Reigns The Witcher review: sing me a song of warriors and witches

The Reigns franchise is so clever in its depiction of sweeping adventures. Each game is minimalist by nature, allowing players to make binary choices between one path or another, with each step accounted for in a branching narrative that takes you across magical realms.

The latest game in the series, Reigns: The Witcher, features this novel gameplay system, with layers of The Witcher lore over the top, for an experience that is simple on the surface, but entirely compelling as its winding paths are revealed.

Walking the way of The Witcher

In Reigns: The Witcher, you must make informed choices about the destiny of the titular Witcher, Geralt. The housing narrative is rather clever. While you’re taking on various tasks, exploring villages, chatting to people and defeating monsters, what you’re really doing is listening to the town bard Dandelion as he tells wild and incongruous stories.

Each adventure is a song, which accounts for the many conflicting challenges that await, and the many deaths you’ll encounter in your quest to serve your people.

Gameplay is brutal by design. You can only progress by looping through the story and finding all its odds and ends – with some of those ends resulting in cartoonish but gory deaths.

With each step, you make progress. You discover more about the townsfolk you meet, and the quests they share. You pick up little clues that hark back to earlier story threads, and on revisiting them in another loop, you may use your knowledge to take an alternative, better path.

In one particular plot thread, encountered early in your adventures, you must discover the identity of a hidden killer in a far-off village. If you pick your path incorrectly, you’ll find out who the killer is in exactly the wrong fashion, and must start again.

Knowing who the killer isn’t will help guide your next pick, so when a choice is presented to flag the culprit, you know which way the cards should swing.

While there is trial and error in this unravelling, there’s also triumph when you pick up the clues you need, and solve your next quest without wasting too much time going down dead-end alleys.

A balance system adds a new layer of challenge

What complicates the gameplay even further is a balance system that can determine what choices you make, and where you can tread next. As you explore, you’re adding points to a four-pillar system that can spell your doom, regardless of making the ‘right’ choices.

Serve the villagers too well, and they may cause an uprising that leads to your death. Preference magical creatures, and the same outcome may occur. You can also make choices that elevate the magic-users a bit too much, letting that power go to their heads.

You really need to make choices right down the middle, balancing all needs to ensure you survive long enough to unlock new cards and new pathways. While this does occasionally limit your choices, the game eventually allows you to gain new freedom, as more quests are added by progressing in singular runs.

It’s a clever, disguised system. By forcing you to make limited choices early on, Reigns: The Witcher guides you into a story that unravels only as quickly as you’re able to process it. It teaches you the ropes, gives you length to travel, and eventually you’re let loose into a wild world of sorceresses, conniving rats and wereboars, where each new card draw brings surprises.

Combat isn’t as successful, but keeps you on your toes

One element that is perhaps slightly less successful than other moving parts is a combat system with a clipped beat. It relies on practice, practice, practice to fully understand and use well.

This combat system features a falling array of symbols, which must be avoided or claimed by moving a token (representing Geralt) across the board. This token moves constantly, so you’ll need to remain on the beat in every battle unless you want to run into every attack and lose your progress to poor rhythm.

It took me an embarrassingly long time to gel with this combat system, and I failed several of my runs simply because I managed to kill Geralt in these combat encounters. While the system clicked eventually, it remains odd-feeling, particularly when paired with the cosier, slower-paced choices of the adventure-focused gameplay.

You’ll spend time relaxing in your various quests, making careful choices, and if you misstep or encounter a random monster, you’ll be thrust into a heart-pounding life-or-death rally where you can suddenly tank your latest quest.

You will still be rewarded with points towards new upgrades and cards, which can better inform your next run, but it’s frustrating when you give up on a new quest because you didn’t ‘lock in’ on the beat.

An excellent adaptation of the beloved franchise

Regardless of my personal tangle with a lack of a rhythm, my time with Reigns: The Witcher was largely delightful. This is a colourful, creative adaptation of the world of The Witcher, and it does very well to combine elements from the CD Projekt Red-designed video game with some wider lore.

The Reigns system feels perfect for the adaptation, providing clever choices in the quests presented, a housing narrative and the encouragement to forge on. You will fail over and over in your path to success, but with endlessly rewarding progression and always-surprising encounters, the blows are softened.

In this game, Geralt embarks on yet another very worthy adventure, with his signature dry humour contributing to funny, ridiculous and heartfelt encounters along the way. Take caution as you travel and you’ll have a warm, lovely time here.

A PC code was provided by the publisher for the purposes of this review.

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