Granted, I'm still fairly early in the game, but I already have some observations. First of all, this game is much more polished on release than Kingmaker (the devs' previous game) was. I have not encountered any bugs yet, and I'm currently playing on a laptop with Intel integrated graphics (and the performance is surprisingly good as well). The sheer number of classes/feats/spells/other mechanics is almost overwhelming, but the tutorial and other helping messages/systems do a good job with explaining stuff. The story is engrossing from the get go and I can't wait to proceed further. Overall, so far this feels like the most ambitious CRPG ever since BG2 (and in some respects quite a bit more ambitious even than that), and the delivery matches the ambition so far.
It's not a very accurate description, but to me this game basically feels as a distilled Witcher 3 experience without the open world, and with card combat. Remember the quests in Witcher 3 which were related to all those supernatural creatures, like the Hym quest or the Towerful of Mice quest? Well, imagine if you take stories like those, replace the combat with a card-based implementation (and an interesting one, at that) and get rid of the open world (so that you move via an overworld map between the story encounters). Well, this is basically Black Book. And I love it.
