I have very little experience with the style of games that I tend to think of as "crunchy CRPGs". I played a few hours of Neverwinter Nights back in college and then slightly more hours of Pillars of Eternity more recently. I also enjoyed the opening bits of Pathfinder: Kingmaker up until they stuck a timer on the screen.

So definitely under 15 hours total†.

I wasn't even sure I wanted to play BG3 but I couldn't escape hearing about it so I decided to jump in.

I'm not very far into the game yet; but even so, it is obviously quite good and really special.

It is, however, also extremely tiring. There's so much to keep track of and so many options to choose from that it requires quite a bit of mental effort to really do anything at all. Couple that with the way that every single button click can lead to horrific consequences (or just a straight up TPK) (including combat, traps, dialog options, or just standing in the wrong place at the wrong time) and every click is stressful.

So every moment of playing this game is simultaneously using up mental energy and replacing it with stress. Somehow, this is actually still fun.

But it's also a sometimes-food. I think I might have 1-2 hours a week available in my psychic inventory for this game. Which essentially means that I will never ever finish it.

I'm hoping to make it past Act 1, I guess.

† I am not counting anything that Bioware did starting with Knights of the Old Republic; with KOTOR, they started filing the mechanical game systems down to be far more straightforward as the juiced the cinematic narrative side of their games. It was a tradeoff that worked really well for me, but clearly leads to different kinds of games.