Baldur’s Gate 3 (on console, with a controller)

Play it on: PS5, Windows
Current goal: Finish Act 1

I know that this is an affront to the CRPG gods, and indeed, to all those players who developed an affinity for mouse-clicking their way through the original Baldur’s Gate and so many other grand role-playing games of the 90s and early 2000s. I was one of those players, by the way, dutifully telling my character where to go with incessant clicks in games like Bioware’s 2002 D&D release, Neverwinter Nights. I was fine with it then. But after plugging a controller into my PC on a whim to see how Baldur’s Gate 3 felt with one, I was forever changed.

Controlling games like this with a mouse makes me feel a bit like a god—powerful but remote, overseeing the action but not really part of it. Exploring the Sword Coast by directly controlling my character like I do in so many third-person adventure games instantly made me feel so much more rooted in the environments of Larian’s blockbuster. I just couldn’t go back to the mouse-and-keyboard approach. The only problem was that I was stuck playing on my modest computer monitor and not my considerably larger TV.

Thankfully, the PS5 version is out soon, and you can start playing Act 1 in it as early as this Saturday if you shell out for the Digital Deluxe edition. Well, I can resist anything but temptation (shoutouts to Oscar Wilde) so I’ll be paying my $70 and enjoying Baldur’s Gate 3 on the comfort of my couch with a DualSense controller in my hand for much of this weekend. Maybe I’ll finally finish this meaty opening chapter, and then start it up again with a whole new character before the full game opens up on PS5 next week. —Carolyn Petit