Best RPG of 2007? Demo Now Available for The Witcher

It's pretty much gargantuan at nearly 2GB, but if you want to give the hands-down best RPG of 2007 a whirl, now you can, because CD Projekt's just released a demo of The Witcher which you can get here from Fileshack.

Did I mention I love this game?

From my SCIFI Weekly review:

Ladies' man Geralt of Rivia gets around, and so does Atari's The Witcher, a sprawling, blackly ironic, ethically complex action role-playing game based on a series of fantasy books by Polish author Andrzej Sapkowski about this professional monster slayer and "witcher" (from the Polish neologism wiedzmin, originally translated by Sapkowski as "hexer," which sounds arguably less weird than turning a noun into an adjective and back to a noun again). Witchers are humans who have elected to undergo trials that alter their bodies genetically. If they survive these trials, they're endowed with superhuman abilities but rendered reproductively sterile.

...and

The tenability of easy dichotomies like "good" and "evil" is itself at issue in The Witcher, and nothing is as it seems in Polish developer CD Projekt's inspired translation of Sapkowski's beautifully turbulent, oftentimes amoral universe. Friends can be (and probably are) backstabbing cult members. Guards and thugs alike turns out to be aggressive sexual predators (sex as a theme in general is something the game embraces, instead of prudishly whitewashing this most elemental of biological imperatives). Witches sell poisonous suicide solutions and craft voodoo dolls to compel siblings to kill each other. Barmaids and plenty more besides will sleep with you for booze, money, gifts, and occasionally just temporary infatuation. Pious religious fanatics turn out to be repugnant misogynists. Mages who can't control their powers become half-insane, slobbering oracles. And for all the wonderfully "un-Tolkien-y" alghouls and echinops and graveirs and bloedzuigers you'll grapple with, the most hideous monsters in the game aren't the ones with six or a dozen consonants crowding a single vowel, but other humans, like you.

Comments

Ok, ok, I'm sold, you can stop now :)

Briosafreak

December 16, 2007

12:21 PM PT