Divinity: Original Sin II

An impressive, overwhelming experience. The world is huge and absolutely stuffed with quests, characters, battles, and secrets. Its open-endedness is pretty staggering- there's a bunch of ways to do every quest and you can kill every single NPC, so the quests available to your party depend on how murderous you all are. The quests were wonderfully written, with lots of twists and details that really gave you space to build your story how you see fit. There were a _ton_ of systems, many of which we hardly interacted with (crafting, sneaking, etc). There are certainly points for ambition.

Combat started out brutally hard- we were dying a lot more than we expected to in a tutorial area. But with better gear and spells (and a strategy) it started clicking into place. Controls could be a little finicky at times, but we mostly got the job done. I liked how the enemies had the same ability pool that we did, they didn't have anything special. I was impressed at how many wacky ideas just worked, too. The devs thought of everything.

More than anything else, I was impressed with how much the game trusted the players. It built the world and dropped us in it, letting us loose. Everything felt huge and limitless and we just had an absolute blast.