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Baldur's Gate 3
Rating: ▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▱ 90%
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It's been a while since I wrote an actual proper review for a game, and I think this game definitely deserves one. Considering the last final major patch has been released for the game, I think now is a good time as any for this review. As someone who has never experienced Dungeons and Dragons (DnD) systems until BG3 I was quite unfamiliar with the "dice roll" mechanic, 1dXs, DCs, ACs, and etcetera when I first started. The game doesn't truly teach you these systems either but it does a decent job at displaying information that's understandable to non-DnD players. All this to say; if you have never played or watched DnD campaigns, like me, the game is still very much playable, but I would suggest some quick web searching for terminology meanings and mechanics whenever you come across them to fully understand the game.
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This game has an insane amount of content. There are so, so many quests, stories, and paths to take in this game. It's the type of game where even after 250+ hours, you will still be finding new things to do, or quests you never even realized were there. Most of which also tie really nicely into each other, with the quests themselves having great attention to detail—changing certain dialogues based on your actions before, or whatever your current situation is. The ability to be able to play as Origin characters (characters you would otherwise recruit into your party or "canon" characters) and have unique dialogue and internal thoughts just shows the length the developers went to creating a fully fleshed out story experience for the player.
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Speaking of Origin characters, the characters you meet in this game are a fun bunch with each having unique and distinct personalities. They also interact with each other while exploring and sometimes even having unique dialogue in conversations depending on who is in your party. The developers did a wonderful job at creating chemistry between the cast, leading to a lively and enjoyable experience.
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The game is generally split into two paths story-wise, the "normal" route, and the Dark Urge route, where you essentially play as a murder hungry character who either tries to suppress this urge, or embrace it to go wild. I would highly recommend playing the "normal" route first to understand and experience the world and characters, then enjoying the other route later. I feel the need to say that the Dark Urge route is infinitely more interesting and fun to play compared to the standard Tav route, it's also very cool to see the many things changed depending on the route you choose to go.
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But although the game has a lot of content, some of them have quite a clear difference in quality and/or content. For example, romance can be a huge part of your playthrough should you choose it to be, however, some romanceable companions have criminally short romance quests, differing cutscene qualities, or just ending blandly. It seems there are the few key favorite romance routes from Larian that receive really beautiful and fulfilling stories, but ending up leaving the other half lacking. Romance aside, most story quests are fun to do even on repeated playthroughs, but there are also a small minority of quests that become quite tedious to complete on repeat.
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Due to the sheer scale of the game, there are expectedly some issues with quests sometimes being bugged or blocked. Despite that, it's nothing game breaking and I have some confidence that these will be ironed out as more hotfixes are released.
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When I first saw the gameplay of Baldur's Gate 3, I was honestly quite disinterested, something about the top-down turn based gameplay was just not appealing to me. However, that was until I actually received the game and tried it for myself. Watching the game and playing it is a whole different experience, I quickly found myself really enjoying the gameplay and combat especially. Certain mechanics simply scratch the right parts of your brain and lead to an addictive experience. The only real complaints I can give is that movement speed while exploring feels slow at times and that enemies every so often take a weirdly long time to make a move, and especially when in a fight with a lot of enemies, it leads to a fair bit of downtime and waiting.
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Core gameplay aside, the max level of the characters feels too limiting. Especially with the ability to multi-class, the levels given often results in most builds not feeling "complete" as you sacrifice certain important leveling milestones for a class. Considering that classic DnD's max level is significantly higher than the game, it's an odd choice to limit the max level here to 12. Though, this can be remedied with modding (discussed in a later section).
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Some of the UI in-game felt a little unintuitive. The game uses a lot of pop-up menus to do things and it can get really cluttered and messy at times.
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Base graphics are good but the true standouts is the spell and combat effects. Combined with the powerful sound design, Baldur's Gate 3 visually delivers a incredibly satisfying combat experience every encounter.
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Some very minor gripes are that facial expressions at times seem too unnatural or over-exaggerated and comical (especially some Durge faces) and that I wish the default character customization had a little more options.
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Performance-wise, it's generally good and stable until the later parts of the game (Act 3), which has a severely noticeable impact in frames. If you are able to get good performance in the earlier acts, the drop should not be enough to be unplayable but it's worth noting nonetheless.
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In my opinion, you can't have the fullest Baldur's Gate 3 experience without mods, which is why I am infinitely thankful that Larian has made modding so compatible with this game. BG3 has some really nice built-in features to accommodate moddin; an in-game mod manager, a mod browser, and a feature to inform you when saves have missing mods. Though Baldur's Gate 3 is incredible with it's story and base mechanics, the sheer amount of QoL (BetterTooltips, BetterTargetInfo), gameplay (UnlockLevelCurve, WASD Movement, Party Limit Begone), and customization (Hair, Faces, Eyes) tweaks, combine to elevates this game to a whole new level. Though modding can be incredibly fun, I would probably suggest finishing at least one campaign on default first before delving into mods, it's personally what I usually do to get a feel for the base game before modding it to hell.
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Baldur's Gate 3 is an incredible game made with extreme care to detail and a very evident amount of effort. It's a game with lots of content, deceivingly fun gameplay, interesting story and characters, and great support for modding to truly customize your experience. I feel like I can talk endlessly about this game and like most games I really enjoy, I very likely didn't manage to write everything I want about this game. This game is truly the gold standard for gaming.

As a final note, Larian has made me attached to the world of Baldur's Gate. And although I understand their decision to move away from DnD entirely, I can't help but to feel slightly disappointed that this world may never receive a game like this again. Despite this, I am looking forward to their next project and they have my full trust in creating another wonderful and rich experience. Thank you for the game.

Elden Ring
Rating: ▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▱▱ 80%
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This is no doubt a great game—with wonderful bosses, fun combat mechanics, and a beautiful world. But there are also times when the experience is bogged down by equally frustrating design decisions, mainly in level and puzzle designs. I'm quite late to review Elden Ring so there's probably not much I can say good or bad that hasn't already been said. Still, no game has made my heart beat so hard in a long while and I enjoyed this game a lot, so I felt like penning down my thoughts after finishing the first run. I should also mention that simply due to the sheer amount of customizability with builds, things mentioned in this review and the experiences I had might vastly differ from another person with a different build (I went with a light load dex build the entire game as I enjoyed the agile feeling movement), so keep that in mind while reading the subjective gameplay section of the review.
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Combat—which is arguably the biggest part of the game—is done really well. There is a decently steep learning curve to the movement, and the decision to bundle running and dodging into the same input seemed odd at first. But after getting a hang of the movement, this felt quiet natural and even saved me many times. I am a huge fan of giving the player many options in terms of weapon types, weapon skills, affinities, and spells that the player can choose to use, and I'm happy to say that Elden Ring excels in this aspect. Combined with the many armor types and talisman options, help customization with builds a lot and gives players quite a bit of freedom in choosing their playstyle. The game is also arguably friendly to new Souls players, providing summons as a feature to aid in open world or boss combat.
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Exploration-wise, earlier parts of the game have noticeable downtime when traversing which will either be boring to some, or relaxing to others. Middle to late-ish though, the exploring the world becomes much more interesting, there's more places of interest, captivating environment details, and generally pretty scenery.
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Another small, but definitely meaningful part of the game, are the messages and bloodstains you can find around you as you play. Be it useful, comedic, or troll messages, I always love reading what previous players have written, and seeing bloodstain deaths can be really funny. It's one of my favourite things to see in Fromsoft games, and it definitely adds to the experience in a positive way.
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Positives aside, I am not a fan of some of the catacombs and mines in this game. The first few are fine enough to do, but after the 5th, 6th, or 7th run, it really starts to lose it's novelty and ends up being repetitive and at times frustrating. Movement also sometimes feels—for lack of better words—sloppy, which is not helped by the few platforming sections of the game. Certain levels (the cringe sewer) also feel like they are made simply just to upset you. Puzzle-wise, there are a few puzzles that have downright misleading "hints", and some where the locations of key items to progress are not clearly indicated, resulting in the need to shatter my precious immersion to switch over to Google for a quick search..
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While most standard enemies are fine, some even satisfying and fun to fight, there are a select few that are very "spammy", or they thrash around a lot, or they god forbid fly. These select few are incredibly annoying especially when Fromsoft decides "Hm, yes, this section in particular. I wish to upset every player here." and places many of them in one spot.
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Bosses can be quite a hit or miss for me in this game. Some of the bosses I loved were super fun to learn and despite dying over and over, I never got mad at these bosses themselves. On the other hand, there were bosses that made me really wish I had an infinite amount of keyboards to break. Duo bosses for one, are incredibly annoying to fight against, especially when you are not relying on summons. And though often joked about, the long wind-up attacks from bosses can actually be quite satisfying to learn and master. It feels good to be able to read and react correctly and dodge based of the boss' telegraphs. All in all, it's the usual Souls boss cycle; fail over and over until you eventually get good or get lucky, then feel super good about it after.
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Not too much to comment on this section. Base graphics are good, asides from some exceptions of models clipping here and there, the game delivers on it's scenery and environment designs. Spell effects are also very pretty to look at, I'm especially a sucker for the nebula/space themed looking effects.
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The world and story of Elden Ring is fascinating, you will find interesting concepts and bits of lore here and there, but most lore pieces are quite abstract and leaves it to the player themselves to try and piece the story together. While I am fine with this approach, it does feel slightly unsatisfying that we may never get a full concrete picture of this game's story.
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Quests are a nightmare. While some quests are relatively straight forward and easy to complete, there are a few that require you to travel to specific areas, talk a certain amount of times or "exhaust dialogue", speak with another NPC halfway across the world, reload an area, or have no clear progression and are easily missed should you happen to miss an NPC. I believe this is the standard Fromsoft quest experience but it does not excuse how unintuitive quests are at times. If you are somewhat of a completionist, prepare to have Fextralife be your most visited site while playing the game. Lastly, I felt that the endings of most quests also lead to quite an unsatisfying conclusion story-wise.
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Overall, the experience Elden Ring has to offer is vast, so much so that I probably didn't manage to cover my full thoughts that I had while playing the game. The world is interesting and packed with environmental story-telling, there is a wide diversity of builds to change how you play, the bosses were fun, visually well designed, and although some aspects of the game frustrated me to no end at times, I can firmly say that I had a satisfying, thrilling, and fun experience. That's all, see you in the DLC.

I fight with the camera more than the bosses.

- Preliminary review since my game crashed and I wanted to write something lmao. -

At a glance the graphics are really good looking, but it sometimes felt a little flat while playing and I think I realized why. It's the lack of shadows, the "flatness" becomes more apparent when looking at the guard rails. After noticing the lack of shadows from super bright light sources, I can't help but to constantly imagine how much better this game WOULD look if there were just some simple shadows baked in to every level.

That being said, the game is still stunning as is and the Poolrooms are probably my favorite liminal space, so I'm looking forward to exploring the rest of this game.

3 hours in and I already got all my money's worth and more.

Tip for beginners: Choose sandbox and set helicopter event to often, better chance of a rescue. Hope that helps!

Came for Peace and Tranquility, stayed for the rest.

More peanut please.

Mmm mother...

Simple and cozy little game. Some parts such as graphics and furniture choices can be improved but it's still early and I enjoyed playing nonetheless. Looking forward to see where this game goes 👍