The game has some great aspects to it, but at the same there are many things that in the end make it way too frustrating. The worldbuilding and the characters are great, the story is what kept me coming back. The gameplay in general is good, and there are good aspects of classic CRPGs in it.

One of the most frustrating game mechanics was the kingdom management. That's what I was looking forward the most since I generally enjoy management games, but it honestly heavily detracted from the main game here. It is very easy to go into a spiral with a few bad rolls that leaves your kingdom in a status that is almost impossible to recover from without much you can do about it.

In terms of the main game, while seems very faithful to the tabletop RPG, it made it overwhelming at times to know what to do and to manage a full party. You're kind of expected to manage all aspects of the characters and there's so much choice that it's very easy to make a bad one. The game also is not great at explaining mechanics beyond the most simple ones, so sometimes it feels like it's cheating when it's probably doing legal things but not giving you the information of how that happened. For example, there are some spells and abilities where the description says it is the same as another spell but with a greater area/affecting more characters and similar but no explanation about what the base spell or ability does. Combat became boring and repetitive for the most part, the enemies are not balanced quite right, so it is very hard to get anything done with casters that target enemies unless you're min/maxing. Also, it can be very frustrating that many combat encounters leave you with permanent negative effects like ability and level drain.

In the end, even though I was pushing through the frustrations to finish the game I ended up quitting because a party member died near the end for decisions I had made way earlier in the game that seemed completely unrelated.

Really, really loved this game. Just finished it (about 170 hours). I'm an older gamer and started playing CRPGs with BG1 back in the nineties. The deep systems and meta management made this much more interesting than BG3 for me. Highly recommend to people who have a lot of free time and a taste for old-style CRPGs Keep mind that the production value is lower than most contemporaries, so there is little voice acting, a lot of reading and there are no animated cutscenes.

from a of company of bigots.