The Familiar Escape of 'Baldur's Gate 3'
After hundreds of hours across several playthroughs in Faerûn, Larian's smash hit RPG has become one of my closest comforts in times of grief.
In the few hours after I publish this blog, I'm going to pick up the ashes of my dog, Holly.
She passed away suddenly at the start of the month—I had planned to start this newslettering era of my career then, but her death obviously pushed that plan back. I'm not looking forward to the still-fresh grief reawakening when I find myself holding my best friend of over 10 years in my hands again, in a very different form from when I last held her those few weeks ago.
But when I've brought her home, I will probably do something I've been doing pretty much every day after her death: booting up Baldur's Gate 3.
I have, according to Steam, wracked up just shy of 423 hours in Baldur's Gate 3, the kind of hour count that is otherwise reserved in my gaming life for MMORPGs or as total hours I've spent in a franchise, let alone one game (the only one I can possibly think of is Dragon Age II, which I have played at least a dozen times, because it's the best one). This will be my fifth playthrough—my latest is as Saylr, a Hexblade Warlock, a favorite subclass of mine from tabletop D&D—but it's also far from the first time I've retreated into the Sword Coast in times of grief.