Despite three games of refinement and expansion, The Witcher 3 is incredibly dense with mechanics and detail, and the pop-up tutorial text boxes started to grate on my nerves a couple of hours in. As I got acclimated, however, I found the gameplay and the narrative to be both a touch confounding but also intoxicating.įor starters it’s clear that The Witcher franchise began as a PC RPG. But for me, at least, it was kind of like dropping into The Lord of the Rings halfway through The Two Towers and having no clue what a Hobbit is. The Witcher 3 does a good job of easing the player into the setting of the Northern Kingdoms, establishing Geralt’s motivations and latest quest. All I can really do is convey how the game performs in raw numbers on Nintendo’s console, but I also want to get across how the world of The Witcher came across to a late-comer like me.

I wasn’t just comparing how the 2015 insta-classic held up on Switch-having no prior experience, I can’t really compare it to how the game looks and plays on other platforms-but I was also entering Geralt’s world at what amounted to the last season of a long-running TV show. So jumping in at the third game on Switch was a trial by fire. I’ve had the entire trilogy sitting on both my Steam and GOG backlogs for years, staring me down with disapproval and scorn, but I’ve never carved out the time to tackle these masterpieces. The Witcher 3 is the first game in the Witcher franchise that I’ve actually played. Rather, it was because I was so new to the series. Not because of the game’s depth and breadth I thoroughly tromped through The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Skyrim and Xenoblade Chronicles 2 on Switch, and dozens of other hefty RPGs on a variety of other consoles, so it wasn’t The Witcher 3’s size that was daunting. When I was asked to review The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt for Switch, I admit to being pretty intimidated.

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