Baldur's Gate 3: 10 Secret Instant Deaths You Must AVOID

Assassin's Creed has been teaching us for almost two decades (yep, we're all getting old) that taking leaps of faith is fine, so long as you have a neatly placed pile of hay waiting for you below.

But what if there's no hay pile to speak of? Or if the ground is so far below you that you can't even see it?

These two oddly specific questions can be answered in the secret spider lair hidden below the well in the Blighted Village in the first act of Baldur's Gate 3.

This web-covered tunnel system is filled with mysterious chasms, one of which serves as a secret entrance to the Underdark. The only problem? The fall is hundreds of feet high.

There are two ways in which you're likely to discover this "shortcut" in your first playthrough. One: Your character notices something strange about the pit, and you jump in to find out what. Two: You jump onto the cobwebs above it without realizing they're too frail to hold your weight.

In either case, you'll see a cutscene of your character falling hundreds of feet into the underdark and then turning into a bloody splatter on the ground below.

Now that's a quick shortcut! To Death!

Hitting an invisible wall is a pretty disappointing experience. It's like a slap on the wrist from the developers that scolds you for being too curious and also breaks your immersion.

Obviously, this kind of killjoy isn't really Larian's style, so what did they decide to do for Baldur's Gate 3 instead? Well, they kill your wandering character in the most brutal and harrowing manner possible.

Although the game allows you to travel between Act's locations freely most of the time, there are certain thresholds that, when crossed, prevent you from going back to the earlier locations. This said, you can still try to go back; it's just that your efforts will meet a grisly end.

Whenever you reach a location you're not supposed to, your mysterious guardian inside the artifact will warn you that their protection will not extend to that place, and you'll be on your own.

If you ignore this warning and try to go in anyway, the power of the artifact stops working, and you immediately enter a cutscene where the Elder Brain dominates your mind and turns you into a mind flayer.

Well, at least as your teeth turn into tentacles, you'll be glad you didn't hit an invisible wall.

What do agonizing death and sexual pleasure have in common? Both can be found in abundance in the embrace of an incubus.

More specifically, the incubus Harleep that you encounter inside Raphael's House of Hope in hell.

In order to rob Raphael of his precious possessions, the player needs to get the means to disable his magical security from his personal consort, Harleep. There are two ways of accomplishing this: you can either fight Harleep or try to play his "game."

By game, he of course means sex, and why it may seem extra weird considering Harleep is transformed to look exactly like the devil you're trying to rob (Raphael clearly has a lot of issues), it is your only option for resolving this encounter peacefully and without bloodshed.

That is, if you don't let Harleep play his game with you for a little too long.

If you fully submit to Harleep and don't try to break out of his influence, the incubus devours your souls, and you get a game over.

The most embarrassing part of this, however, is that as the incubus pleasures you to death, your companions are forced to watch the whole thing. Yikes!

Baldur's Gate 3 is filled with puzzles that, in most cases, reward the player with a new weapon or treasure for solving them.

Well, unless it's the Lance puzzle in Rosymorn Monastery, in which case your reward is a swift but not necessarily painless death.

The monastery incorporates a series of puzzles, each connected to the mysterious security system protecting a powerful artifact. Following the trail of puzzles will reward you with some pretty sweet loot at first, but then you get to the giant Solar Lance mounted on top of the monastery.

The giant cannon looks incredibly powerful, so you might feel tempted to activate it to see what it can do. Maybe shoot down a flying dragon or destroy the githyanki chasing after you?

Well, not quite. While the weapon might certainly help you do the latter, it will also turn you and your companions into fine dust. Once you activate it, the weapon charges up, and if at least one of your party members isn't close to the exit out of the monstery, a special cutscene will play showing the entire building blowing up, along with everyone inside of it.

Whoever fights with the Solar Lance dies by the Solar Lance.

When you start to take your first steps in the world of a video game, you expect some degree of leniency. You're new to everything, so the developers should be a little more forgiving about making mistakes, right?

Well, apparently Larian would bag to differ. The first act of the game contains plenty of moments that punish you for your incompetence, including an instant death cutscene that can be triggered within the first ten minutes of the game.

Not too far away from your starting location in Act 1, you encounter a dying illithid who attempts to hypnotize you and feed on your delicious and nutritious brain.

It goes without saying that you should keep your brain a fair distance away from its tentacles, so if you're curious or naive enough to let the illithid manipulate you, don't expect a Deus ex machina to save you.

Submitting to the mind flayer will allow it to feed on your brain and trigger a gruesome cutscene if you act, after which you'll lose all HP and die. And if you haven't recruited anyone to your party yet, you're basically forced to restart.

In retrospect, that one should've been obvious.

In Dungeons and Dragons, hags are nefarious and powerful creatures that delight in the suffering of others. A wary adventurer should always be careful when entering one's cursed domain.

Or, you can just mess around with all of the hag's stuff, like most of Baldur's Gate's players! Yeah, that sounds way more fun and will definitely not lead to some regrettable and terrifying consequences...

During your visit to Auntie Ethel's teahouse, the player gets to see her collection of cursed clients she's gathered over the years.

One part of her exhibit consists of monster hunters who were turned into her obedient puppets with cursed artifacts known as the Whispering Masks.

When you meet the hunters, they immediately attack you, and, if you're smart, after you defeat them, you'll never look at their creepy masks ever again.

However, if curiosity takes over, you might be tempted to take the masks from them and then put one on your character. Just don't be surprised that a cursed brainwashing mask is going to curse and brainwash you.

As soon as you put the mask on, Auntie's mocking voice will sound in your head and turn you into her slave, prompting a game over the screen.

Letting a vampire have a gander at your neck sounds like a pretty terrible idea. But then again, most things that Astarion, the heartthrob vampire in your rag-tag group of adventurers, proposes are absolutely terrible ideas, and yet we let him get away with them anyway!

It's that damn smile of his!

Anyway, as a vampire, Astarion obviously needs blood to survive, and at some point, he decides that the best source of blood he can get is you. Of course, whether or not he can feed on you is up to your own choices alone; however, if you do decide to become his personal blood bank, you might want to make sure Astarion doesn't make too large a withdrawal.

You see, during the first feeding scene with Astarion, if you let him suck on your neck for too long, Astarion will get a little carried away and, well, drain you dry.

The game will cut away from your lifeless corpse, and the next day someone in your team will have to resurrect you so that you can yell Astarion's ear off.

Or just agree to let him feed on you again, because some of us just don't know how to say no to him.

In most games, trusting your companions is a no-brainer. They're either too loyal or their AI is too dumb to make you worry about any of them ever betraying you.

However, in Baldur's Gate 3, your companions have a mind of their own, and sometimes this can have pretty unpredictable consequences, as evidenced by this secret death cutscene with your team's resident githyanki, Lae'zel.

If you take enough long rests early in the game, at some point your character will start to show signs of their transformation into a mind flayer. Lae'zel will be quick to notice your symptoms, and she will try to sneak up on you and "save" you from becoming an abomination by slitting your throat. You have several means of dealing with her attempt on your life. However, if you want to, you can also put your trust in her and surrender to her blade.

You might pick this option thinking it's a test of your bond with Lae'zel, but in reality, even if the two of you have good relations, Lae'zel will kill you anyway, as she's just too fanatical to let a potential mind flayer live.

Well, that's what you get for trusting in the power of friendship!

Like most of your companions in Baldur's Gate III, Gale, the charming, if not slightly dorky, wizard from Waterdeep, has a little secret that packs a lot of punch. His body is infused with a teeny-tiny magical artifact that is capable of creating a not-so-tiny explosion that can level entire cities.

This artifact, known as the Netherese Orb, plays a major part in Gale's personal story, and at some point, it can even play a major part in your untimely demise.

In the second act of the game, Gale is approached by one of his wizard friends, Elminster. Elminster helps Gale stabilize the orb, but then tells him that Mystra, the goddess of magic, wants Gale to activate its destructive power in order to stop the Absoulte's cultists.

From that point on, the player unlocks a special button that allows them to activate Gale's orb. Pressing the button will turn Gale into a magical nuke, blowing up everything on the map, including your party.

And if you use the orb as Elminster instructed you inside the Absolute's lair, you can actually get an early secret ending where all the cultists die in the magical explosion.

And all it cost was your and your friends' lives!

In a fantasy setting where gods are real and very much involved in the affairs of mortals, cursing out your deity of choice is obviously not the best idea. Especially if God is standing right in front of you.

Still, if you feel especially daring and ready to tempt your fate, or rather provoke it, the questline in the githyanki creche in the mountain pass allows you to meet, talk, and potentially anger the githyanki God-Queen Vlaakith. Towards the end of the quest, the goddess makes a personal appearance and angrily orders you to kill the mysterious resident of the artifact you're carrying.

Now, when being commanded to do something by a wrathful goddess, your first instinct should be to follow suit. However, the game does allow you to defy Vlaakith and tell her to do her dirty work herself, putting her authority in question. Picking this option will quickly remind you that the world belongs to the gods, and your character is just living in it.

Angered by your impudent insubordination, Vlaakith lashes out and simply wishes your squad's entire existence away.

Well, at least you've got bragging rights for telling off a goddess. Or rather, your atomized corpse does...