The Witcher: Enhanced Edition

If you're considering playing this game, you probably already know all the pros and cons. There are die-hard fans like myself who will tell you that the game is absolutely worth playing. Even though the controls and graphics are a bit outdated, the game offers an unique atmosphere and experience, that not even the following titles can reproduce. The game is based on The Witcher book series by Andrzej Sapkowski and although it continues the story of geralt after the books took place and it is not the official story by Sapkowski you can see that the developers did everyting to honor the books from the most obvious references to the most subtle ones. And more importantly they managed to give you the taste of the slavic lore and culture that goes hand to hand with the witcher. The atmosphere is very dark and suspensful and you can feel it! There is always some mystery, something wrong hanging in the air and the game does an excelent job expressing it. It's not just the monsters, dead bodies, laments of the ill, howling of the dogs and the music that makes the atmosphere come together. Even a "weakness" like not having an open world or a quest design that (in some cases) doesn't tell you exactly what to do, contributes to making the game more immersive. (tl;dr) This game is a great entry point into the witcher universe whether you read the books or not. Forget what fan boys like me say about it in the reviews and play it if you think YOU will like it, play it without high hopes and expectations as long as you enjoy it. I stand by my praise, but I myself took a blind leap of faith, without knowing what to expect whatsoever and it became my favorite story of all time.

The best of this game is that Witcher 2 and 3 follow. Playing this game means that you will be spending way too much time of your life just holding the W key. At least half, maybe more of the game, consists in travelling a path you have already travelled before at least ten times. This makes the the whole thing very repetitive and, to me, very boring. Travelling can be enjoyable if things to be discovered exist and events happen along the path. But going twenty times from A to B, and then back from B to A, with nothing new happening ever, makes me feel like an errand boy. Other than that: combat system was enjoyable and challenging at the beginning; then it became repetitive and too easy —even at highest difficulty. The story, I didn't find it too compelling, but not bad either, and I didn't find characters to be too charismatic. I wouldn't recommend playing it nowadays, unless you have a particular interest in playing all three Witcher games in order.

If you just finished playing The Witcher 3 and are itching for more, this is a definite must play. The story, characters, locations and lore are amazing and the progression of the story is very rewarding. Your choices matter and within the first couple of hours playing you will realize this as you make decisions that dictates who lives and who dies. When you pick up the game for the first time, the gameplay and combat are definitely going to be a bit hard at first but if there's a game you want to stick with until you get the hang of it, it's this one. If you enjoy story rich RPGs with memorable characters, deep lore, and a great story buy this game right now and get ready to get completely hooked by this world. A must play.

It's a highly atmospheric game

So, let's get this out of the way: I'm playing this natively on a Mac Mini 2, purchased in March 2023 and running MacOS 13 Ventura. There's a little glitch where the cursor disappears when the game first launches. You sort of have to fumble around until you highlight one of the splash screen commands (New Game, Load Game, etc...). Once that's going, the cursor reappears you're in and the game runs great. I got this for free from GOG like five years back, probably when The Witcher debuted on Netflix. As for the game itself? I'm playing this right as I'm finishing up The Witcher 3 on PS5, so as you can imagine, there's a little bit of whiplash, quality-wise. That said: Witcher One, if anything, shows how far CD Projekt Red has come. The graphics and characters are servicable at best. Again, this is a 17 year old game, but I kinda of feel like even for that time frame, there was much better out there. Another issue is the combat itself. I didn't quite get what was going in the tutorial. Someone on Reddit pointed out that if you approach this as a point-and-click adventure, it helps immensely. Basically, point at an enemy, left click, and then wait for a second for the game to do it's thing. It's weird, but once I did that, I started moving along. Now that I'm about 30 mintues in, I'm like "Okay, yeah, this story is making up for the techinical limitations." It really is fasciniating to play this and then see whate CDPR wound up a decade later. All of the elements that you interact with in W3 are here in almost embroynic form. I'm not sure if I'll finish this or not. This game has a rep for being janky and it's well deserved. I also just bought Witcher 2 and everything (UI, gameplay, art) is just light years beyond the first one. It's literally a much more enjoyable process. If you can get this cheap, it's worth getting just to experience a piece of gaming history, if nothing else.