Baldur's Gate II: Enhanced Edition - 14/20 hours

I have to hand it to Baldur's Gate II - they are not fucking around when it comes to AD&D lore. At one point, while I was crawling around in the sewers underneath the city slums, I popped up an unmarked staircase and faced a group of myconids. Yes, myconids. It's at this point that I wish there were some kind of dry and understated sarcasm font so I could get across exactly how nonplussed I was when I stumbled across this encounter.

Myconids are also known as "fungus men." They are humanoid mushrooms who live in a hierarchical, caste based society ruled by myconid kings, who are larger, blue in color, and can incapacitate enemies with psychoactive spores.

The game doesn't explain this. The myconids are just there. There's no attempt to integrate them into the larger story or explore the world-building implications of their existence. They're just weird creatures that you have to fight.

That's not a complaint, by the way. It's entirely true to the spirit of old-school D&D, and it makes curious, if not eager, to find out exactly how far out there the game will get - Owlbears, wolfweres, crabmen, winged snakes? I'm kind of hoping I get to see a Thought Eater (which sounds like a super serious and horrifying monster, but looks like this:

 

Yes, that's a platypus skeleton, and yes, it's a real monster)

But Baldur's Gate II's commitment to being true to AD&D has a downside as well. I was clearing out a a sinister slaver compound and found to my dismay that the slavers had some trolls (because when you are in the business of buying and selling human beings of course you want to keep flesh eating monsters in the same building as your primary product and their primary food source - there's nothing at all that can go wrong with that scenario) and I discovered that I could not kill them. The reason for this is that the Baldur's Gate trolls play by the same rules as trolls in the roleplaying game - they quickly  regenerate any damage not caused by fire or acid, and the only way to kill them is to reduce them to 0 hit points and then hit them with an attack of the appropriate type. 

Unfortunately, when I encountered these trolls, I had no fire or acid spells memorized (going into the intricacies of AD&D's bizarre magic system could be a whole series of long posts in and of itself), and, unlike the tabletop game, I couldn't just handwave it away by claiming I used my flint and tinder to light a torch. I had to go away, sleep to rememorize my spells, and then come back and fight the trolls again. And what if I hadn't known their weakness? It's not as if the game took pains to spell it out (although, to be fair to Baldur's Gate, I am extraordinarily sloppy when it comes to keeping up with in-game lore, so I may have just missed it).

All-in-all, I'm enjoying this more than the original Baldur's Gate, because the higher level gameplay is a bit more forgiving (I have a cleric who can cast Raise Dead, which gives my party a ton more stamina), but those little D&D-isms still kind of bug me. There's a reason I stopped playing AD&D second edition and moved onto other roleplaying games.