever you are, have been infected with a Mind Flayer tadpole, ensuring that you will become one of the tentacle-faced monsters before long. You’ve landed in some forgotten corner of Faerûn with other infected and band together to try and find a cure.

While this begins dire, good news and swashbuckling possibilities come into view. A mystical figure is protecting you from the parasite infection; you can even take in more parasites to upgrade dramatic powers. Even the act’s central moral quandary is less thorny than it first appears (though I’m about to reduce it for brevity’s sake). Tiefling refugees seek a haven in a druid’s grove, hiding from the roving soldiers of a deadly cult. The druids fear that this will paint a target on their backs and seek to close their hidden world from outsiders. Simply clear a dungeon of evildoers and you can protect both parties. The tieflings will even come celebrate with you that night, which sets up many of the game’s first romantic encounters.

Over the course of Act 1, the possibilities of removing your parasite grow slimmer. However, the tone is disheartening and comic, rather than tragic or horrific. The game ventures into gorey physical comedy if you let the bard Volo try to surgically remove your tadpole. Allowing a witch-like Hag to attempt similarly results in fairy-tale hijinks. Though all these efforts fail, your best bet—using the mystical technologies of the alien Githyanki at their nearby Creché—remains on the horizon.

All this is to say, Baldur’s Gate 3 sets you up for a popcorn good time. There’s desperation and melodrama, but most of it leads to adventurous, rather than distressing, ends. Even mechanically, Baldur’s Gate 3 starts thrilling rather than terrifying. The game’s first few level ups swing in hard and fast, and your power widens significantly with each one. However, just as level ups start to slow, Act 2 arrives.

The most immediate difference in Act 2 is aesthetic. The majority of Act 2 takes place in a cursed land, where a magical darkness swallows flora and fauna, and crushes sentient life into vicious shadow creatures. Outside of underground sections and campfire scenes, the entirety of Act 1 is in gleaming daylight. The vast majority of Act 2 is in this choking darkness. An optional section, the aforementioned Créche huddled within Rosymorn Monastery, is not so bleak. Still outside the monastery there is no brightness of the noonday sun, but instead the orange hue of sunset. A thematic choice, as much as any other.

The darkness is not only literal. The Tieflings you helped in Act 1 ran afoul of a much bigger army than the one you defeated. A few found sanctuary in the one safe area of the cursed land, but others were not so lucky. One crossroads is strewn with their corpses and more may die, depending on your choices. The setting also layers itself with death. Before the shadow came, people lived and died here. Their bones are everywhere. Every shadow creature you kill leaves behind a solid black heart, which whispers one truth of their life before the curse. The rage and despair of grief even motivate the act’s principal villain. Act 1 sees you protect a fledgeless community. Act 2 forces you to watch how little that protection came to and lets you wander through the graveyard of another, seeing how all their lives resulted in this endless night.

As you might expect, you will not find a cure for your parasite in the Créche. However, in contrast to the tomfoolery of the first act, Baldur’s Gate 3 renders this failure in bracing emotional scale. The Githyanki’s promise to remove the parasite is a lie, told so that their god-like queen can shore up her power. Your companion, Lae’zel, is a loyal Githyanki, whose queen would kill her without a second thought. If you fight your way out of the Créche, she will then cry to the sky in mourning for the life she was promised. While Act 1 has plenty of engaging character moments and strong plot hooks, this is a moment of heartbreaking capital D drama, carefully built up to for hours before you’ll see it and no less potent because of its genre trappings. Still, after all that, you’ll have to return to the dark to see the story through.

Much has been made of how Baldur’s Gate 3 adapts its tabletop origins, but what’s most interesting about it comes from its videogameness. One of the things that is so thrilling and strange about tabletop to me is that it is negotiable. We can discuss everything, the course is far from set. A videogame, by nature, is bound to its code. There’s unpredictability, sure. But even in a game as big as Baldur’s Gate, there is a single course that all players must chart. There may be hidden secrets, oft-discarded paths, but the general arc of the game is recognizable and familiar to every player. It’s unwise to characterize Baldur’s Gate 3 as a tabletop sim for exactly that reason. It has limits that friends around the table do not have, but that also means it cannot be negotiated with.

That limitation, both narratively and practically, is what’s so magical about Act 2. To be clear, it’s not subversive of player power. To its bones Dungeons & Dragons is a power fantasy and Baldur’s Gate 3 is no exception. Combat in the second act is much like combat in the first. It makes you feel good in the way RPGs like this can. It’s also not unconventional structurally. Narratives from a variety of cultures and contexts have “dark” middle chapters. Baldur’s Gate 3 succeeds not because of its novelty, but because it is well executed. Few games as expansive as Baldur’s Gate 3 are as sharply constructed. It builds a narrative whole with hard edges and soft valleys that each player must feel their way through.

By the end of Baldur’s Gate 3, that arc will widen. Act 3 takes place in the titular city, though I still haven’t arrived there. It’s broad and expansive to the point that it was the source of many technical issues, which are still being ironed out as of writing. I’m hopeful, though, that it will not disregard the simple truths that Act 2 revealed. In a videogame, the feeling of control is artificial. Designers can play with it and build out heartbreak in the uncomfortable span between action and intention.

Grace Benfell is a queer woman, critic, and aspiring fan fiction author. She writes on her blog Grace in the Machine and can be found @grace_machine on Twitter.