"There's a foreign object in your body, and it might kill you." That's a pretty good summary of the central plot of Larian Studios' hit role-playing game Baldur's Gate 3. It was also my life for the past two years. I started playing Baldur's Gate 3 not because I love Dungeons and Dragons (although that's true) or because I enjoyed Larian's previous work (also true) but as a desperate attempt to cope with my very own "mindflayer tadpole."
In early 2023, I woke up from a routine surgery with a massive blood clot in my abdomen, a complication so vanishingly rare the doctor who broke the news admitted he couldn't even cite a percentage. What followed was more surgeries, hospitalizations, desperate attempts to maintain a normal life while doctors constantly monitored this Thing in my body to make sure it hadn't shifted the deadly few inches from that could change my situation from "scary, but treatable" to "I'm sorry, there's nothing..." And then one day, while I was doomscrolling statistics about blood clot deaths, I got a message that would change my life: "Hey, have you checked out Baldur's Gate 3? The main characters all have this weird thing in their heads that could kill them at any second. It's kind of like you, isn't it?"
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Baldur's Gate 3 Gets The Uncertainty Of Living With Illness Right
The message from a well-intentioned friend was right. That first night, I barely got an hour into the game, because I started sobbing every time Lae'zel bluntly talked about how unlikely surviving a tadpole implantation was or Astarion ranted about how unfair it was that he was likely going to turn into a mindless monster mere minutes after finally getting to walk in the sun. These characters understood what I was going through. The uncertainty that shadowed my every step and kept me bed-bound and scared was the same thing they were feeling. From that moment on, I started thinking of my own blood clot and the mindflayer tadpole in my drow paladin's brain as one and the same.
What Baldur's Gate 3 gets the most right about a situation like this is the desperation. My party and I were willing to pursue every possible avenue for a cure, no matter how dubious. A clearly villainous hag offers to use her sinister magic on us? A guy we just rescued insists he can totally get the thing out by dubious surgical means? A suave demon presents an obviously rigged deal? We jumped at each and every bit of hope, no matter how minuscule, because the alternative was just that terrifying.
I think I fully realized this after I had my usually upright and thoughtful Paladin immediately agree to undergo Volo's obviously unpracticed surgery attempt, despite Amelia Tyler's Narrator asking multiple times in her best "I'm-not-mad-just-disappointed" voice "are you REALLY sure you want to do this?" The surgery, of course, was a total failure, leaving my character with a cool fake eye but just as tadpole-infected as before.
When I brought this up to my friends who were also playing the game, their responses were incredulous. "Couldn't you tell it was a bad idea? The game signposted it like a million times. Come on, you've played Dungeons and Dragons, you know when the DM asks you 'really' that many times that it can't be good." And I was confused, but then I understood: being sick had fundamentally changed how I approached situations like that one.
Because that's what you do when you're sick and the situation could change for the worst at any second. You say yes. Another surgery? Another scan? A new medicine? You say yes, because saying no feels like giving up, and giving up feels like letting the thing inside you win.
How Baldur's Gate 3 Gave Me The Hope I Needed
The mindflayer tadpole that kickstarts the plot is far from the only part of Baldur's Gate 3 that resonated with me and my condition. I saw myself in Karlach's faltering infernal heart, in Gale's fear that the Netherese Orb inside him might explode at any time, in Wyll's frustration with his transformed body and Astarion's dependence on the blood of others. This game saw me, and understood me, in a way no other piece of media has.
Plus, it certainly didn't hurt that I could come home from yet another appointment where a doctor talked about how messed up my blood was to a handsome vampire who literally got stat bonuses from consuming it. I played pretty much the entire game with the -1 to my rolls from the Bloodless status, and I regret nothing. I even started calling the days when I couldn't get out of bed because of the pain and exhaustion in real life my "Bloodless days," which certainly confused a lot of doctors, but Astarion himself thought it was hilarious when I was fortunate enough to meet him and tell him about it.
But Baldur's Gate 3 gave me more than a new way of speaking about my condition: it gave me hope. Because Baldur's Gate 3's party doesn't just sit around and bemoan their bad luck like I had been doing. You and your companions are facing down the same terrifying thought - that there might not be a cure, that this might just be your new permanent way of life - but you don't have to let it stop you.
You can fight. You can feast. You can fall in love. You can go to the circus and watch an absolutely terrible clown perform. You can adopt a dog, or a baby owlbear cub, or both. Your days might be numbered, you might be doomed to transform into a horrible tentacled being that needs to consume humanoid brains for sustenance, but that doesn't stop you from having fun or kicking ass or just living your life.
My journey isn't over, but things are looking up. About a month ago, I was officially diagnosed as blood clot-free after two years of constant anxiety. I'm still at extremely high risk of developing other clots in the future, and I still have a bunch of side effects and complications I'll be living with forever, but I'm not giving up. I have the hope and determination that Baldur's Gate 3 gave me. I haven't quite mastered the art of living as fully and genuinely in the face of terrifying, life-altering health issues as my favorite "group of weirdos" (as Astarion would say) have, but I'm trying. Their tadpoles never stopped them, and I'm not going to let mine stop me.
Baldur's Gate 3
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OpenCritic Reviews
- Top Critic Avg: 96 /100 Critics Rec: 97%
- Released
- August 3, 2023
- ESRB
- M for Mature: Blood and Gore, Partial Nudity, Sexual Content, Strong Language, Violence
- Developer(s)
- Larian Studios
- Publisher(s)
- Larian Studios
WHERE TO PLAY
- Engine
- Divinity 4.0
- Genre(s)
- RPG
