I saw people going on about how great BG3 is on this site, so I thought I’d check out a let’s play to see what all the fuss was about. I immediately fell in love with the graphics and the mechanics, such as the classes, races, spells, dice etc, but I disliked the emphasis on gore/horror in the game, and I know I wouldn’t enjoy playing a game with that whole brain horror thing going on. Not to mention the price and storage requirements being excessive. (150GB!)
So, bearing in mind that, is there a game that would match my criteria, and if not, what do you think comes closest?
Is any form of violence or blood a no-no? If you can accept some, Larian (bg3’s developper) was already well known for the Divinity series. Many even say that BG3 is kind of Divinity:Original Sin 3 with a DnD license. You’ll still be killing some people though. Otherwise, I suggest searching for Turn-Based games which BG3 is. You might like Battletech which is a mech warrior themed game or the X-Com series where there’s an alien invasion.
And also, you might have been mislead by the videos. Yes the brain parasite is important but you’re really only directly dealing with mind flayers (the tentacle clad monsters) in the very beginning and very end. The rest is just a classic fantasy setting.
There’s a lot of really grim and dark fantasy, but it’s definitely not all of fantasy. BG3 is full of super dark stuff with or without the gore.
Yes but it’s not all of the stuff, far from it
It’s not all as much gore as the brain parasite, but it’s full of scenes that are every bit as dark and fucked up. I won’t list anything in particular detail because of spoilers, but i’ve seen dozens of things that are super fucked up, and I’m not even out of act 1. I’ve had numerous people want to rip out eyeballs, failed a dice roll to mind control an enemy into eating himself, been suicide bombed, had a slave incubator for a witch go apeshit on me for rescuing her, and loads more. It’s absolutely super dark.
Not all violence is a deal breaker, just really grim stuff, like those pus balls exploding, or the worm burrowing into the characters’ eyes, exposed brains, that sort of thing.
So I’ll reinforce my first suggestion to look into turn-based CRPG as a genre and see for yourself. That’s where you’ll find most of the mechanics you seem to want and you won’t have to take the opinions of strangers as to how much gore is too much for you.