Devolver follows Reigns: Game of Thrones with a new Witcher game

Dandelion wrote poems about every death

Nerial released the first Reigns game in 2016, using Tinder-like swiping to represent a medieval king hearing petitions and making the right choices to balance the realm’s interests and prolong its rule. The concept worked well enough that the developers applied it to different time periods, and even the world of Game of Thrones. Now Nerial is letting players guide the decisions of The Witcher’s Geralt of Rivia with Reigns: The Witcher, which launches on Feb. 25. While the narrative game delivers plenty of absurd humor and tricky decisions, it’s marred by the insertion of a terrible combat mini-game.

Geralt’s self-proclaimed best friend and hypeman Dandelion is hoping to achieve fame and fortune as a bard by sharing stories about the White Wolf. In each run through of the game, you’re dealt a set of three cards representing different aspects of Geralt’s personality – like Geralt the Parent – or goals for him to achieve, like Save the Snakewoman. Making choices that suit these cards levels them up, earning you more points in the run.

Those points increase Dandelion’s fame, unlocking new titles like Dandelion the Second Fiddler and Dandelion the Unobjectionable. Once Dandelion has enough status, he’s invited to perform for a noble, fielding requests for his tale’s tone and plot by choosing the most fitting cards. During my 90-minute demo I only got to try one of these in, but there’s a whole map of performance venues you can presumably unlock by playing longer. I’m looking forward to trying more as the puzzle is a satisfying way of measuring your progress, even if each of Geralt’s lives is relatively short.

Like in the other Reigns games, Geralt’s goal is to survive as long as possible by making decisions that keep four key attributes in balance – his work as a witcher and his relationships with humans, nonhumans, and sorcerers. If any of them get too low or too high, he dies. Some of these deaths are pretty straightforward, like being shot full of arrows by the Squirrels, a group of nonhuman guerrilla fighters. Some are extremely silly. If Geralt gets in too good with the sorcerers, his love interest Triss will make him go to a party and then he’ll die in an orgy.

Some runs don’t even kill Geralt but simply end in ways that make him too boring to Dandelion, like eschewing his sword skills to the point that he decides to become a scholar instead. Each outcome comes with a pithy poem from Dandelion, and collecting as many as possible is half the fun of the game.

Geralt is constantly presented with choices, made by swiping left or right, like whether to provide the Squirrels with weapons or help a noble hunt a beast whose head they want to mount on a wall. You can usually see which attribute a decision will impact and by approximately how much, but not whether the result will be positive or negative. The cards you’re using can also impact the math, making one faction predisposed to like you or quicker to anger.

Many choices will have unforeseen consequences later. Offer an author information on a deadly monster poison, and you’ll learn that they were looking for inspiration on how to kill someone, not their next story. Some of the decision chains are outright hilarious. After paying a toll for a troll twice, I realized the monster wasn’t very satisfied with their job and managed to guide them to a new career as a chef.

If this were the whole experience, I would strongly recommend it. Unfortunately, Geralt sometimes needs to fight monsters and this takes the form of an awful mini-game. Geralt’s head slides around the bottom of the screen and the only thing the player can do is click to change the direction he’s going. The goal is to have him cross magical signs and catch falling swords and potions to attack and heal while avoiding the dropping teeth and claws representing monster attacks. But it’s very tricky to time things right given the lack of control, and it doesn’t help that the tiles drop in groups to box you in.

If Nerial wanted to simulate Geralt’s complex fighting style, they should have stuck to their core competency, pushing him to rapidly make choices based on how to attack and what signs or potions to employ, using information about the monster gathered earlier in the run. As it is, I hope that there’s a way to skip combat when the full game is released so I can just focus on figuring out how to avoid getting turned into a fly by a jilted sorceress.

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Reigns: The Witcher releases on Windows PC and mobile platforms on Feb. 25.