Recent reviews by Smorpheus

My 6 year old son literally peed his pants laughing so hard while we played this game.

It's ironic because McPixel pees on everything.

Two pee pees up.

I've played all of the classic "golden age" late 90s/early 2000s RPGs: BG1, BG2, Fallout 1 & 2, Arcanum, Planescape: Torment, Icewind Dale... And I think Baldur's Gate 3 is better than any of them. BG3 has all of things that made those games great, with a modern interface, a fantastic adaptation of a pen and paper ruleset, and a compelling and original adventure.

The game feels very Baldur's Gate and is definitely done by fans. This idea that you've assembled a motley crew to take on a world-breaking catastrophe tied directly to your existence is pretty true to the franchise. I think most of us who were fans of the original feared it would just be Divine Divinity III with little to do with the originals, but it has a ton of great connections.

What makes this possibly the greatest CRPG?:
+Almost every NPC in Acts 1 and 2 is voiced and has a unique look. It's not until you get to Act 3 that you start to see repeats and unnamed PCs. Even bad guys are named! This is extraordinary and I don't think has ever been done before. It really makes the world in Act 1 in particular feel alive and huge.
+Ability checks are fun and really well-implemented into the game. It definitely is satisfying to see the actual roll on screen so you know what's going on. I've always wondered why PC games felt they need to hide their "behind the screen" rolls. Integrating actual skill checks into the gameplay hasn't really been done effectively since Neverwinter Nights 2.
+Karmic rolls work. I know the game is cheating the rolls a bit higher, but it just feels better when playing the game. I never really felt infuriatingly cheated like I did when playing a game with honest dice rolling like the new X-Coms or Temple of Elemental Evil.
+The voice acting overall is exceptional. The DM's voice is particularly well-performed.
+The story is great, reminiscent of a modern 5E campaign.
+Initiative rules are improved from 5E.
+Very few Dragonborn in the world, one of them is even a redcap.
+Very satisfying fan service for players from BG1 and BG2.

All those pluses said, there are definitely some things that could have been better-implemented.
-The magic items are weak. I think this is due to the legacy Divine system this was built off of. But the magic items feel "Samey" have no lore associated with them and generally aren't very interesting. There's about a half dozen epic items that can be found that are pretty cool, but it's not enough for a world this large. Magic items are fantastic and weird in 5th Edition, and a huge motivation for playing, not so here.
-The goblins are disappointing. They're straight out of the player's handbook and aren't really as fun and wild as they could be.
-The game has *a lot* of script breaks. For a RPG of this size, there's surprisingly not a lot of showstoppers (a bug that breaks the game.) I haven't seen many reports of them in the forums, and I personally ran into none which is very rare for a game this big this close to release. However, the game breaks a lot when you do weird things, approach things "out of order" or play a chaotic character making wild dialogue choices. Generally these types of breaks mean you don't complete a minor quest, NPCs say inappropriate things (mention a dead character or assume something has happened that hasn't) or you don't get an item and the quest gets stuck on the map. Act 3 in particular has a lot of these breaks.
-The 5E rules overall are great, but there's some weird stuff like the removal of two important actions: Delay and Dodge. Both tactically are important to the tactics of D&D combat, and it's odd you can do neither. Additionally every NPC can see through magical invisibility for some reason (seems like an easy thing to just fix.) And finally, there's some legacy weird Divine Divinity stuff about Water/Fire/Lightning that is barely used at all in the game and doesn't exist in 5E.

Some quality of life concerns that could be addressed via patching:
-You should be able to move your party on the map screen.
-It can be VERY hard to click on small things.
-PCs tend to walk on discovered traps, fall off of cliffs and get hurt, which is very annoying.
-Traps/Perception checks should be done "behind the screen" so you don't know it's getting checked. It makes it too easy.

Overall, I loved the story, the characters, the good guys, and the bad guys. I'm really looking forward to replaying this with a good character after having conquered it with my neutral evil Cleric/Wizard Svirfneblin Renderak.

The building is good. The exploration and adventure is mind numbing. When you have dialogue that's joking about how lame fetch quests are, then proceed to force the player to execute several fetch quests, that's a bad sign! Guys, it's time to go back to the drawing board on your game design. A bit more Captain Toad and a bit less pointless wandering would have been much better.

The building is fun, creative and very well designed. It's addictive, I can't wait to get to the next build challenge. They need to work on the PC keyboard controls, but that will come.

Hopefully they release a version of the game that's just building - and you can skip all the mindless walking around.

Sometimes the puzzle setups are a bit confusing and illogical and are only solvable by trial and error, but overall a great, quick puzzler.

Pretty fantastic port, with lots of Quality of Life improvements to make the game more playable than it's ever been. This system is so much better for this type of RPG than the heavily 3.5ish systems like Pillars of Eternity and Pathfinder where there's just too much going on at level one. Controlling a party of six is completely unreasonable. In BG:EE however, mostly you can just attack in combat, and as you level you get more abilities, easing you into the combat system in a perfect way.

There's so much content in here, and it's a huge project to try to do everything. Instead, I recommend you just play and enjoy. There's no "wrong" approach to the game unless you are playing solo on Insane difficulty.

I regret writing this review, as I was really hoping the Novelist, which got a ton of main stream attention, was a worthy entry in the line of "slice of life" poetic games like Dear Esther and Gone Home.

Unfortunately, where both Dear Esther and Gone Home have something interesting to say about both games and life, The Novelist flounders and gets lost in a sea of "first world problems" that makes it hard to empathize with any of the characters.

From a gameplay perspective, the game is boring, symetical, and repetitive. After finishing the first chapter, you'll be amazed by the potential. By chapter three, you'll realize you're caught in a gameplay loop of boredom: Find three clues for each of the three characters until you complete each of the three chapters of each of the three episodes. Yes, that is boring game design.

Real Life doesn't work in threes. So, the family feels compartmentalized, fake and droning. Unfortunately, where the game could have excelled is with allowing your choices to have meaningful effects on the gameplay paths.

Unlike The Walking Dead, this game is self-contained, so it would have been much more realistic to have a few branches based on player decisions.

Unforutnately all of the "branches" are just props placed around the house and a simple follow up letter or picture on the next day after your decision. Ultimately, there's a recap at the end of the game which crams your decisions into three (that number again) binary "good" or "bad" results.

Ultimately, this game had a lot of potential. The base format would be a great idea for a scenario where something interesting happens. White Patriarch trying to decide whether he should drink whiskey or build his son's car is not interesting. At least not in the way it's presented here.

Thumbs down, unfortunately.