Thronebreaker: The Witcher Tales

It's while playing games like Thronebreaker: The Witcher Tales , which blithely exceed my expectations in many areas, that I remember why I chose to work in the video game world. We are indeed far from the simple single player campaign grafted in a hurry to a multiplayer card game. CD Projekt RED delivers a grandiose, complex and moving story, all carried by memorable characters, excellent dubbing and above all parts as varied as they are exciting.

The writing is the thing that blew my mind the most. The story takes place just before The Witcher game trilogy, during the Second Nilfgaard War, and puts you in the boots of Meve, the intrepid, dynamic and complex ruler of Lyrie and Rivie. Throughout her adventure, the heroine is confronted with a powerful enemy, political stakes and countless uncomfortable decisions that defy morale and which have made The Witcher saga famous. Are you ready to sacrifice your honor for the sake of your neighbor? Are you prepared to make sacrifices for the good of your soldiers, but at the expense of a potentially useful alliance? This tale makes no distinction between good and evil. In the end, I only retain from my adventure difficult compromises, emotional and imperfect, which stuck to my skin for several hours after having made them.

Throughout my epic, I was accompanied by several aides-de-camp, with personalities as diverse as they are fascinating. Characters that, in my opinion, equal - if not eclipse - the best companions encountered in traditional RPGs. From the irreverent Gascon bandit, to the pacifist and fanatic witch Isbel, they all make an impression with their unique reactions to the decisions you make. Depending on your choices, they may open up to you, or on the contrary want to stand apart. I did not manage to keep everyone happy, which adds credibility to my decisions and my behavior during the adventure.

And it's not just about losing a drinking partner. Some of the most powerful hero cards can only be obtained if certain companions are by your side. In addition, several of these companions can offer special solutions to certain events in the game, or on the contrary put you in front of certain dilemmas which can end in bloodshed. The Eyck monster hunter, for example, is very useful for clearing a cave, full of treasures, of its evil creatures, without having to sacrifice the lives of its soldiers.

Many other maps and branches can be unlocked by using diplomacy or by forming alliances with one of the many factions encountered, thanks to the connections of your companions. I particularly appreciated the very intuitive functioning of this system, and the way in which it rewarded me - or punished - according to the values that I had chosen to defend. Even though I only played the campaign once, each quest seems to have a lot of different outcomes.

Help me !

The quests and accompanying dialogues are on their side as well written as in The Witcher 3 . More than once, I have experienced deep emotional satisfaction, before being overwhelmed the next moment by intense sadness. And the card games that punctuate all these moments are really fun. There is no question here of playing hundreds of standard Gwent games. Each encounter revolves around particularly satisfying twists and turns to overcome. For example, some commanders can resurrect any card you destroy. The only way to win is to reduce their hit points with non-lethal attacks until the end of the game.

Some scripted fights also sometimes require the destruction of heavily armed gatehouses in order to attack the unit behind. The high level of customization of the decks - especially after obtaining the ability to recruit special cards such as dwarves or Skellige mercenaries - also allows you to spice up the games a little if you are bored, or on the contrary to tackle some clashes far too thorny with more serenity.

I regret the absence of a function to save and load decks associated with certain game situations. This defect is particularly problematic during certain scripted confrontations whose rules favor or hinder a certain type of card I remember in particular a lieutenant who could increase the power of his soldiers based on my strongest unit. One situation that encouraged me - or forced me, it depends - to use weaker cards. The only way to prepare for these kinds of games is to rearrange your deck by hand, one card at a time. And after you have won, you must reset it to start again on a more "standard" deck. In my opinion, this system discourages experimentation. The idea of spending several minutes creating a unique deck, before having to reset it completely because it ultimately does not suit me, did not delight me.

The soul of cards

Otherwise, I found the various puzzle parts dotted around the beautiful hand painted Thronebreaker map very interesting. These require certain unorthodox conditions such as using a specific set of cards for a limited number of turns. Others ask you to place a card in a specific location on the game board using movement abilities, or to increase a card's power to a certain level. Sometimes it took me over an hour to find a solution to some problems. Some goals were a bit frustrating, but that was nothing compared to the great satisfaction felt when finding a solution. And since all of these tasks use pre-made decks, the lack of a save feature was less of a problem.

The five maps (six including the short epilogue) of the game are also not lacking in character and style, thanks to their magnificent landscapes which scroll in the background and which give the impression of playing a title much more ambitious than 'a simple 2D isometric RPG. In particular, I enjoyed being able to glimpse the snow-capped peaks of the dwarf kingdom of Mahakam, a region unlike any that Geralt visited during his adventures. The visually vivid environments brilliantly capture the essence of the famous Witcher's world, from the smallest mud puddle to huge monsters stalking their prey. Thronebreaker has nothing to envy to the 3D world of The Witcher games. To end it all, the game revolves around an interface that is both intuitive, responsive and pretty, which can be handled as well with the joystick as with the keyboard / mouse.

We can answer the second doubt immediately with a sigh of relief: if you do not chew the dynamics of Gwent with particular ease and above all want to enjoy another story in the world of Geralt, Thronebreaker will not get in the way too much. There are three levels of difficulty and if you already have experts we advise you to aim for the most difficult immediately, otherwise you risk watering down your experience with a lot of trivial skirmishes. If you do happen to get caught up in a clash that you think is impossible, you can always solve it automatically, saving horrible wounds to your troops and limiting them to your ego.

The first curiosity instead requires a more articulated answer: Thronebreaker is undoubtedly an interesting spin-off, but requires a little of your trust and your time to be appreciated in the right way. Above all, it requires passing the first hour and a half of the game, which basically acts as a long tutorial. The story is based on the deeds of Princess Meve, proud queen of Lyria and Rivia, who, like many other rulers of her period, has to face the incredible military capacity of the Nilfgaard army. A long, complex and fluctuating story that unfortunately every now and then loses its compass and offers long digressions that we would have gladly done without, almost as if we wanted to lengthen the broth of a TV series on Netflix that must at all costs reach twelve episodes. It's a shame, because when everything goes smoothly, epic sensations are felt like the smell of Nekker in a marsh.

From a strictly narrative point of view, Thronebreaker represents something different than The Witcher: Meve is not a character completely in the player's hands, he offers less freedom than Geralt. He is a character with his own moral code, positioned in a context of a different class than the monster hunter, however we will be able to decide whether to impersonate an icy ruler willing to hang anyone who contravenes his laws or a queen of the people willing to forgive, at least every now and then . However, do not get too used to court jangles, because soon you will find yourself in the mud and horror of a story that when it wants to speak directly to our hearts and puts us in front of those swampy areas of consciousness that the Polish developer likes so much . Meve's journey is made much more interesting by the court of characters who over time find themselves at his side, often angular personalities, who clash with each other in a series of dialogues capable of sparking sparks of humor and cynicism, giving advice often diametrically opposed to the queen, underlining the difficulty of making a choice that is actually "right".

Continuing the tradition of The Witcher, some decisions will have some weight as the story continues, unlocking new travel companions (and related cards) or transforming choices that seemed magnanimous into bad decisions. However, it is fair to point out that in most cases they will simply make us choose between a fight or peace. And since each victory will bring us money with which to forge new cards and expand the camp it is quite clear which is the most sensible way. Also because playing a game of Gwent is undoubtedly more interesting than exploring by clicking around the map.

If the 25 hours of history have their ups and downs, where Thronebreaker excels is undoubtedly in the technical sector, both from a visual and sound point of view. The game environments are made with painstaking care that overflows with details and the same goes for the illustrations of the cards and the dialogue sequences. The various maps of the game come out of the screen with their bright colors, positioning themselves halfway between the richness of an ancient tapestry and the stylization of a game board. Since Meve's adventures can ultimately be described as a kind of personal board game, the choice is undoubtedly appropriate. And if the eye is satisfied, the ear is forced to say enough in the fourth encore because the excellent Italian dubbing, the music and the sound effects are able to help the static images that describe the most important events and help our fantasy.

But what happens when the talk ends and the swords have to be drawn? A lot of interesting things. CD Projekt developers know that card games do their best with a human opponent and that a computer, no matter how good, cannot offer the same clash. He doesn't bluff, he doesn't think outside the box and on long distance he succumbs, even in a game based on the cards you have in his hand. Moreover, the Gwent is different from its competitors, it is based much less on the attack and more on the accumulation, on the movement of the cards between the two rows, it is less "aggressive" and often the computer simply cannot counter a good accumulation of cards. For this reason it is essential to immediately seek the maximum confrontation if you are expert players, otherwise there is the risk of getting bored (and in any case nothing can replace a human opponent).

To overcome the risk of boring the player too much, most of the fights are puzzles or otherwise subject to particular modifiers that make everything much more peppery. In many cases we will have to resolve the clash in one turn, trying to find the correct mechanism with which to put the right armies on the table at the right time, instead of simply throwing everything we have against the opponent.

Those who are already accustomed to the original game will find that in Thronebreaker things are a bit different: there are only two lines, you need to know how to use the skill of the commander, there are only gold and common cards and above all some of them are equipped with a one-off ability that can be used at any time of our turn and that can be "reloaded" by deploying particular units. For example, the card of an armored tank can deal a lot of damage when the units deployed after it on the same line, but it can only do it once. To be able to use it several times, we must therefore use a card that recharges that ability and try to move others between the two lines to increase the damage. This is just a small example of the joints that must be known (and that are widely explained) in Gwent and, believe us, it is not even one of the most complex.

Perhaps the most skilled players at the beginning will bite the brake, because even if the deck is widely modifiable the resources to do it are limited and it will be essential to choose carefully, but the good balance of the game offers a rewarding experience both for those looking for customization total, and to those who just add some cards every now and then. But be careful, dear Gwent novices, at the end of your adventure with Meve it is very likely that you will want to taste some of the real competition (and this is probably the real purpose of Thronebreaker).

MODUS OPERANDI
I played Thronebreaker in PC version on a Legion Y720 with Nvidia Ge Force GTX 1070 and Intel i7 for about twenty hours, thanks to a code received from CD Projekt Red. I have completed the main quest and some of the side quests and puzzles.