The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings Enhanced Edition (2011)

 

Witcher 2's story picks up a month after the conclusion of the first game. After saving King Foltest from an assassination attempt, Geralt has been drafted into being the king's bodyguard. Unfortunately, Geralt is unable to stave off another assassination attempt and he's even framed for Foltest's murder. Geralt escapes custody and embarks on a quest to find the real killers.

With the first game becoming a sleeper hit, CD Projekt Red moved on from the Aurora engine and created their own, the REDengine, for the sequel, giving the new game an immediately obvious jolt in graphics and faster, more action-oriented gameplay. Cutscenes are impressively directed and performed. The first game never made it to a console release, despite some plans, but Witcher 2 seems to have been designed to be console-friendly. The mouse-driven interface of the first game was replaced with a series of lists (lists in big, brutal font on top of a putrid yellow background) that could be navigated with a modern gamepad. 

The game feels more like an action game in that its combat follows modern trends in third-person gameplay: quick/fast attack, slow/strong attack, block, dodge (one of those really exaggerated dive rolls seen in so many games), and some alternate actions such as the use of magical signs or secondary weapons (bombs, traps, and ranged weapons like throwing knives). However, the developers seemingly didn't want to wholly abandon the action-RPG roots of the first game and kept the action rooted in "under the hood" mechanics like percentage-based "dice rolls". It's hard not to notice and be a little frustrated when Geralt clearly slices through an enemy and not only fails to get a response but fails to even damage the enemy because the game calculated that you actually missed, contrary to what your eyes saw. Fortunately, the game doesn't have level-scaling, so whatever Geralt struggles with in the early game will become little more than an annoyance by the closing chapter, so the combat's flaws become more tolerable as the game proceeds. Unlike the first game, where Geralt's early-game futility could be chalked up to his amnesia, in Witcher 2 he's simply a level 1 weakling at the outset. Potions can now only be consumed during meditation, but they and blade oils don't last very long and they seem less effective compared to the first game.

It also doesn't take long to notice that a lot of the environments, particularly the forested area around the town of Flotsam, are comprised of narrow pathways with dreaded invisible walls keeping the player from wandering off. The camera can be difficult, especially in combat, as it can swing around behind trees, completely blocking the player's view of the action. The game also includes quick-time events, particularly for boss fights or major setpieces, and the presentation is so heavy with visual and aural details that it can sometimes be hard to discern what the game wants the player to do to overcome situations like the kayran battle. There are also occasional stealth sequences that feel underdeveloped. As an action game, or at least an action-RPG, Witcher 2 is mediocre. The combat in the first game may not have provided an action-packed, adrenaline-soaked thrill ride, but at least it was reasonably comprehensible and consistent through the whole game.

It's in the storytelling that the game makes its impression. The designers clearly tried to push the concept of choices and consequences as hard as they could, most obviously in the story branch that occurs in the second of its three chapters. At the end of chapter 1, Geralt can accompany one of two parties and whichever is chosen will cause a different version of chapter 2 to play. Geralt can choose to join Vernon Roche, a special forces operative pursuing the scoia'tael terrorists, sort of a fantasy version of the kind of ruthless G-men that J. Edgar Hoover would dispatch to take out public enemies. Or Geralt can join Iorveth, the bloodthirsty leader of the scoia'tael Roche is after. Joining Roche causes Geralt to end up in the camp of King Henselt while Henselt's armies attempt to conquer a disputed province. Joining Iorveth puts Geralt in a dwarven city on the opposite side of the province, among an unruly army of human peasants, nobles, and nonhumans hoping to carve out a free kingdom. Although the stories are distinct from each other - not merely opposing halves of the same story - playing both versions will provide the player more insight into the characters on both sides; e.g., if you play on Roche's path, you might find yourself confused by the rebel army's Joan of Arc-like commander Saskia and her relationship to the dragon that appears in the first and last chapters, but playing Iorveth's path helps you get to know Saskia a little in person. You can still pick up enough of what's going on, but actually replaying and making the opposite choice makes things more explicit. And this chapter branch is only the biggest choice to make; the game is loaded with many decisions that can have ripple effects that are reflected later in the game, on top of whatever major choices were made in the first game, assuming the player imported his final save from it. It's not perfect - there are definitely some continuity errors that crept in despite the designers' efforts - but the amount of detail accounted for is very impressive.

The story itself, whichever path is taken, is heavy on the in-universe politics, for better or worse. There are some little pockets in which the folklore of the original stories makes it through, such as a memorable subplot in which Geralt has to deal with a troll living under a bridge outside of Flotsam, but mostly Geralt is focused on clearing his name, rescuing Triss Merigold, and unraveling the assassination conspiracy. Stuff like the witcher contracts, the boxing, and the gambling (somehow worse than in the first game) subquests make a return, but they feel slightly out of place, like the designers just wanted to make sure Geralt had some vestigial witcher stuff to do in between his primary missions. Compared to the first game, in which Geralt just had to explore a particular region and hope to hit on leads to follow while making ends meet, Witcher 2 has a much more insistent story that sweeps him along. And as dark as the first game could be, Witcher 2's emphasis on politics leads to even murkier outcomes regardless of what choices are made. A player could get through the first game and feel satisfied that even if he couldn't save the whole world, at least he could make reasonably informed choices according to his ethics, but Witcher 2 is more likely to sucker-punch the player by revealing how choices made with reasonable intentions can still result in mass murder, cities aflame, and evildoers getting off scot-free. There isn't really a lesser evil to be chosen, just equally bad endings with different origins.

An impressive game in many ways, and a must-play for fans of Sapkowski's stories, but with some real flaws, too.

Necromancer (1982)

 

We've looked a number of games involving sword-wielding heroes cleaving through their enemies, so it's probably time to start highlighting the Sorcery side of the genre. The side where Clark Ashton Smith and Jack Vance liked to play much of the time. Necromancer, created by Bill Williams and published by Synapse, has the player control a druid whose task is "to grow an army of trees in the enchanted forest, and to march with this army through the necromancer's vaults, and then finally to destroy the evil in the necromancer's foul lair." Although the concept is heroic, the game is uniquely dark compared to most of Williams's other games; e.g., Salmon Run and Alley Cat are each about animals trying to reach a mate and victory is signaled with a loud smooch that is so well-rendered by the Atari 800's sound chip that it's easy to think it's a digitized sample, not something crafted by Williams's audio mastery. Necromancer is dark (literally, with its black backgrounds) and features an underdog hero battling a dominating figure who lives in a graveyard, flanked by armies of giant spiders and ogres. The opening theme (composed by Williams, as he usually did everything in his games) sounds like a horror movie theme. It's easy to complete a cycle of Salmon Run or Alley Cat and enjoy the happy ending, but it's extremely difficult to make it through Necromancer and enjoy its happy ending.

The opening level features the druid standing in a pentagram at the screen's center, where he will remain. The player controls a cursor called the Wisp, which can reach any part of the screen. The job in this level is to plant magic seeds and watch them grow into tall trees, using the Wisp to protect them from the ogres that race across the screen and try to cut down the trees when they're still in the sapling stage. Even when the trees reach maturity, it's still important to protect them because the spiders start racing in and trying to poison them. Even with the Wisp's ability to home in on nearby enemies, the spiders are particularly difficult to hit because of their rapid, helter-skelter movements. More seeds can be obtained by hitting a creature called the Eye Pod. The gameplay here is frenetic and the player must grow as many trees as possible before his strength is exhausted from killing and being hit by enemies. Some degree of success is nearly guaranteed, but a major aspect of the game is that how you do in one level influences your success in the next.

In level 2, the druid needs to navigate through a series of vaults containing the spiders' eggs. The druid can use the Wisp to command his tree army, which has the ability to walk like Ents, to move to a vault and then plant roots in the vault's roof. Before long, the roots will disintegrate the roof and the tree will plunge down, crushing the eggs. The player must account for hands of fate that descend from the roof and try to grab the druid or the trees, and for spiders that freshly hatch from flashing eggs. The druid must grab an item that lowers ladders to deeper vault levels, and must survive through the five screens worth of vaults (with eight eggs per screen), survive being a crucial word because, unlike level 1, running out of strength here ends the game. The player always has the option to simply race for the bottom and not worry about smashing spider larvae, but this will cause a brutal disadvantage on the final level...

The druid confronts the necromancer on the graveyards of level 3. The druid uses the Wisp to kill the necromancer, but until the player clears the screen of 13 gravestones, the necromancer will continue to rise from the dead. Meanwhile, the druid is being attacked not only by the necromancer but by all the spiders he failed to kill in level 2. If the player rushed through level 2, the druid will likely be overwhelmed quickly by the swarm. Meanwhile, there's another spider, a She-Lob-like Mother, that patrols and makes the spiders immune to the Wisp. The player must somehow clear five screens worth of graves before the necromancer is finally vanquished.

An idiosyncratic feature of Williams's games is that they tend to involve randomness in both controls and gameplay; multi-faceted "series of minigames" designs; and an encouragement of players to resist their instincts. Modern players raised on predominantly Japanese design philosophies such as consistent and predictable core gameplay ("he jumps and attacks exactly this way every single time and the enemies are always in this exact place...") could very well find Williams's style infuriating, and perhaps assume the games are broken or weren't playtested. As one review said, "With a Bill Williams game, you knew you'd always have to learn to use the joystick in a way that you hadn't used it before -- always interesting, always challenging."

Despite being action games, the philosophy is almost more akin to how Rogue-like games are made in that it's better to develop a strategy and understand that the strategy can only improve the player's chances instead of guaranteeing victory. Sometimes the random element is just too much to overcome. Necromancer is no different. You can have a plan (e.g., it's a good idea to plant trees in the corners and along the edges because adult trees block the paths of the ogres) but sometimes the game just doesn't cooperate. Sometimes the trees fully grow almost immediately but other times they take what seems like an eternity considering the action happening all over. Similarly, in level 2 the length of time it takes for the trees to collapse the vault seems to be random, sometimes happening almost immediately but other times taking so long that the egg starts flashing and hatches before the tree is even halfway through the roof.

Graphically, the game looks okay for 1982. The C64 version is slightly prettier for getting a bit more detail and color in the druid's sprite (it also seems to be slightly easier, although like most Synapse games, the Atari version is a bit smoother in motion). The trees are especially nice-looking with the way their leaves flicker to indicate a gentle swaying, and their anguished faces that appear when they've been poisoned by the spider. 

Necromancer is the kind of game that can be exhausting to play because it can get frenzied to the point that it could give Eugene Jarvis or Jeff Minter pause, but like those men's games it also has a punchy quality that keeps you coming back. No matter how many times you lose, you still feel that if you play just a bit better and if enough things break your way, you might finally overcome it (but you probably won't). 

Supplemental reading: Empire of the Necromancers, by Clark Ashton Smith

Supplemental viewing: Warlock (1989)

God of Blades (2012)

 

God of Blades is a mobile game that got a Windows port, created by White Whale Games following a successful Kickstarter campaign. It's a sort of endless runner/melee combat game and, considering its mobile gaming basis, it's quite simple to play. Your character, the Nameless King, is running from left to right, annihilating every foe that gets in his way until facing a level boss in a more protracted battle. Swiping up, right, or down causes you to execute an attack while swiping left results in a parry. There's also a special attack that can be used if its meter has been filled. Passing scoring thresholds allows the player to unlock swords of different sizes and abilities, each with a proper name and backstory, like they're all part of Stormbringer's family tree. The game is simple but enjoyable and the campaign mode is short enough to not overstay its welcome. There are also endless modes just to rack up score or see how far you can get.

The game's most noteworthy aspect is how it's drenched in 1970s fantasy imagery, specifically imagery inspired by paperback books of the time. Every level opens with the image of an imaginary vintage paperback novel, such as "Guardian of the Black Clefts" by C. Percival Briggs, which is accompanied by a small amount of evocative yet cryptic text that could have appeared on a back cover or on an introductory page. The art on these covers takes after more abstract New Wave cover artists than the warmer works of the 1960s masters. The game's multiplayer mode, called Slayers, furthers this aesthetic by dynamically generating fake magazine covers featuring the winner's character as a subject. The story itself is a thin layer draped over the game, indicating something about the Nameless King rising to defend his planet from a cult devoted to a dark god.

The graphics during gameplay, however, lushly render bizarre landscapes, pushing a Roger Dean influence especially hard, populated with hideously warped humanoids that seemingly fell out of Michael Moorcock's more psychedelic passages. Artist Jason Rosenstock cited the works of Sidney Sime, Frank Frazetta, and Riccardo Burchielli as influences, while writer George Royer tried to base his efforts for the game on Robert E. Howard, H.P. Lovecraft, Lord Dunsany, M.R. James, and Moorcock's works. 

One interesting feature exclusive to the mobile version was the Loremaster mode, which would inform the player of nearby libraries that could be visited to unlock rewards for the game. There are games that proudly display sword-and-sorcery influences, but God of Blades might be the only one that actively tries to promote the genre by directing players to where the books live. Unfortunately, the game wasn't a hit and as White Whale shut down in 2019, it's no longer supported on newer mobile devices. Perhaps it was too simple for the crowd who might have appreciated its theme, but too action-oriented for the Candy Crush fans. But the PC version can still be had for a few bucks on Amazon and works just fine on Windows 11.

COVER ART: Ali-Bebe (1986?)

 

The game (for the ZX Spectrum) is about a cute little baby in a fez exploring a maze while various creatures impede him. Alfonso Azpiri provided this cover for it. The Spanish may have had the best ratio of great cover art to games of any national games industry in the world.

The Witcher: Enhanced Edition (2008)

 

There are very few cases of sword-and-sorcery characters being officially licensed for video games. Conan is the big one who gets a new game every few years, and there have been some odd cases such as the text adventure based on Roger Zelazny's Amber novels. Some aborted attempts at making an Elric game over the years. Betrayal at Krondor is a classic RPG based on Raymond Feist's Riftwar books, but that's more in the epic fantasy category. It's significant that CD Projekt Red not only made a game based on Andrzej Sapkowski's Witcher stories but they made a big splash while doing so.

The game opens with a well-rendered CGI adaptation of the very first Witcher story, in which Geralt of Rivia cures a young princess of a curse causing her to transform into a monster. Upon starting a new game, the player sees Geralt, the witcher nicknamed "White Wolf," being transported to the witcher stronghold of Kaer Morhen. It's made clear that Geralt, who was in no shape to be having adventures at the end of Sapkowski's novels, is an amnesiac, a common device in RPGs to justify why an otherwise capable hero needs tutorials on how to fight and navigate the game world. During the opening tutorial section, Kaer Morhen is invaded by mysterious assassins who steal secrets on how witchers are created, and the resident witchers are ordered to the four corners of the world in pursuit. Since it's Geralt's game, he's obviously the one who finds the right lead and finds himself untangling a deadly conspiracy.

CDPR originally started with the idea of making a roleplaying game set in Sapkowski's world that would allow the player to create his own witcher, but later chose to center the game on Geralt. This seems to have somewhat disrupted the development of the game's story, which involves the hero meeting various people from the original stories for the first time and getting involved in a story that is broadly reminiscent of how Geralt became a father figure to a mystical child of destiny. The player is allowed to romance either Triss Merigold the sorceress or Shani the nurse, two relatively minor characters from the books. It's similar to how the Blade Runner game creates a story very similar to and overlapping yet distinctly different from the movie's story. The developers use the amnesia concept to smooth over how Geralt could be involved with this stuff but it generally would have worked better with an original character. It would be like making a Conan game that ends with Conan as king of Vendhya with Yasmina as his queen - the names and lore would be recognizable but readers would be distracted by how it violates canon. On the other hand, Geralt made for a more marketable hook and CDPR obviously did something right because the game was a big enough hit to pave the way for even more successful sequels.

On a limited budget, CDPR licensed Bioware's Aurora engine and then heavily reworked it to suit the game's needs. Instead of a simple combat system of clicking on enemies to strike them until dead, they tried a timing-based system in which the player has to click again at critical moments to continue combos. The player can assume one of three stances (strong, fast, or group-focused) and perform dodges. Although they deserve credit for going with something a bit different, the system isn't very engaging. They also tried to adapt the witchers' elegant fighting techniques in the game as more advanced combinations. It's easy to imagine Sapkowski's pirouette-filled descriptions as something like Hollywood swordfighting made practical through the witchers' superhuman reflexes and balance, but the gratuitous backflips Geralt does in the game while fighting just look hilarious. Also, despite the occasional incline or decline in elevation, the settings suffer from the sort of flatness often seen in RPGs of the period. And there are a couple of cases of what should have been major setpieces that simply don't work because of the engine's limitations; e.g., a recreation of Geralt's battle to cure the princess of the striga curse can easily devolve into a comical scene of Geralt and the monster simply running in circles around the monster's sarcophagus until morning. Finally, the game suffers from a problem common in RPGs in that a lot of quests involve running across large expanses to speak to someone, deliver something, or kill something, then running off to the opposite side of the world to do much the same, which creates the sense that Geralt is the world's toughest errand boy rather than an intrepid adventurer.

What the game does do well in terms of visuals is that the depiction of the City of Vizima and its outskirts, which comprise nearly the entirety of the game, have exceptional atmosphere and a sense of authenticity rarely seen in western fantasy games. Perhaps it's because Polish developers will understandably have a more intimate familiarity with the types of architecture the setting calls for. The city has a used, lived-in look without being overly fixated on griminess or dishevelment, the swamps are so oppressively murky that it's easy to imagine flies or mosquitoes everywhere even though the game can't render them, and the forests are verdant while still housing many hidden dangers. There are also nice touches such as dynamic weather changes and the way people run for cover during rain storms, how birds soar across the sky, and how the characters all obey simple schedules, going to work during the day and then turning in to bed at home at night.

The game's biggest triumph is in simply adapting Sapkowski's concepts relatively faithfully. The writing is cynical but doesn't cave in to adolescent overcompensation. Geralt is constantly faced with problems that seem to demand that the player choose a lesser evil, but there's usually enough nuance that the choice can be made according to a player's particular views without feeling bad about it (at least assuming the player isn't expecting a perfect world to arise from his choices). Many video games attempt this sort of writing but fail badly at it, including so many tradeoffs and so much moral ambiguity on all sides that every choice flattens out into being equally unsatisfying. The sense of scale probably helps in that despite the implications of the game's story, Geralt is ultimately just a man, not a prophesied world-savior. He's a blue collar figure who just wants to do his job with as little fuss as necessary (it's hard not to notice that some variation of "Got any work for a witcher?" is usually one of Geralt's first dialogue options). For all his fame and accomplishments, he's ultimately part of a dying tradition of dedicated monster hunters and he just doesn't matter very much in the scheme of things, so his choices won't necessarily have earth-shaking impact. He might save or condemn an individual or a few people, not entire nations. And the game loves to record the choices made and belatedly indicate consequences of those choices, even if the overall plot of the game never changes much (e.g., the identity of the villain is always the same, but his stated motives might shift slightly).

The monsters are mostly drawn from the books. Drowners, kikimores, giant centipedes, bruxae, ghouls, wyverns, demon dogs, etc., in addition to various types of human enemies. The game ties the vodyanoi from Slavic folklore in with Lovecraftian horror through a connection with Dagon. The general setting is basically Tolkien-esque fantasy with a cynical slant. Among the backstory is the idea that a cosmic event called the Conjunction of the Spheres caused the inhabitants of various overlapping dimensions to be deposited on a single planet, causing long-lasting ethnic strife as elves and dwarves see their lands encroached on by surging human populations, with monsters also causing significant ecological damage because they're transplanted to a world on which they didn't originally evolve. 

Much as in the books, gathering information on how to kill monsters and then mixing potions and blade oils specifically suited to the tasks are important. Crafting systems have become a tedious feature in many games today, but The Witcher is one of the very few games in which gathering wild ingredients and using them in a crafting system is genuinely consistent with the source material. Geralt can also use limited forms of magic such as telekinetic or pyrokinetic "signs" to get an edge during combat. The game isn't particularly difficult at the medium setting, but the use of the potions, oils, bombs, and magic can make things go quite a bit faster and easier, and they're recommended at the harder setting.

Sapkowski's books, at least in English-translated form, are entertaining enough reads, although not necessarily among the best of S&S (it's been said that he has some very clever wordplay in the original Polish editions that is difficult to translate), but even if The Witcher game had never received any sequels, it would still rank as among the better licensed games ever done in terms of respecting and capturing the flavor of the source material while still being an enjoyable gaming experience, and depending on one's preferences it might even be an improvement. It's certainly more action-packed compared to the somewhat languorously plotted and dialogue/exposition-heavy novels.