But that still means it's pretty darn good. It's pretty much a direct retread of all of P:T's beats: mostly-immortal amnesiac tries to figure out who they were; meet a large group of eclectic weirdos and solve their problems; read the better part of a few novels of excellent, thoughtful writing; failure is sometimes just as productive as victory; that sort of thing. The gameplay itself is pretty mid; the "skill checks" in dialogue can be easily save-scummed and/or cheesed, and the combat is utterly forgettable and honestly something I usually tried to avoid. But the writing, story and setting are all top-notch, and I enjoyed pretty much the whole 30 hours I spent on it. At absolute worst, if you liked P:T this should be on your wishlist and got when it's being sold for a tenner.
Long story short, there's a character who makes an offhanded remark that she's transgendered, and one of the creators made a remark about how the original Baldur's Gate was kind of sexist and how they were going to remedy that. They did so in a fairly hit or miss way, admittedly (by trying to build the character of characters who never really had any in the first place *because* they were sexist stereotypes to begin with), but apparently even marginal efforts to be inclusive and progressive are enough to send GamerGaters into an enormous bitch fit. So when you see people talking about it being "not Baldur's Gate" and "pushing a political agenda on you", what they mean is "one of the writers said something I don't like and I'm so terrified by transgendered people that a minor NPC offhandedly mentioning that they're trans is enough to send me into conniptions and give a perfectly serviceable game a one-star review. I'm playing on a mediocre computer at best and have had only a couple crashes, seen no real bugs to speak of except for a few graphical glitches, and basically find everything in the game to be at least "close enough". I'm happy to see people doing something with the Baldur's Gate licence enough that I'm willing to forgive a sketchy launch and some less-than-stellar writing at times. It's a shame that there are apparently so many gamers terrified and intimidated by the mere presence of a single minor NPC being transgendered and women doing the writing for one of their franchises that they have to abandon it completely to soothe their bruised egos. SoD isn't perfect, but it deserves better than a bunch of whiny self-persecuting GamerGaters crying about how Steam and Beamdog don't feel obligated to indulge their self-persecuting baby-d**ked screeching.
This game absolutely refuses to hold your hand and happily smacks you in the face the second you do something even slightly careless. Grinding is somewhere between important and mandatory, regardless of strategy; in spite of this, the game limits the number of encounters per section to limit the extent to which you can do so. At least some save-scumming is a necessity to all but the most hardcore and masochistic of old-school purists. Gold spent on items and the leveling system can, at times, bring marginal relief if at all to all these things. Why five stars, then? Because this makes finding the right skills to increase, the right items to buy, the right strategies to use all the more rewarding. The fights and traps and skill management are unforgiving, but not unfair. The "save anywhere" option mitigates the punishment for carelessness or tactical error, the graphics and combat system are fairly simple but smooth and engaging, the music and story are solid and the setting and classes are familiar enough to your average RPG fan but with enough variety and creativity in application to be familiar without being style. Even on the lowest difficulty, this is a tough game to master. But even the journey to competence is enjoyable and rewarding, and anyone who likes games like Baldur's Gate, Wizardry or Dragon Quest should give this game a try on the virtues of its blend of accessibility and old-school difficulty. That said, if you find games like Baldur's Gate, Wizardry and Dragon Quest too hard or unforgiving, I'd probably give this one a pass. Fair warning.
