A dull game set in an enthralling world.
The Witcher is a pretty bad game which you have to play if you want to read a very well-written choose-your-own-adventure book. The combat is simple and usually quite dull, often becoming a game of “watch the icon change and then click the mouse”. There are occasional moments where the overly complex potion-brewing mechanics come in useful, but even then the whole system seems so obtuse that it’s easy to dread these sections. The systems in the game are actually quite simple, if perhaps overly dense, once you become accustomed to them, but they all seem quite overwhelming and off-putting towards the beginning of the game. There’s plenty of time to adjust though, as the game is long. Perhaps overly so. There’s a hell of a lot to do in the game, not by way of the main story but more in the small, world-building quests you’ll find around the well-realised world you’ll be exploring. But these quests can regularly feel like fetch-quest type busy work, and in truth the game is often flat-out boring, running between different sections of a quest through the same relatively small environments you’ve trudged through again and again during very similar quests. The visuals are, much like the world of the Witcher, equal parts enchanting and repulsive. Almost any character you speak with looks like vaguely angry mannequins, dead eyes and plastic features. But the dialogue coming out of their poorly animated faces is original, interesting and mostly very well written. This game feels more genuinely medieval than most, the lives of these people are bleak and the choices they force upon you are often bleaker. There’s no empty right-answer/right-answer-whilst-being-a-jerk morality dynamic a la Mass Effect, every choice is a bit ok and a bit wrong. It means you are more inclined to throw any video-gamey completionist tendencies where you’ll side with whichever faction leaves the most questlines unlocked and actually start to get into the world. And the world is well presented and engaging from every angle, in terms of the writing at least. Huge in scope but very focussed and personal exactly when it needs to be, fantastical and imaginative yet logical and consistent. The setting of the Witcher, and the stories and situations it places you in, are more interesting than you’ll find in most games, so it’s a shame that it feels like such a chore to uncover it all.
