Existential inventory. The Witcher 2 is a game about exploring, collecting, returning and repeating. Challenge sways slowly from difficult and invigorating to boring and messy, depending on the style in which you approach the game. Though the game levels seem expansive and exploratory, the game is attached to paths, to exploring certain roads, making decisions and reacting always to their immediate consequences. For these reasons, The Witcher 2 starts out a roller coaster and overextends, a classic case of Icarus versus a created subjectivity.
Subjectivity is what much of the game breaks down to, from the fighting the character partakes in, to the conversations that are little better than any other dialogue wheel. Perhaps what is frustrating is the game wants to be greater than anything it ever actually accomplishes, it is pushing so hard to recreate the feel of a classic fantasy that making connections becomes an exercise in futility. Though perhaps that could be seen as the strength of the game, where the underlying internalization of who the character is versus who the player-as-character wishes to become, it feels like indecisiveness.
The classic fantasy is thus awash in schizophrenia, where the character has personality that is clay-shaped, an unfortunate disservice which continually leaves less ambiguity with each interaction, rather than establishing a mystery around the character. The story unravels who Geralt actually is, but in the process takes away much of what makes him intriguing, the oft-established doubt that much of what he is doing is in conflict with who he once was. By removing the veil, by making him into a character, taking on the choices for who he becomes clashes quite often with who he once was.
Yes, The Witcher 2 is a game about choices made towards character, but many of these choices become convoluted or frustrated by certain decisions made throughout the game, such as the ability to pause and save anywhere throughout the game world. Thus, choice becomes less about the singular situation and the interaction therein, infected with the problem of min-maxing that comes along with any role-playing game. The sense of time is thus deluded and morphing according to the player’s will, according to the taps of their controller, rather than the intentionality of the interaction. What this means is that decisions and fighting and inventory become clunky affairs that feel less like choices and more like speculations with the player developing a save-based future sight.
At its heart, the problem with The Witcher 2 is tension. Affairs do not feel like they have urgency, they do not feel as if they are tightly wound, and instead the experience feels meandering and overly-questioned. The politics and questions of character asked often feel out of place or perfectly awkward, and instead of granting a continuation of the exhilaration the player first feels when entering the game’s world, the game becomes bogged down in micro-experiences which are not satisfying in themselves. The Witcher 2 is enjoyable for the die-hard, but difficult to figure as a whole experience.
Recommended: No