Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Your game kind of saved my life.

The game pulled me out of a deep depression, the bad kind that's normally a one-way trip, I've lost my wife a few years ago, and my mom was diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer, and have been secluded, disconnected from the world, and slowly fading away mentally and spiritually over the course of a few years.

I played the game for the first time at full launch, happy I managed to hold off playing, so everything and all the characters were brand new and entirely unexpected.

No spoilers, I played as a Paladin, I was in a dark place in real life, so wanted to roleplay as an avatar that reflected of the opposite of things currently going on IRL, so anyway, in roleplaying the choices of a Paladin, as you do, I tried my best to turn one of my companions away from a vast darkness, the kind of darkness that's a one-way trip, I saw a lot of myself in this companion character, and it was a strange surreal experience roleplaying as someone trying to save someone like "me", to say I was emotionally invested in saving this character from darkness is an understatement, I didn't even know if you could turn this character to the light, thought things were set in stone and it's just going to be what it is, it's a video game, I mean there's just no way this character had any hope for redemption, no way they'd build that into the game as an arc, right? I kept hoping and chipping away regardless because this was now more than a video game and more about something else and more serious to me.

I struggled on anyway, irrationally keeping hope alive, the more I kept chipping away, the bigger the hope grew, I didn't stop playing, didn't sleep, I just wanted to save this stupid little video game character, that's all that mattered, this lack of sleep made me lower my real life emotional and rational walls, so it became an utterly engaging experience, the payoff was incredibly rewarding, I felt I 'beat' the game right there, I learned that despite how dark things can become, there will always be a tiny light, somewhere, ready to be grabbed, and will explode in a roaring sun if you just reach out to it, to give in to the impulse of light, when you're in a dark place, you'll hopefully find these tiny impulses, they'll grow smaller and less frequent as you go down into the depths, but they'll be there, you just have to grab it.

Still in the process of this reflection, but it's been tremendously positive to me.

It's fascinating that in the process of casual escapism from all the horrors of real life and being the most emotionally and spiritually vulnerable I've ever been in my life, I abruptly found myself utterly invested in a desperate and serious situation where I virtually confronted an existential darkness, fought it, and conquered it, so might as well do the same outside of the game. There's something about games, or the process of interacting and roleplaying, that can crank up emotional engagement to 11 that no movie or book can do.

Who says games can't be good for you? Maybe simple things amuse simple minds, and it's just a game, I don't care, it was a little life changing experience for me, that's what matters for me.

Thanks Larian and specifically the people who wrote this arc, it means a lot and whenever I find myself in a dark place, I'll remember this little journey within a journey.