Solasta is an incredibly faithful recreation of the 5th edition rule set. And I absolutely love it. I’ve played the main campaign, all the DLC, and a fan made recreation of the temple of elemental evil.
The rule implementation is fairly strict, especially when compared with BG3. Can’t be casting somatic component spells with something in your off hand. Your wizard spell book is something that you can accidentally sell (oops). Need to attune those magic items. But I find it all pretty fun and I felt like I actually learned more of the D&D rules.
The cutscenes and dialogue animations are… actually comically bad. But I like the idea behind the way scenes work. Basically you set your character’s personality at the start of the game and then they automatically speak according to that. Some of dialogue is hilarious. Some of it is even internally hilarious.
But what really shines are the encounters and campaign design. The encounters are all very fun and well designed, there’s a fair amount of verticality and environment interaction. Each encounter feels like it could plausibly be part of an an actual tabletop adventure. And the overall story also feels like something that your friend would come up for his homebrew world. It lacks the style and polish of BG3 but makes up for it with authenticity and heart.
Assist
Solasta is the closest I’ve ever felt to playing dungeons and dragons in a video game and I would highly recommend checking out the base game at least.
I remember they tried to use the environmental angle for marketing. They claimed that they were making use of discarded fruit pulp that would have gone to waste.
But of course it was actually an efficiency nightmare. They shipped the pulp to their factory, then shipped the weight of the pulp plus juice to the customer, who would then throw out half the weight of each package.
It would have been way more efficient for them to just buy the pulp, squeeze it in industrial quantities and sell bags of juice like some trendy health thing. But of course then they would have been a juice company instead of a tech company, and juice companies don’t get as much venture capital.