SKALD: Against the Black Priory is a Kickstarted RPG by Anders Laurindsen that hearkens back to classic PC RPGs, particularly those for the Commodore 64, but adds in a much darker mood that leans heavily on Lovecraftian horror.
The game has a strong story focus. You create your own hero, but once you set out the game will generally progress in the same way, with only minor differences depending on how you resolve subplots and which skill checks you pass or fail. The opening sees you on a ship sailing to "the Outer Isles" when suddenly the boat is attacked by a leviathan of the deep. The game then flashes back to a calm scene of you being summoned to a lord's court, where you're given a mission to find the lord's daughter, a magically-touched woman, who happens to have been a childhood friend of yours, who has vanished on the trip to the Outer Isles. The game then flashes forward to the present of you waking up on a beach. You set about your mission, finding equipment and companions to help you along the way.
The party members are pre-generated characters such as Kat the thief, but you can also hire mercenaries and these you can customize to your liking. The party members will occasionally contribute to the story, offering exposition or simply their opinions on what's happening, but thankfully this is no blockbuster RPG in which people engage you in lengthy conversations for the purpose of starting a romance or requiring you to be a psychiatrist and helping them with their particular hang-ups. The writing is bent on furthering the game's dark atmosphere but still relatively restrained, without huge reams of text dumped on the player. The only place it really falls down is in providing worldbuilding details (e.g., magic system stuff) that feel awkwardly inserted and are arguably extraneous. Laurindsen is also clearly a fan of the movie Aliens and doesn't mind throwing a reference in the dialogue here and there.
Beyond the tentacle monster ripping your ship in half at the opening, shortly after washing up on the beach you'll be exploring caves full of giant man-eating crabs - you can tell they eat men because the gory remains are all over the place. You learn that the major town on the island literally went crazy one night as good citizens began slaughtering their neighbors and formed a cult of human sacrifice. Refugees who managed to escape are dying from a grotesque disease that causes writhing things to grow in their bellies. Even a mid-game episode involving a trip to an idyllic town, where you run fetch quests to help happy residents prepare for their yearly festival, devolves into a Robert W. Chambers-influenced nightmare. With the leviathan still patrolling the deep waters around the islands, the characters have no option to simply leave. The game feels like a tight corridor you're being herded down and the sense of doom gets thicker the closer you get to the end. The ending isn't very happy.
It's a fun game to play, though. The restrained completion time is always welcome compared to the bloat of so many modern RPGs, and the nasty tone is unlike most modern RPGs, which often can't resist self-aware humor or nonsensical worldbuilding. Such a local-level story, based on simply finding a missing person, is particularly rare in video games, as even most sword-and-sorcery-influenced games still incorporate dark lords or battles for the fate of the world, trying to make the low and high sides of the fantasy genre play nice with each other. The game feels like playing a very horror-heavy Dungeons & Dragons module, and Laurindsen's experience as a DM for his own table-top games comes through.
The combat system is a bit rigid at first (no diagonal melee attacks), but it's easy to get to grips with it, and the C64-like graphics lend a sense of grit and darkness to the game, the only major downside being that they're so detailed that it's easy to miss important things unless you hold the shift key to highlight interactive objects.
Sword of Kadash is an early action RPG, created by Chris Cole and one of the very first releases from Dynamix. Dynamix was behind many classic games such as Project: Firestart, MechWarrior, Stellar 7, the Aces war simulation series, Red Baron, and Rise of the Dragon, among numerous others. Almost none of their games are fantasy-themed, however, so Dynamix likely won't be coming up again here.
Like many PC games of the time, it has an arcade sensibility, similar to something like Berzerk, but with just a bit extra to hopefully interest players beyond recognizing algorithms and honing reflexes. The player controls the hero from a top-down view, attempting to navigate a huge maze one screen at a time. The player can pick up different weapons but despite whatever the weapons are identified as, the combat always takes the form of firing arrows across the screen at enemies. Among the threats you face are various types of wildlife, the undead, orcs, and a liche, among others.
The maze is always the same, but it's full of devious traps beyond the creatures inhabiting it, so progress is best made by mapping or memorizing the layout and noting how the traps work and which items are safe to pick up, so the player can gradually work out the most efficient path through. It's a tough but engrossing game.
The story explained in the manual is that your character is a merchant traveling to Persia to do business, but your guide sneaks off with all your merchandise and provisions, leaving you to die in the desert. Fortunately (?) a band of brigands appears and takes you captive. The leader forces you to enter the Fortress of the Dragon to recover the fabled Sword of Kadash or die trying. You're sent in with "a dagger, a shield, and your natural charm." Assuming you actually succeed, your now hardened hero emerges with the sword with the intent on turning it against the brigands instead of peacefully handing it over.
Cole told the CRPG Addict that he envisioned the game as having more a high fantasy theme, but that the publishers forced the Middle Eastern/historical fantasy theme on him late in development. It's possible a high fantasy theme may have improved sales - this was the mid-80s, when things were shifting toward epics - but for the purposes of this blog, the game's final theme is actually much more in line with classic sword-and-sorcery. A lone adventurer exploring a haunted fortress in the middle of the Persian desert and dealing with brigands sounds like the kind of premise Robert E. Howard could have used for a yarn featuring Conan, El Borak, or maybe Cormac Fitzgeoffrey.
[Apologies for very slow upload pace in recent months. Real life concerns have been incessant, but there's no lack of things to talk about.]
No sorcery in this one, just sword, but a lot of classic S&S does have a strong historical element. And even as history-minded as this game is, it does brush up against a sense of weirdness in a couple of spots.
Kingdom Come: Deliverance was Kickstarted in 2014, released in 2018. The player takes control of Henry of Skalitz, the son of a blacksmith living in a Bohemian village in 1403. The king, Wenceslaus IV, is a bit of a disappointment compared to his father, Charles IV, who presided over a golden age for the country. In response to Wenceslaus's frivolous ways, his half-brother Sigismund leads an invasion of the country to presumably sort things out. What this means for humble citizens like Henry is that his village, a valuable silver-mining center, is sacked by Cuman mercenaries who take liberties with the locals in the process, including killing Henry's parents. Just before the invasion, Henry's father had forged an exceptional sword for the local lord, Sir Divish, and in the early portion of the game the sword is stolen by the villains, so Henry's quest becomes to recover the sword while taking revenge for his parents and village. Henry will become a knight in Sir Divish's service and will travel across a region that includes the towns of Sasau and Rattay.
The game is a first-person RPG, built on the CryEngine, with very good graphics that emphasize realism over art direction and mood. Henry has basic needs for sleep and sustenance that have to be monitored, although they aren't too difficult to maintain. Injuries have to be looked after. Not bathing or taking care of your clothes and armor will draw insults from other characters. The fighting system involves having to practice to level up strength and skills so Henry will have more endurance and ability to parry, strike, and counter attacks. The combat system is interesting but disappointingly falls down in major battles where Henry is part of larger forces clashing. It simply becomes a mess of men flailing at each other and the most effective technique is probably to just run behind the enemy shield wall and start backstabbing people while your fellows keep them occupied in front. Not exactly the blood and thunder one would hope for in such situations.
KCD had to be crowdfunded because historical games, especially ones in as obscure a setting as medieval Bohemia that require a hefty budget, terrify game publishers that would greatly prefer to stick to tried-and-true settings like Tolkienesque/D&D-flavored fantasy or space marine-centric sci-fi. As much as possible, KCD is based on real places and events, peppers its story with several actual historical figures, and generally tries to present its setting with as much accuracy as a video game could reasonably allow. A writer like Harold Lamb might have found it interesting. Accessing the game menus will allow the player to read brief encyclopedia entries on medieval society, enough that playing the game will give players an elementary-level foundation of Bohemian history. The game also is generally even-handed in how it depicts its setting, eschewing Monty Python-like images of cruel nobles mercilessly beating idiotic peasants covered in mud and excrement. Instead there's a range of personalities shown, with nuanced examples of people all along the social strata. Some lords are entitled brats but others are serious-minded and dedicated to their duties on behalf of subjects, while peasants might be hardworking, lazy, or opportunistic depending on their minds and circumstances.
The story is linear but the player is free to define Henry however they like. He can be a selfless do-gooder or a complete psychopath or likely somewhere in between. He can specialize in fighting (and particular weapons) or have a silver tongue or be a stealthy type. The game is open enough to different playstyles that there are usually multiple valid ways to overcome situations. Come across a bandit camp and don't think you're strong enough to simply walk in and massacre everyone? Perhaps try waiting until midnight and then sneak into the camp so you can take out watchmen silently in the dark and then murder the others in their beds. Or slip poison into their food and let it do its work.
Even at his strongest, Henry isn't a cartoon hero. Travel on the roads can be very tense, especially in the earlygoing, as Henry can run into highwaymen, stray bands of Cuman raiders, or be baited into traps by people claiming to be in distress. Henry's odds of winning a fight drop significantly with each extra man added on the other side - one-on-one isn't too bad; one-on-two is doable; against three, four, or especially five, though, and he might be in real peril and simply trying to escape or even surrendering might be the best play.
As mentioned above, the game does touch briefly on more fantastic aspects in two notable sections. First, there's a sidequest that can only be completed if Henry is able to access a cabinet of forbidden books in the Sasau monastery's library. The particular book he needs is Lovecraft's Necronomicon, although somewhat disappointingly, the presentation of the book is a bit drier than might be anticipated. Nothing about its authorship by Abdul Alhazred, and even looking over its pages makes it seem like nothing more than just another book, albeit slightly more esoteric than some. But at least it's something, and the lighter touch in how it's presented is probably more in the spirit of classic S&S than the overkill most games go for.
The other episode is a somewhat more standard one in which Henry is tasked with uncovering witchcraft in one of the villages. His investigations will take him to a secluded woodland spot where some of the women are trying to commune with Satan by using psychedelic drugs, and, after confronting them, when they smear the drug on Henry's face he starts hallucinating, seeing men with the heads of beasts.
KCD ends on a bit of a cliffhanger, but the sequel has yet to appear despite the game turning out to be an unexpectedly big hit. Considering how actual history went and the allegiances of the main characters in this game, it doesn't look good for Henry and his friends having a triumphant ending, but perhaps he will slip through the cracks and land on his feet somehow.
Not clear who the artist who did this is. Doc the Destroyer is an adventure/RPG hybrid that was supposed to be the first of a line of Doc the Destroyer games but the series plan didn't come to fruition.
Art by Joe Chiodo. Despite the rise of epic fantasy through the 80s, the classic Frazetta-esque swordsman still lingered and was often even in the forefront.
Times of Lore is another game that straddles that line in having a high fantasy concept but with some of the old single-hero low fantasy elements still present. They could have promoted the game with the Knight or Valkyrie representing the game's protagonist but they went with the Barbarian (kind of funny because the game is about rescuing the kingdom from a barbarian horde).
The art is by Denis R. Loubet, whose images have adorned many games over the years but were probably most associated with Origin's. He worked on almost the entire Ultima series, as well as Wing Commander and many of the company's other major releases, and he contributed to the recent Nox Archaist.
A couple of years after releasing Rastan, Taito and designer Hiroshi Tsujino unleashed Cadash, which might serve as an indication of how the tides had shifted in fantasy since the decade had begun. Cadash broadly resembles Rastan in that both games were side-scrolling hack-and-slash types (there was no crossover between the teams behind each game), but while Rastan was a pure sword-and-sorcery experience that was made to be a sort of unofficial Conan game, Cadash is a multiplayer, party-based game that tilts more toward the sort of high fantasy that had come to dominate the genre by 1990.
Up to four players can play Cadash simultaneously, each person choosing from a fighter (the closest to the older Conan/Rastan type), a magician, a priestess, or a ninja, each of course with particular strengths and shortcomings. Perhaps following Gauntlet's example a bit, or simply riding the RPG mania that gripped Japan after Dragon Warrior and Final Fantasy blew up, each character has a set of hit points, upgradable equipment, and experience levels, and before getting to the monster fighting players can wander a town speaking to NPCs to get hints about what to do; e.g., when in the gnome village, you need to find a magical item that will shrink you down to their level so you can enter their homes and shops and teleport to the next continent over. Instead of simply going in one direction, the dungeons are somewhat nonlinear and exploration could lead to finding chests with extra power-ups, although a time limit meant the players needed to stay focused on the goal.
By the time Cadash was released, people were starting to perceive Dungeons & Dragons as less of the classic sword-and-sorcery experience it was at the start, where adventures were often just about taking care of localized issues or simply raiding dungeons while picking up a lot of cash, and more like epic adventures where parties were akin to Tolkien's Fellowship of the Ring and the fate of the world, if not all creation, was at stake. The story in Cadash is that demons are rising up to conquer the surface world behind their leader, Baalogue, whose name is a mistranslation of Balrog. Baalogue kidnaps the king's daughter, so the king hires the heroes to get her back and end the menace.
It's a reasonably entertaining game, especially with more than one player, and it being not terribly long offsets how the level design can be a bit dull. It's not nearly as visually or musically inspired as Rastan, but it's not bad in those aspects, either.
The Witcher 3 is one of the most celebrated games of the modern era. It iterates on the gameplay style of the Witcher 2 by adjusting the combat system and shifting to a massive open world peppered with an exceptional amount of uniquely crafted content, much of it with full voice acting.
CD Projekt Red clearly wanted to finally get its video game version of Geralt more aligned with the literary version, so the story in its early phases sees Geralt summoned to an audience with the emperor of Nilfgaard, the Germanic empire that invaded the northlands at the end of the previous game. Geralt is soon reunited with Yennefer of Vengerberg, his canonical love interest, who's been serving the emperor as an advisor, and the emperor tasks Geralt with tracking down Ciri, Geralt and Yennefer's adopted daughter because the emperor is her biological father and wants her with him. Ciri, as the long-lost daughter of the queen of Cintra and the descendant of a crossbred elf-human line with incredible powers (sort of the Witcher universe's version of Dune's Kwisatz Haderach), is an important person, both politically and genetically, so she spends a lot of time evading people who want to take advantage of her, and in this game she's on the run from the Wild Hunt, a group of extremely ill-tempered elves from another dimension who like to snatch people and press them into serving their ghostly hunting party. Geralt is revealed to have been in their clutches before he was freed and rendered an amnesiac, explaining how he got into the state he was in as the original game began.
So off Geralt goes to track down leads on Ciri, reuniting with old friends and enemies, and generally having a variety of new adventures. Occasionally, when Geralt finds where Ciri has been, the game will switch to a flashback in which the player gets to control Ciri and enjoy her ability to teleport around the playfield, zipping behind enemies and backstabbing them.
As with many open world games, the overarching story isn't very compelling, little more than a thread to keep players moving into fresh, unexplored areas. What's more notable is what goes on as the player wanders around that world, running into monsters or bandits that need killing, visiting towns and picking up contracts for witcher's work, or just stumbling across strange happenings that need sorting out. When the game is at its best, there is no game that better conveys the sense of being a wandering swordsman simply getting into adventures. The life of a sword-and-sorcery protagonist who's more interested in making some money or satiating some curiosity about strange local rumors instead of saving the whole world. The major subquests, such as the one about the Bloody Baron, often feel like they could pass as well-drawn short stories or novellas in an extra volume of Geralt's adventures. Even the main storyline, to its credit, is really just about Geralt trying to reconnect with his daughter; Ciri might be of world-shaking importance but Geralt is "but a witcher."
The game is a triumph of presentation. The graphics are beautiful, with various environments convincingly rendered with crisp art direction. The music brings a classically Slavic flavor that has never really been popularized outside Eastern Europe. Most notably, the game has a very large amount of unique writing that makes even the most disposable content feel special. Wiping out a generic group of highwaymen will usually yield at least a letter or journal that explains who they were and why they were there, completely unlike any other generic bandit group who have their own brief stories. And the game handles a variety of tones. Much of it is grim and horror-tinged, but there are times it goes for humor or well-earned sentimentality. It brings back the Grimm fairy tale and Arthurian influences that Sapowski worked into his original stories.
Where the game is less triumphant is in most other aspects; i.e., the gameplay. Although it improves on the combat system in The Witcher 2, adding a nice side-hopping move to the full dodge-roll from the previous game, the combat is still rather unsatisfying in many ways. Geralt has a maddening tendency to auto-target the wrong enemies and in more hectic fights the player could end up fighting the controls as much as the characters in the game. Geralt's context-sensitive moves can be hard to predict - sometimes he'll perform a simple quick stab, but many times he winds up with a slow-developing pirouette. And the combat is often formulaic. Many situations come down to dodging or parrying a strike, hitting exactly two counterattacks before the enemy gets its guard up, and then repeating until the fight ends.
The controls for horseback-riding and swimming under water are also frustrating. The player has to keep Geralt facing forward at all times for them to work correctly, lest they start reversing over and over until the player resets the camera behind Geralt and gives the game a moment to settle down. With Geralt's limited air supply, you can literally drown while trying to get the swimming sorted out.
As an RPG, the game feels like it has an identity crisis, similar to its predecessor. Most of the game's design is in line with standard action games and the inclusion of classic RPG mechanics like gathering experience and leveling up feels at odds. Why is Geralt, such an experienced witcher, clowning around much of the game at a low level? Even late in the game, it's possible to encounter random bandits who can slaughter you in a single blow because they're 10 levels ahead of you, so powerful that it's possible you won't even be capable of hurting them no matter how well you've mastered the controls. And the game doesn't even gate off areas with monsters at significantly higher levels. The whole world is open to you right away and it's possible to run afoul of such monsters at any time, leading to pathetic scenes of Geralt fleeing like a wimp from routine drowners or ghouls.
As a major AAA release, The Witcher 3 is also predictably conservative in how it handles exploration and quest design. It insists on holding the player's hand at all times. Although it's possible to switch off HUD elements like the minimap, you'll still need to refer to the map to get anywhere because the game never bothers to use detailed directions when describing objectives. A character might tell you to visit someone in a particular city but they won't give you an address or note landmarks - you have to use your GPS/quest markers to find out where they live. Contrast with a game like Morrowind, where an early quest involves locating Caius Cosades and the player has to work out on their own where he lives based on information provided. Interesting locations in the game world are marked with question marks until the player gets near them, taking some of the fun out of simply wandering the world, wondering what's beyond the next hill or in those ruins off in the distance. Now you just check to see where the markers are and head over, never needing to bother with empty, unmarked spaces.
As a very large game, some pacing issues do occur at times. The game's second major phase, where Geralt visits the island country of Skellige (a nation of pseudo-Celts who follow Norse religion), often demands that Geralt circulate high mountains or sail from island to island. Although it's quite visually stimulating, the relative slowness of the travel can become wearisome and unlocking fast travel options becomes a priority.
Ultimately, the game and the series as a whole exemplify games that succeed based on their storytelling and general ambiance over their actual game design. They resonate with fans who enjoy the characters and the situations they get in, and with those who appreciate games that prioritize choices and consequences, less so with players who would rather just have a nuanced and exciting combat system.
The game does offer a tremendous value for money. In addition to already being a big game, CDPR created two substantial expansions, Hearts of Stone and Blood and Wine. Hearts of Stone provides a major new subplot in which Geralt has to literally beat the devil, taking part in other activities such as organizing a bank heist along the way. It also brings back Shani as a supporting character, giving fans of the first game who missed her some closure.
Blood and Wine is even bigger, so much so that it's almost a full-fledged sequel in its own right (Witcher 3 and 3/4?). Geralt travels to the French high medieval-flavored duchy of Toussaint to hunt a vampire, and it also serves as a homage to the early short story "The Lesser Evil" in how it involves a princess born under a bad sign. Blood and Wine serves as a sort of victory lap for the character and the series. After trudging through so much blood and mud in the northlands, the sunny, colorful climate of Toussaint can be a relief. Sapowski's stories portrayed Toussaint with a bit of a satirical attitude, falling maybe a bit closer to Don Quixote than The Amadis of Gaul, but in the context of the game it's refreshing to explore a place where the beautiful, well-dressed people seem to actually take chivalric virtues seriously (too seriously at times) instead of simply all being bitter-minded cynics and hypocrites. When the expansion closes with Geralt chilling out at the vineyard he's inherited, there's a feeling he's earned his rest and arrived at a better end than what Sapowski chose for him.
The Warrior of Ras series is an early Rogue-like RPG series (four in all) created by Randall Don Masteller. Well-executed "go in the dungeon, get magical object, escape" stuff. It seems to have fallen into obscurity, possibly because of its age and the fact that only the first game was ported to IBM PCs? The games and their advertising all feature art by Michael Haire depicting this distinctive blonde warrior. Turn his hair white and he could almost pass for Elric. Haire has contributed to many other games through his career, including various other Med Systems titles and Microprose's games such as Darklands and Sid Meier's works.
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.
