Beyond's Best PlayStation Game of 2023

ign.com:

If you haven’t heard, Baldur’s Gate 3 is a really, really good game. Just, so good. When the semi-regular cast of Beyond was asked to decide our best PlayStation game of 2023, several of us immediately blurted out Baldur’s Gate 3, and no one else had any objections. So, there are plenty of write-ups on IGN and elsewhere about why it’s so great, but I wanted to reflect a little on how it seemingly came out of nowhere. Make no mistake, this game is 100% Game of the Year material. It almost was IGN’s overall pick, losing to Zelda by a handful of votes. That said, it seems like a miracle that such a dense, unabashedly technical entry in a 23-years-dormant franchise would have such widespread appeal.

When the first two Baldur’s Gate games were released, I was a prepubescent middle schooler who was way more interested in the slick, stylized JRPGs on PlayStation about guys with cool hair than I was in a text-heavy isometric PC game about subject matter that would be at home airbrushed on the side of a van in the late 70s. A few decades later, the third Baldur’s Gate was revealed with a slick launch trailer as part of some Stadia presentation. A handful of Elder Nerds around the IGN office were ecstatic, but despite having dabbled in analog Dungeons & Dragon, it didn’t really move the needle for me.

Somewhere along the line, a friend convinced me to check out Divinity: Original Sin 2 by saying you can play as a skeleton who talks to dogs and picks locks with his bony little skeleton fingers, and also you can also turn people into chickens. On one particularly seasonally depressed weekend I threw it on, and got completely sucked in. My wife went out and came home 10 hours later to find me in the same position, bleary eyed, still