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I approached The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt with little in the way of expectations having missed the first two games in the series. The sprawling open world action RPG is most certainly not my forte but knowing series’ pedigree I thought this might be a great opportunity to introduce myself to Andrej Sapowski’s dark fantasy world. And so I sat down to see what developer CD Projekt RED’s latest had to offer a total newbie.
Right off the bat players are introduced to the game’s key plot points by way of cutscene. Geralt, the white haired star of the series, seems to be hunting for his black haired lover Yennefer who wanders around a world at war leaving magical destruction in her wake. Geralt’s young ward, Circi, is also being hunted by a nocturnal skybound terror known as the Wild Hunt. This opening pre-rendered cinematic did a wonderful job conveying the basics of what was going on without bogging us down in exposition. Unfortunately this understated opener is preceded by a shorter, hand-drawn intro explaining the basics of the world in the most overwrought of fantasy cliches. This was the challenge I faced in breaking my Witcher cherry: for every part that left me surprised and refreshed there was another that felt par for the course.
