My best memories of Dungeons & Dragons are all from the first couple sessions, where your party is operating on a level somewhere between the gang from It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia and Blood Meridian. You are five broke hobos who will do absolutely anything to survive. You're ambushing people in dark corners with hammers like the elevator scene in Drive. You're pushing knights wearing heavy armor into small ponds and drowning them. You're breaking into houses and dead sprinting to where the valuables are because you cannot pass the stealth check. It's always a blast, and Baldur's Gate 3 totally realizes that early game spontaneity and inventiveness by embracing the principles of the immersive sim, a genre associated with many of the classics of PC gaming.
Pen and paper RPGs and immersive sims like Deus Ex, System Shock, and the Prey remake operate along the same lines: the player looks at a problem, asks, "Can I do this?" and the game or gamemaster says yes or no, with a bias for "yes, and here's why it was a really bad idea." Immersive sims are less of a genre and more of a vibe, kind of in the same way as CRPGS (where the C stands for "computer", confusingly).
