Welcome to my new series where I -- gulp -- attempt to play and review every single quest in the Witcher 3! Next up: Magic Lamp, a nice palette-cleanser to yesterday's travesty.

Magic Lamp

Side Quest

This mission is a nice change of pace from its immediate predecessor, the nigh-unbearable Wandering In The Dark. Instead of making you wander aimlessly through endless dungeons, fending off the same three enemies over and over again until you grind up against two rinse-repeat bosses, Magic Lamp place you in two smalls rooms, makes combat completely optional, and gives you a meaty riddle to chew on. What's this? Do you mean to say that this mission wants me to do more than blindly swinging Witcher Vision across every dungeon wall and scanning for shimmering red lines? Impossible!

Compare Magic Lamp's simple riddle to one of the largest 'riddles' found Wandering In the Dark. Here, an inscription against an ancient door asks us to light the braziers in front of four different statues in the correct order, using clues both positional ("The First...dare not march on the end") and descriptional* ("The Third kept close to his faithful beast"); there, the clue ("Swallow, the obvious route is not always the best. Find Kelpie.") is given and then immediately solved by Geralt, who recognizes Kelpie as the name of Ciri's horse, leaving a pixel-hunt to find a horse-shaped inscription as all that's left to do. While the former's riddle is no great feat to solve, it's at least an actual brain teaser, something that necessitates being solved in order to move on. If you never solve that riddle, then hey, you can't continue with the quest; contrast that with the search for Kelpie, where all that's required is for you to tilt the camera down while in Witcher Vision to see the solution at the bottom of a well, and the basic puzzle design of Magic Lamp is already better than the previous quest.

It would unfair not to mention, however, the different contexts that these puzzles are in. The brazier riddle? In a skippable side quest. The search for Kelpie? In a mandatory main quest. You can't just walk away from Kelpie, flee out the nearest opening and never come back, leaving Keira with the Hunt and hoping for the best. It makes sense, then, that the designers would want to create a 'riddle' that anyone could solve; I just don't think it 100% excuses them from creating a 'riddle' that was uninteresting as it was.

Anyway, after you solve the brazier riddle, you are led into a room with a sweet-looking tomb and a conversation. Overall, I found this conversation (which concludes the mission) pretty much better than anything found in Wandering In The Dark, featuring a cool environment, nice lighting, and some interesting story tidbits to ruminate on, despite most of the conversation being about a character who has barely been mentioned up to this point, Lara Dorren. As a whole, this conversation encapsulates one of the best and worst things about the Witcher 3's story sections: the assumption you have intimate knowledge of the Witcher lore, going back three games and countless books. This broadly breaks players down into two camps, where conversations are A) really rewarding for fans of the series, as they offer a greater chance to engage with the universe than other parts focused more on the insular main story, and B) really infuriating for newcomers, since names, places, and sometimes even choices will be thrown at you with little context and next-to-no explanation. This dichotomy, whether you're a seasoned Witcher pro or not, directly leads to how much enjoyment you'll be able to glean from this conversation and this mission as a whole.

On one hand, the 'fan of the series' hand, this conversation is awesome, getting into some juicy drama about if Dorren is well-liked by her fellow elves or not and interesting speculation about the Mysterious Elf's connection to her. On the other, 'wait who's Lara Dorren was she the person they mentioned 5 hours ago' hand, this conversation is incomprehensible. Wait, Lara who? She married Cregennan of what? Why is the Elf interested in her? Why does she have the Sign of the Gull too? Isn't that Ciri's sign? Games force players to piece together who characters are and what's important about them all the time -- there's nothing wrong with that idea by itself -- but the problem here that there is a disconnect between the knowledge of the player and the knowledge of the character they're playing. Geralt knows exactly who Lara Dorren is and what makes her important, and a player new to the Witcher world might have no idea whose grave this is or why it would have any connection to Ciri. On my first playerthrough, I was that newcomer with little intimate knowledge of the lore, and it made times like these where the game refused to explain itself eternally frustrating.

Whatever camp you end up in, however, the mission ends the same way: Keira takes the magic lamp resting on the gravestone and invites you to partake in her line of side quests before leaving the dungeon for the open world outside. You can find an interesting little note about the Mysterious Elf trying to contact Lara Dorren with the magic lamp, to no avail, and that's it. A tiny little quest that I've written entirely too much about. Riddle, conversation, 'come see me', done. 100xp. All in all, good, simple, featuring little more than a five minute brain teaser, conversation of variable quality, and the promise of something more down the line.

*TIL descriptional is not a word D:

Three White Wolves out of Five