Played this for three hours. Most of the gameplay is tediously walking around the map picking piles of gold and wood from piles on the ground. You pick them up, not by walking over them or clicking on them, but by standing right next to them and holding right mouse button for three seconds. You will have to do this hundreds of times over the course of the game. Holding right click is also how you talk to NPCs, open doors, etc. The actual battles are not great either. The puzzle battles where you get a special deck are decent, the only reason this gets more than one star. The standard battles where you use your own deck are extremely easy even on the hardest difficulty. Play standard Gwent or any other CRPG instead of this waste of time.
Normally I play combat heavy isometric CRPGs - Icewind Dale 1 and 2 are among my favorites. But the mechanical concepts of the game intrigued me, so I gave it a try. I went into it knowing there would be no combat, no magic, that it would be heavy on the dialogue and role playing, that the story was a murder mystery rather than saving the world from a dark overlord. I was fine with this, and was enjoying it at first, looking forward to unravelling the murder as well as the amnesiac main character's personal demons. What made me uninstall the game was the pretentiousness of the writing and the obvious political leanings of the writer. His views are far in one direction, and you will be beaten over the head with them constantly. There are a few NPCs which are the political opposite, but they are cartoonish strawmen, You can choose dialogue options which go against the writer's views, but your sidekick, most NPCs, and even your own internal mental processes will hit you over the head with what a bad person you are for saying such things. Also the setting is depressing: poor, dirty, short on food, full of selfish and downtrodden people. Ironically, it resembles the real world countries which had the writer's preferred political system inflicted on them for 80 years. The final straw for me was late in the first in-game day, when I realized I'd interacted with about 20 NPCs and disliked approximately 19 of them. All that said, if your politics match the writer's, you will probably like this game a lot.
