Baldur’s Gate 3 Is GameLuster’s 2023 Game of the Year

One unassuming day in August, conversation among my GameLuster coworkers shifted from the familiar, comforting background hum of Zelda and Final Fantasy and various indies to near-constant chatter about a not-so-little new release called Baldur’s Gate 3. I’d never seen anything like it. Like an illithid tadpole directly to the brain, this game had gotten them, one and all, and it wasn’t letting go anytime soon.

I didn’t actually start playing the game for well over a month, and I’m not exactly proud to admit what finally got me to take the plunge. (Hint: it’s pale, snarky, and has two sharp teeth and a Best Performance award.) But take the plunge I did, and I’ve never been happier. Now, as I sit here attempting to condense everything I love about Baldur’s Gate 3 into roughly one thousand words, I’ve banked about 220 hours in the game between one and a half playthroughs. And that’s not counting all the time I’ve spent talking about Baldur’s Gate 3, looking at Baldur’s Gate 3 fanart, watching streamers (including some of the game’s voice actors!) play Baldur’s Gate 3…yeah, suffice to say this game has pretty much taken over my life. And I’m not the only one, which is why we, the staff of GameLuster, have voted Larian Studios’ utter masterpiece of a game as our 2023 Game of the Year.

Baldur’s Gate 3 is, simultaneously, both extremely easy and extremely difficult to describe. At its core, it is a story about a group of adventurers traveling through Dungeons and Dragons’ Forgotten Realms setting to search for a cure for the illithid parasites in their heads and investigate the mysterious “Cult of the Absolute.” But it’s also a story about a group of traumatized people facing up to their scars and (hopefully) coming out better and stronger on the other side. Beyond that, it’s game that takes everything you love about Dungeons and Dragons and pitch-perfectly converts it into a video game medium. It’s also a branching, twisting narrative with near-endless replayability due to the sheer amount of choices you can make. 

It’s the revival of a beloved series many thoughts would never return. It’s beloved characters coming back and it’s fresh new faces that quickly cement themselves as among gaming’s most memorable. It’s a romance begun with a shy campfire confession or an unbearably passionate night in the woods, followed up banter between characters who actually feel like a DND party you might play with at a real-life table. It’s a world where you can create a character of any size and shape and sexuality and gender identity and be accepted and loved for who you are. It’s the grueling challenge of Honor Mode as you throw yourself at the mercy of the unforgiving dice. It’s killing a goblin with another goblin, Throwing a hamster at your enemies. “Accidentally” obliterating a party member with the FULL, CONCENTRATED POWER OF THE SUN. Licking a dead spider despite the DM’s constant insistence that that’s a terrible idea. It’s a battle, it’s a party, it’s an adventure – it’s the video game equivalent of rolling that rare, perfect Natural 20 exactly when you needed it most.

You start your journey in Baldur’s Gate 3 as you do in any tabletop role-playing game: by creating a character. From that very first moment, the game makes it clear just how much choice you have. There’s tons of races, classes, and sub-classes to choose from, and that’s not even getting into appearance and voice customization. You can easily spend an hour or more simply building your character to the dulcet, ear-worm tones of “Down by the River” – and then, as soon as you’ve finally come up with the perfect character, you immediately think up a half dozen more and are tempted to head right back into the creation menu and start all over again.

From there, the adventure never stops. You wake up captive on a mindflayer nautiloid, and are just as quickly sent crashing down into the wilds of the Sword Coast. You pick up your companions – a mysterious cleric, a combative githyanki, a charming vampire spawn, a noble warlock, a learned wizard, and a flaming barbarian (GameLuster’s Hottest Character of 2023 – both figuratively and literally!). You are given several options for potentially curing your little “tadpole brain” issue, and you can pursue all of them, or none of them, or just a few. The choice is yours.

As you journey, you’ll make your way through a seemingly peaceful druids’ grove with tension bubbling under the surface, a once-beautiful land now tainted by a twisted curse, the shadowy Underdark, and many more memorable locations before finally reaching the bustling metropolis of Baldur’s Gate itself. Along the way, there’s rats to exterminate, mysteries to solve, heists to carry out, devils to negotiate with, and much, much more before it all comes to an epic conclusion that puts the fate of the entire Forgotten Realms in the hands of your ragtag band of adventurers.

Whether you’ve got decades of experience with DND and roleplaying games or haven’t rolled dice since you were a kid at family board game night, I fully encourage you to give Baldur’s Gate 3 a try. This game is a triumph, the likes of which probably won’t be seen again for quite a while (unless developer Larian Studios has some surprises up their sleeve?) Brainstorm a character (or six, or ten,) gather your party, and venture forth for a journey I – and everyone at GameLuster who voted for Baldur’s Gate 3 as our 2023 Game of the Year – can promise will be like nothing you’ve ever experienced before. And to Larian Studios, thank you once more for creating this masterpiece of a game. As a certain someone says – this is a gift, and we won’t be forgetting it any time soon.