Act 2 of Baldur's Gate 3 Made Me Scared of the Dark Again
- Brandon Sherbo
- Oct 3
- 3 min read
If you haven’t read the first two articles in this playthrough series, you can find them here.
Disclaimer: Spoilers ahead for Act 2 of Baldur’s Gate 3
Everyone warns you about Act 2 of Baldur’s Gate 3 before you get there. The Shadow-Cursed Lands. A place so drenched in darkness it turns anything living into a twisted shade of itself. And they’re right–it’s terrifying. You have no choice but to go through it, and there’s far too much still alive in there.
You’ll likely run into a drider pretty quickly. Driders are dark elves twisted into half-spider, half-humanoid forms by the evil goddess Lolth. The drider, named Kar’niss, is unsettling, with multiple eyes popping out of his forehead and cheek in a half-baked transformation into a monster. We didn’t have to look at him for too long before revealing ourselves as the good guys, and taking him out alongside a group of Harper ambushers.
Nearby, we met a character named He Who Was. He’s hot, he’s goth, he’s got an albino raven, and I’m 98% sure that I could fix him. He’s one of the Shadar’kai race, a group of elves that were transformed in the Shadowfell realm. They gather memories of tragedy and grief for their mistress, the Raven Queen. We’re tasked with retrieving information about a dead bartender (whose corpse is patiently waiting within a full witchcraft circle surrounded by purple candles). Apparently, she did something terrible to people that she once called friends and He Who Was wants to make sure she gets what she deserves. This side quest, “Punish the Wicked,” is one of my favorites. It’s brief, it’s brutal, and it proves that in Faerûn, death doesn’t always mean the end.
Then there’s the House of Healing, easily the creepiest part of this zone that comes straight out of the kind of horror movies I don’t go see in theaters. What was once a hospital has now devolved into the opposite: blind zombie nurses tend to people that are already dead, and the Chief of Surgery is a necromancer, Malus Thorm, that tortures live subjects. The only shining light in this place of actual hell was that my Charisma roll convinced him to subject himself to an operation by his own nurses that killed him. It’s grotesque, disturbing, and one of the few times I’ve audibly said “nope” while playing this game.
At the town’s tavern, The Waning Moon, we found a vile creature named Thisobald Thorm. Part Blob, part Texas Chainsaw Massacre, this bloated, foul-smelling creature looks like he could explode at any second. Tubes run from whatever is under his hood to a barrel on his back, and a seam down the middle of his gigantic stomach is hard to look at. He tries to get us to drink, but attacks upon refusal. Whatever was in those cups was not going into my body.
Act 2 feels like stepping into a high-fantasy Silent Hill–a world swallowed by shadow, crawling with horrors that used to be people, and just waiting to make you one of their own. It’s terrifying, unsettling, and proof that Baldur’s Gate 3 isn’t just a great RPG–it’s a masterclass in how to make darkness feel alive. My party is just looking forward to hopefully seeing sunlight and getting some fresh air after all this.
