What.

What?

Doesn't this guy realize that I'm The motherfucking Witcher? The infamous slayer of monsters and devilry? The pale-faced, bar-hopping amnesiac? The sterile, dwarf-loving tough guy? I have silver swords and shit. What is he thinking?

"You fight like a lass," he says, taunting me.

What the hell is this game?

The Witcher
The Witcher isn't exactly a breath of fresh air. It's more like the musty, stimulating smell of an old library; somewhat stale, but comforting, nostalgic. It's a throwback to an age when the ESRB didn't exist, and when game designers were free to fling as much sex and violence around as they saw fit; when they were willing to fill their RPGs with outlandish one-liners and depressingly realistic scenarios, and to pose nude on box covers.

Take the main character of Geralt, The Witcher's silver-haired antihero whose role you'll be playing out. Within the first 30 minutes of the game, players will see him coring the chest cavities of guards, banging his female co-star, and attending a reverent funeral. From there, it's a short hop to an inn, where you can participate in an endless round of bar fights and drunken slavering.

No, this isn't your average G-rated Star Wars RPG. This is something else. This is European.

The world of The Witcher is based on a series of novels by Polish author Andrzej Sapkowski. Witchers are essentially the mutated Ghostbusters of Sapkowski's fiction, a band of sterile humans with supernatural abilities and enhanced fighting skills. Almost immediately I lost track of the main thread, forgetting which witchers were good, and which witchers were bad. The grandiose storyline begins with an attack on a laboratory and Geralt losing his memory, another example of how deeply rooted this game is in its own genre. No RPG released in 2007 that looks this slick has any reason to be carting out that tired videogame cliche, but for whatever reason, The Witcher still works despite it.

Maybe it's because I haven't satiated my appetite for a good, solid, singleplayer RPG in a while. Maybe it's because I'm tired of cookie-cutter MMO-style quests, tasks which almost never make an attempt to capture your attention or stand alone as any kind of substantial anecdote. Or maybe it's because you just have to admire a game that so thoroughly knows what it is, and isn't afraid of playing it all up to gloriously overblown effect. Sure, the 100% voice-acted dialogue is uneven, and at times badly written, but how can you not dig a line like, "Finally! This place makes my flesh crawl... Did you bring wine? Thanks, I'm not scared now."

Geralt himself is a sardonic fellow, often cracking wry jokes or narrating his own thoughts. After noticing an over-sized set of armor in the corner of a room, without any clicking or cutscenes, he comments, "From the blood and dents this armor is a warrior's, but this fatso's more familiar with a tankard than a sword." This constant usage of voice effectively involved me in the world, and within an hour, I didn't really care whether I knew what was going on with the overarching plot or not--simple exploration was more fun.

The Quandary of Quandaries
But let's get back to Mr. Dwarf Cock for second. A game that's willing to step far over a line like that should probably allow me to outright kill the fucker who said it. Instead, The Witcher locks down the Geralt-on-villager combat in some areas, while allowing it in others. You can't draw your weapon indoors, and you can't kill anyone outside until an area becomes "dangerous"--typically at night. There will be no wanton pillaging and slaughtering townsfolk at all hours of the day. You won't be soiling your naked victims to the detriment of Youtube. Hacking the groins of children will not be tolerated.

This murder law illustrates the difference between The Witcher and something like Oblivion. Whereas you won't be stealing people's jewelry or rearranging their physics-enabled furniture in The Witcher, you do have a far more fleshed-out story to chew on than is presented in Bethesda's game. A huge amount of NPCs are waiting with full dialogue trees and quests to present, and while playing the game, I never once felt the boredom that would lead me to a mindless slaughter of innocents. I wanted to hear what these people had to say.

For instance, once while wandering around in the wilderness late at night I ran across a traveler, some random fat guy in a robe. He soon came under attack by a dog, which, strangely enough, had been chasing me to that point. After coming to his defense, the man introduced himself. Turns out he knew me before I lost my memory, and his business has been doing so well thanks to my help that he was willing to give me a wad of cash, right on the spot. I didn't have to save him, but if I had let the sucker die, I would have never known gotten the cash. Rather than allowing you to act in a bluntly negative way, The Witcher instead allows you the choice of not acting at all. You're a kind of Batman character, perched above the world's common concerns, indirectly choosing who lives and who dies.

Of course, offering the player moral choices is the mechanic de rigueur of RPGs, and The Witcher is no slouch in that regard. Shacknews editor Chris Faylor wrote an excellent preview outlining the unconventional method The Witcher employs to remind players of the choices they have made in the past--choices which can impact gameplay hours later. You are sometimes faced with choosing the lesser of two evils--or five or six evils, depending on the varied amount of dialogue choices--but more often than not these quandaries appear to be straight forward right-and-wrong affairs. Saving a dwarf from racist bullies is about as clear-cut as it gets.

CD Projekt, DVD Game
You have to appreciate what developer CD Projekt has done with The Witcher's visuals. Taking the original Neverwinter Nights engine and retooling it over the course of nearly four years, these Polish developers have crafted a very polished game. The animations, player models and architecture may not be on the level of Crysis, but they get the job done, and more importantly, they all meld in a coherent way. This is a gritty, dark world, and you rarely feel ripped out of that by something like a plastic wall texture or gaudy purple cloak.

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