So, I completed The Witcher.

This game is fucking fantastic.

It's a very story-driven RPG, more along the lines of games like Planescape Torment than cheese like Elder Scrolls. By which I mean it's far less concerned with exploration - there's not much of that, and you spend most of the game in or around a single (admittedly very big) city. But there's a truckload of side quests and character interaction and it succeeds in all sorts of areas Oblivion totally failed in. The ambience, for one. It manages to really sell the sense that you're in a breathing world. The NPCs aren't the usual depthless quest-dispensers - rather, they're believable characters with motivations and opinions.

The game's tagline is 'There is no good, no evil - only decisions and consequences.' It lives by these words. The decisions you make are never clear-cut; there's no flat good-and-evil moral system, and every choice has merits, both practical and moral. It feels much less like you're controlling an avatar in a computer game and more like you are simply directing the personality of a fully-formed character. It's incredibly immersive, and the whole narrative plays out far more smoothly and believably because of it. In this way the narrative is closer to a novel than a game, except you get to control the main character's choices. It actually affects how the story plays out, too. Decisions you make early in the game will change events much later. You make alliances, you lose and gain friends. It is wonderful. The fact that the story is really cool anyway is just icing on the cake. While it includes a few fantasy cliches (though none of the most abrasive ones), they're used in an unfamiliar way and unlike your average fantasy game the story is always thoroughly personal. There's no generic evil warlord sitting atop his throne of flesh - only people whose ideologies and motivations clash with yours.

The game takes a little while to get its awesomeness rolling - around the middle of Chapter II, roughly - and before then there's more than one instance of goofiness. The cutscenes are sometimes a little clumsy (although more often they're totally awesome), and the character animations during dialogue take a while to get used to. Most of the first Chapter feels a bit disjointed and ham-fisted, but it pulls itself together in the end.

While Oblivion had a system to make each character look a little different but used about four voice actors to cover the countless characters, The Witcher's NPC models often pop up all over the place - though not to the point that it's distracting - and there's enough voice actors that I never actually noticed two characters with the same voice. There's a lot of dialogue, too, so that's really quite impressive for a fully-voiced game. Most of the acting is pretty good as well.

For the length-obsessed of you, the game's pretty long. Longer than most games as story-focused as this, at least. I guess it's around 50 hours or so assuming you don't do every side-quest - that's around how long it took me. The box says there's 80 hours in there. The gameplay's pretty fun - it's real time sword-swingery, but it's a little hard to explain. It's combo-based. You click at the right time during a fight and you go to the next combo, and so on. It's not as direct as something like Prince of Persia, but once you get used to it it's quite fun and it avoids the tactical pause-fest of games like Baldur's Gate. There's spells and things, and a big skill tree. There's not much of a focus on phat lewt and getting the next new sword and armour, which I actually found kind of refreshing once I got over the initial shock that there were only like four suits of armour in the entire game. There's a fair few swords and things, but the way it plays out is more like the event-driven acquisition of a new sword in Prince of Persia than picking one off a freshly killed zombie in Diablo 2.

Most of the item-based gameplay is to do with ingredients. Witchers make potions, you see. They make potions from herbs and bones and stuff you skin off dead creatures - there's a whole aspect of the game dedicated to getting new formulas and discovering new ingredients and so on. The potions aren't Diablo-style health potions, either; they have a whole range of abilities and generally last anywhere between thirty minutes to several hours. As examples: there's one that slows down time, there's one that makes you immune to stun and knockdown effects, there's one that lets you see in the dark, there's the expected damage-boosting ones and poison-resistance potions. As the game progresses, and especially on the harder difficulties, you can't survive without them. It's an interesting mechanic.

AND! The game has a not insignificant portion inspired by fucking H P Lovecraft. So, yeah. Game is fucking fantastic. Elder Scrolls has nothing on this.