The Witcher: Pardon Me, Not a Turkey
Happy Thanksgiving, which if you live in the US and dig on RPGs as much as I do, means today's the day you do battle with relatives and weird gelatinous fruit salads and post-feast lethargy and -- by the grace of hyper-caffeinated beverages -- possibly enjoying a sprawl of time in front of your computer axing mud crabs and bog lurkers and furbolgs and maybe, just maybe, seducing naked greed dryads.
Oh yeah, I guess the latter means I've been playing Atari's The Witcher, and for the life of me, I can't figure out how to not like this game. It's grungy, it's medieval, it's adult, it's thematically sophisticated, it has miraculously intelligent realtime mouse combat, and -- so far anyway -- a vastly more ethically complex (or at least weighty) plot than the bland sort of PG-rated moral matrix that's supposed to pass for trailblazing in story-driven games like Bioware's Mass Effect.
Friends can be duplicitous cult members, guards are (shockingly) guilty of sexual assault, witches sell poisonous suicide solutions and craft voodoo dolls to compel siblings to kill each other, barmaids (and plenty others) will sleep with you for booze, religious fanatics turns out to be distastefully misogynistic, and for all the bosky monsters, the worst aren't the ones with ten or twenty consonants crowding a single vowel, but other humans, just like you.
(I'd love to say more, but my wife's calling me, and it's time to shower and pack up and hit the road...)
So enjoy your one or two or four day holiday, and if you're casting around for something a little deeper and more unabashedly grown-up than pretty much anything else on the market, you might want to consider this bleak little gem in the comparatively jejune rough.
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I just picked up The Witcher as well and preliminarily, it's very well done. Aside from the crash course on the Aurora 2007 Game Engine (I'm used to WASD in Guild Wars), the game is very well written thus far. The only caveat is the game's system requirements: you need a fairly decent gaming machine to play it. (Not an issue for me, but may be an issue for others.)