JAKE CLELAND

Folks had been whining about Roach, the horse, being a nightmare to control for months before I touched the game. In reality, Roach is… not so bad. The collision detection is strange – sometimes she’ll intuitively dart and weave through thickets of trees at a gallop, but then pull up and whinny in fear when she comes across a row of rocks higher than her ankle – but mostly it’s not that frustrating. What IS frustrating is that Geralt himself moves as if you were guiding him by pushing him in the back with a pool noodle, and this never gets easier – you just become more familiar with the nuances of the pool noodle dynamic. The greatest monster slayer of all time will dodge the lethal charge of a griffin by fractions of a microsecond and parry a crossbow bolt shot from behind deep cover with nothing but a sword… and yet he’ll still have to run around in a circle three times, then move forward a bit, then slowly spin on the spot, then look down to pick up a herb.

Also, sometimes Geralt runs into battle attempting to punch huge demons to death instead of drawing his sword. But, uh, that’s fine. Badass points, I guess. Same reason you can’t question why Geralt’s silver hair is perpetually swaying in non-existent breeze like the subject of a Pantene ad. It looks cool.

So here’s the deal. Geralt is a Witcher, a kind of monster hunter-slash-detective. A few centuries ago, a bunch of dimensions folded over briefly, bringing monsters, magic, and humans into the world of elves and dwarves. The humans’ solution was to create Witchers to kill the monsters, but to create Witchers meant a torturous process of mutation in which only three out of every ten applicants survived. Sometimes less! The lore is that the process turns people into emotionless killing machines, but Geralt’s apparently an anomaly in that he’s got a whole saddlebag of emotions. Witchers aren’t heroes, neither; traditionally they only kill monsters for money, and sometimes they kill people for free. Most folks consider them alien. They’re something people need, but don’t want, says the game. Which means Geralt is more or less fundamentally alone in the world. He travels from village to village, seeking contracts to kill monsters, and gets spat on and occasionally assaulted for his troubles. The Witcher’s life is one of solitude and Geralt – and any Witcher - risks a lot by straying from that ascetic ideal.

Wait, let’s do another metaphor: the core of the Witcher 3 is in three layers, like a Magnum Ego: innermost, the search for Geralt’s identity in relation to several main characters, most notably the sorceresses Yennefer and Triss and his pseudo-daughter Ciri; then, the errand running; and on top, the sword-swingin’ magic-castin’ fantasy fighting adventure game. Folks talk about “core mechanics” but in the Witcher 3, the mechanics are furthest from the core as a game can get outside of a Telltale adventure. This is a book you watch, and then a book you play, in that order. Half of the game (statistic dubious; it might actually be as much as 90%) involves walking from here to there, maybe a few metres, even, to trigger another cutscene. You will never mind, and if you do, The Witcher 3 is not for you. I got about half way through the game before realizing I could skip moments of these cutscenes and it was some of the most invested time I spent in the game. When I’d read the subtitles ahead of a speaking character, I’d look up, and watch the way characters in the background would react; the way Yen’s jawline would rise a touch and a smirk would curl out along her cheeks, the way the edges of Geralt’s eyes would slightly crinkle in skepticism, the way a hand would idly brush the edge of a table, fidgeting. I don’t much give a shit for rewarding how much work the devs put into this stuff – I expect it to be there, because all details should be accounted for and all opportunities for expression taken – but this is one of the main reasons, reckon, folks fall so hard for this game. People aren’t standing in dialogue, either tense or banal, over-gesticulating (Grand Theft Auto) or standing limp waiting to be activated (every other game.) There is life behind those eyes – decisions being made, biases being challenged or reaffirmed – and it is taking agency over the world around you. They’re being people. And you will care more about these people than people you even care about in your real, non-Witcher life.

If it weren’t for the perpetual expression and reaction of the people around you, the consequences of their motivations conflicting or aligning with your own would bear no weight. As it is, they bring the kind of gravity reserved typically for Capsule Corp training rooms and collapsing stars. The main characters in the Witcher 3 have been entwined with each other (literally, in some cases, you know what I meeeean?) through two prior games and five books. They have history, I’m sayin’, and a lot of it. Hearts have been repeatedly broken and mended, expectations constantly failed and exceeded, personalities clashed and enmeshed. I’m not going to say the Witcher 3 is a triumph for the illustration of female characters – sex and the human body is treated refreshingly frank here, but the fact that the love interests are all conventionally gorgeous bisexual white women who shop exclusively from the Vizima’s Secret catalogue is worth consideration - but it’s a step above the norm: at least Sapkowski gave them motivations at all, and depending on how charitable you are, they’re empathetic ones. When Yen acts like a shit it’s because over her century lifespan she’s endured all kinds of abuse, and how’re you gonna blame a gal for prioritising her self-preservation when nobody will prioritise it for her? The damaged woman trope is overplayed in fiction, but the Witcher 3 never plays it for shock: everyone is damaged here – the women in ways often mirroring the ways women are damaged in our own lives, the men likewise, and the same goes for the racially vilified – and they deal with it in their own ways. Its manifestations are subtle. You feel it in the guarded tone Triss speaks to Geralt at first, still (only implicitly; the game is clever enough to never tell more than it can show, and as we’ve already established, it shows well) unpacking their relationship, which started while Geralt had lost all his memories and ended when they returned, and he returned to Yen. You can play this love triangle as sordid as you like – for a while, anyway; I tried, and the game punished me for my avarice – but objectively, the three of them are trying to be as respectful of each other as they can be. Triss loves Geralt but won’t battle his history with Yen, Yen loves Geralt but won’t endure the terror of uncertainty if she doesn’t have to, and Geralt loves both – and when, like he did in my playthrough, he hurts both, he respects the distance the two want to put between themselves and him. 

When that distancing happened to me, I reacted instinctively in a way I later reflected was probably realistic. I haven’t wanted to say too much about Ciri because anything will give plot points away, so the rest of the next paragraph will contain light spoilers, and we’ll resume after that.

Knowing my relationships with Yen and Triss were burned, I put all my energy into being the father Ciri wanted. Some recently separated fathers express this sensation with vigorous gift-giving, but the only gift I had to give was my experience of what a lost child needs most. We visited a temple belonging to one character and she found out that character had betrayed her; I helped her smash a bunch of his shit and we laughed the whole time. She struggled with self-doubt; I spent a morning throwing snowballs at her. She would ask me to make choices; I told her I would support hers. She looked to me for advice; I counseled her towards wisdom. I never preached. I tried, as hard as I could, to do what was best for her. But at one point, we came to a crossroads, and it was a matter of steering her towards a life of noble servitude or one of humble work by my side. I knew that the best course for everyone was for her to go where she could do the most good, but I couldn’t let her go. So I asked her to stay. And she said she had to leave anyway. I’d taught her too well, and in the moment I suffered, but I was proud.

Geralt’s cultural adjacents are numerous: Ned Stark (haplessly honorable (in certain playthroughs)), Bond (the harem), Blade (not quite human, not quite monster, hated by both yet necessary for the survival of the former), Phillip Marlowe (sleuthing), Liam Neeson in Taken (the desperate parent). Geralt inhabits all of these at different times, sometimes simultaneously, but the last is the most compelling.

I read a while ago that The Witcher 3 is complicit in what this person called The Daddening of Games, which I assume is a reference to The Last of Us and Fallout 4 and the rest of a recent slate of game narratives driven by paternal instinct – you can take this back to Silent Hill, even, if you want. These stories are easy to feel affinity for if you’re the kind of person with their own troubled relationships to flawed fathers (ain’t they all) as much as those willing to examine and explore their own capability to nurture.

In the post-climax end of the game – in one of the endings, anyway - you revisit a place marked as important in an early quest. It’s a tender moment. But a day after I experienced it, I started a new game, and when I got to that part I felt a sting of what I can only describe as atemporal grief, a kind of heartache for the loss I felt after revisiting the place at the game’s end, and a kind of heartbreak knowing the significance it would later take. Holy shit y’all, I’ve been to cafes I used to frequent with exes and not taken it this hard. I stood on this particular hill, as Geralt, watching the solar glow of the setting sun throw golden light on the trees around me, and wondered at what point I’d adopted Geralt’s longing and anguish as my own.

And that’s where the Witcher 3 finds its strongest idea. This is a story about confronting one’s irrelevance. Geralt can only convince himself that he’s making the world a better place one dead monster at a time – although his conversations with trolls make you wonder if the massacre could be avoided – but as one character puts it, this is not his story – “What would you know about saving the world? You’re only a Witcher.” Geralt is a useful tool, but only that. The characters he helps are the only ones with the potential to stop the end of the world, and then transform it away from its ills and prejudices once it’s saved. By the end, I was left standing in a massive castle by myself, the domestic idyll on which the game opens now perverted into a haunting monument to my unnecessity. I’d done all I could; now it was up to everyone else. An ending cinematic says Geralt goes back to living hand to mouth hunting monsters, which makes him no more heroic or important than the farmers constantly toiling in White Orchard. My only meaning for the duration of the story was what was given to me by the broadly influential people around me, and stripped of them, I was stripped of purpose. The Witcher’s life is one of solitude, but alone again, having been victorious against the greatest evil the world had ever faced, I felt nevertheless defeated.