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A beautiful painting that You Mustn't Touch. The precision and clarity with which The Witcher 3 displays its domestic environments is remarkable and perhaps unparalleled in RPGs: the crude earthwork lining the impoverished warstruck farms, the broken bridges with their planks of wood cracked at oblique angles, the obscure little earthen paths renatured back to meadow. It all approximates to something like the realist turn in 19th century European literature, the acuteness to the everyday and mundane that makes one look at its artistic predecessors and almost chortle at their relative naivety. One looks at the "districts" of a Whiterun and laughs, not just at their scarce geography but their sheer unbelievability compared to even the most offhand village in the Witcher 3. This commitment to realism extends even to the game's inhabitants, with a sardonic tone befitting of the game's wartorn world. The guards of Whiterun talk of grand conspiracies with the Thalmor and about their life's epic exploits; the guards of the Witcher 3 snort, cough, spit and shit.

I likened the Witcher 3 to a painting because, as gorgeous as it is, its nature steers it towards something lacking in interactivity. I point to suprisejunkie's great review, where they make an analogy comparing The Witcher 3 to an electric car stuck on autopilot. They make that point towards the game's tactility, towards how the game feels in its movement and combat, but I'd actually extend it further to explain the game's entire philosophy. For The Witcher 3 is not merely void of tactility, it's a game that's downright autocratic. The game makes no concession to the player to allow them to experience anything without it being a Quest or Map Marker; there are no opportunities for gameplay to emerge naturally outside of the context of prefabricated scenarios. It is a Disneyland with the Death(march) Penalty. The game's quests, (effectively) restricted by level barriers, are tightened down to an almost linear sequence, to the sequence that The Witcher 3 wants you to do them. You come across a quest early in the game that seems interesting, but You Cannot Do it: it's a level 32 quest, you're level 9. This might seem like a banal complaint when RPGs such as Morrowind scatter late-game dungeons in with early-game ones (and to great effect), but what makes a critical difference is in how they're presented: quests and enemies in Morrowind aren't given a level, quests and enemies in The Witcher 3 are. This level, an explicit numerical symbol of difficulty, distrusts the player's ability to judge a piece of content's difficulty. It seizes any means through which the player can approach a given challenge creatively and instead instills such challenges in a programmatic manner. Levels, in this sense, are not so much an extension of Geralt's power as a character, but act more as arbitrary "chapters" through which the player is allowed to experience the game world.

So in a sense, The Witcher 3 is kind of an uncanny game. As a lot of other people in the reviews have said, I don't think it works very well as an RPG computer game, a medium through which creative and intelligent player input is valued. But I also don't think it could translate to anything else. A serialized television show makes the most sense given the dramaturgical nature of the game's quests, but I think such quests are made better through their spontaneous introductions. You wander through Velen minding your own business, only to come across someone needing help, leading you through a whole rabbit hole: that kind of spontaneity is difficult to capture in a television show. I was thinking maybe The Witcher 3 would work better as a graphical adventure game, stripped of its meager RPG elements, but then you'd risk taking away the game's gorgeous environments that I love. I'm not too sure! I like The Witcher 3, I think it's among the most admirable triple-A open world-ish type games out there. But it's never gripped me as much as I wished it did, and I don't think it utilizes the strengths of its medium very well. It feels like a game that could very well do without the player at all.