I watched my husband cry for the first time.
Act 3 - Spoilers
We’ve been together 7 years now. I’ve seen him get emotional, seen his eyes water, and we’ve shared so many intimate, traumatic experiences.
I’ve been playing Baldur’s Gate 3 alongside him for months now, and I’ve rarely seen him so invested in a game.
But today we infiltrated a devil’s realm of hell. I’m not big on RPGs like he is, but it was clear this was a pivotal point in the game. There was even a disclaimer asking if we wanted to continue and that this part was hard as fuck basically.
I watched him navigate the halls with this gleam in his eye I’ve rarely seen. Then, at the climax of the hell level, the guy who’d been tempting us with Faustian bargains the whole game finally appeared, infuriated we’d trespassed in his home, freed his Hope and murdered is doppelgänger-gimp.
When the music played, and the hell-minion we’d influenced weeks earlier in Shar’s Temple decided to fight by our side because he respected our strength, My husband paused the game. He set his controller down, closed his eyes and just
sobbed. Admittedly it rattled me a bit.
I’ve seen him at funerals, we’ve watched tear-jerking movies dozens of times. But he showed the most raw, unashamed emotion I’d ever seen from him.
It took about 5-10 minutes for him to calm down and be ready for us to continue. But no way I was glossing over that without asking .
He told me this game brought him back to 2009 when he first got Dragon Age: Origins. 2003 when he first played KOTOR and Jade Empire. It was a dark time in his life and RPGs became his refuge. He showed me
this meme and said it encapsulated why he was so moved by this game.
Playing through BG3 brought him back to that. The feeling of newness, exploration and discovery, the freedom of choice to be what he wanted to be that he’d never had the opportunity to do in his youth. BG3 recaptured that for him, took him to a place when epic adventure was his only respite in life. And he got to experience that again and share that alongside the person he loved most.
We both ended up crying together for a while, just so happy we could have this experience together and that that the magic of a new and amazing game wasn’t lost to us in adulthood.
Then we dried our eyes, hugged it out then fucking murdered Raphael in our toughest fight yet. Then we went to dinner to celebrate our final side quest before endgame. Together.