Déraciné Review – Stumbling Through A Dark Tale

From Software has made a name for itself with tough-as-nails games like Dark Souls and Bloodborne. For that reason, Déraciné feels a bit like an experimental diversion for the studio. It focuses on narrative moments spaced out between simple puzzles, and asks you to sympathize with orphans, not fight gigantic monsters using your favorite weapon. Sometimes it succeeds and is augmented by the virtual reality platform, but at other times it stumbles, held back by awkward controls and bland fetch puzzles.

Déraciné begins by introducing you, a magical faerie, to a group of orphans. They can’t see you, but they know you’re intervening in their lives at random intervals. You experience life as moments frozen in time; the world is essentially paused when you appear, resuming only occasionally so you can listen to a snippet of dialogue or watch something small happen, like see a pair of kids try to sneak into a window on a second floor. You can also see ghostly memories of the children wandering the halls who share bits of exposition as you piece together what is going on.

This “frozen moments in time” setup is a smart conceit for why you warp from place to place, and it also serves to highlight a strength of the game, which is making you feel like an anonymous spectator. You can take your time to look at what is happening and casually inspect everything around you. Unfortunately, the paused nature of the experience also means characters don’t move much, giving it the feeling of a statue garden or museum. The things that are happening in the world are interesting, but it rarely feels active or alive.

 

Puzzles involve watching the children as they live and work in their home, moving assorted objects between them like a classic adventure game. The fetch-quest nature of these puzzles is rarely rewarding, but closer to the end of the game, when time travel becomes a bigger factor, it gets more interesting as you watch actions in the past affect the future. Those final few final puzzles aren’t enough to elevate the ones that came before it, but I appreciated the change.

In the way its story is told, Déraciné has more in common with Gone Home than it does Dark Souls, but From Software’s ambiguous grim tone is present. You soon realize that faeries aren’t necessarily a good thing. You bring a vague darkness with your presence, and the mortality of the children (and the larger world, surprisingly) is called into question. Bad things happened before your arrival, and since you have some limited time travel abilities, you might be able to fix it. The dialogue of the children and the few adults who take care of them serves only to move the story along in a perfunctory fashion, but the events they describe are engaging and its final puzzle wraps the story up in a novel way, giving your actions a legitimate role in the conclusion.

Déraciné approaches VR in the right way, letting the player soak in the environment at their leisure, but the teleportation movement is awkward and most of your engagement outside the narrative hinges on how much you enjoy picking up objects, looking at them, and putting them somewhere else. The world is interesting, and the narrative features a handful of fun, dark twists, but the ultimate experience is bland, even if it does have its charms.

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Gwent: The Witcher Card Game Review - From Diversion To Main Attraction

A lot has changed about Gwent since its early days as a fun, imbalanced minigame in The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. The goal is still to win two out of three rounds by having the highest total card strength, but years of iteration in beta have changed the game drastically, molding it into something much more interesting and rewarding. Now officially out of its test period, Gwent proves itself a strong competitor in the card game field, offering lots options and strategies while also differentiating itself in exciting ways.

Gwent matches play out like fantasy poker, as you take turns playing a single card from your hand to gain the advantage that round, mimicking the feeling of anteing up. Making the choice to take a loss in one round to win the next can be brutal; do you play one powerful card then fold, potentially forcing your opponent to play two cards and giving you a leg up next round? Or will they immediately destroy it next turn and get an easy win? Few matches are a done deal until the last card is down, and I regularly felt my heart pounding as I waited to see what my opponent played, even when I had a strong lead.

One of Gwent’s biggest strengths is how you can curb the role of chance without making matches stale. Most decks are small, and you can see more than half your deck across three rounds. You also get a number of mulligans that let you optimize your hand every round. Though the right draw can still get you out of a pinch, bad luck rarely prevents you from playing to your deck’s strengths, which makes luck a fun variable rather than a crutch.

With its recent move out of beta, Gwent is more streamlined than it was at first (its three rows have been condensed to two), but still offers a lot variety in both decks and playstyles. Each of the five factions have various leaders who can drastically change how you play, like whether you use a monster-themed deck that sacrifices its own fighters to wreak havoc, or spam the battlefield with weak enemies you later boost into an unstoppable army. So far, only a couple of cards are indispensable across all decks.

Plenty of different deck types and strategies already abound online, though you may want to brush up on the more than basics before you wade into the more competitive side of things. Despite the sweeping changes and influx of new players for the full release, beta-seasoned players already have a firm grasp on deck synergies, though it’s easy (and recommended) for novices to look up strong decks online and use them as a base for making their own. If you’re looking for more casual play, unranked matches make it easier to test new decks, and an arena mode lets you improvise a deck by choosing one of four cards for several rounds, leading to wackier matches where you can’t take losses to heart.  

 

Taking inspiration from its roots in RPGs, Gwent also has a light progression system that ties into its microtransactions. Winning rounds, matches, and various achievements give you progress points, which you can spend in several faction-based trees to unlock small snippets of lore for each of the various faction leaders, as well as the various currencies needed to craft regular cards, their premium versions (which animate instead of displaying a picture), and card packs. Working my way through these trees, and being able to choose what rewards I’d get, made me more eager to keep playing. Most cards are cheap to craft, too, so while plenty of ads push you to spend money, I rarely felt like it would result in a significantly stronger deck. Unfortunately, the arena mode costs in-game currency (or real money) to play, which takes away from Gwent’s fun, casual feel.

 

After years of iteration as a minigame and in beta, Gwent has come into its own as a great card game. It emphasizes keen decision-making over chance, and a great back-and-forth buildup ratchets up the tension across multiple rounds. With a great variety of decks and strategies at its disposal, as well as strong incentives to play match after match, Gwent proves great ideas can come from small beginnings.

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Thronebreaker: The Witcher Tales Review - Tough Calls, Big Payoffs

Part of what makes Gwent so fun in The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is how it is contextualized within the latter’s fictional world. Plotlines have you building your deck across multiple matches, and occasional dialogue branches let you settle disputes with cards instead of swords. Thronebreaker, a new Gwent-based campaign set in the world of The Witcher, takes this concept to its logical conclusion, telling a new tale using Gwent as its core. It works surprisingly well, as the story delivers strong political intrigue, character moments, and tough moral choices. These all hold Thronebreaker together as the standard card-slinging gradually falters across dozens of hours.

Gwent retains its  back-and-forth gameplay (which has since spun off into its own free-to-player multiplayer game) in Thronebreaker, though it’s undergone several changes from its minigame iteration. Although the objective is still the same (build up an army one card at a time to win two out of three rounds), there are several more card interactions and abilities to consider, and spies are no longer the terror they used to be.

Thronebreaker uses these rules as its foundation, but alters cards to fit the campaign (and even lets you skip battles on the easiest difficulty). Many of the cards from the free-to-play multiplayer have completely different abilities, and several new cards offer some great new challenges. A fight against a griffin involves lopping off its individual limbs (represented as different cards on the board); fending off a group of thieves has one of them invading your side of the board. These battles further cement the importance of certain story beats, it was great to see that facing an opponent the story long foreshadowed didn’t lead to a straightforward match. 

Several fun puzzles find more creative uses for Gwent’s rules – or break them altogether. I love the way these they tie gameplay to story, like one that has you moving a character across the board to sneak past guards. I ended up liking the variety of these puzzle-oriented tasks more than the standard battles, since it’s easy to build unstoppable decks after a few hours. This makes your victory in traditional encounters a forgone conclusion, which gets dull as the campaign goes on.

 

Although you spend a lot time playing Gwent in Thronebreaker, the narrative does a great job of propelling you from battle to battle. You play as Meve, Queen of Lyria and Rivia, as she attempts to fend off an impending Nilfgaardian invasion. Meve is a fantastic lead, a defiant ruler who refuses to back down from the overwhelming obstacles she faces even as her subordinates cower before Nilfgaard. Between her steely resolve and her tense, harsh moments with her son Villem, I was captivated by her tale.

 

She’s joined by a strong cast of supporting characters, such as the conniving-but-lovable Gascon and Brouver Hoog, the strict king of the Dwarfs who forces Meve to play neutral with the Nilfgaardians within his realm. Although conversations play out in visual novel fashion, the animated comic-book style looks fantastic, and the performances and character animations are strong enough that I never felt like I was just reading text.

 

Choice also plays a large role in how your adventure plays out. As you explore a handful of large maps for resources that let you build up your deck, you come across plenty of moral quandaries. Some are simple, like deciding whether to spend money to bury a peasant to raise your troops’ morale. Others can have major ramifications on how the story plays out, and even if certain party members (and the powerful cards they add to your deck) leave your side. These decisions can play out in various ways, and I was pleasantly surprised when some decisions I was adamant about came back to bite me.

 

Thronebreaker is a great alternative for fans of Gwent who’d rather not dive into the multiplayer arena. Although some unique twists can’t hold off some late-game tedium, it’s a diverse campaign that emphasizes the strong characters and tough decisions that define the Witcher series, and emphasizes clever twists over turning newcomers into solid Gwent players. Whether you just want to play more Gwent or are simply a fan of The Witcher, playing Thronebreaker is an easy choice.

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