T w e n t y S i d e d
Last post I covered most of the Kaer Morhen sequence, and called it “Part One” even though “Part Two” is really its own sequence. (Hence this entry’s awkward title.) This is where the game makes an important transition from being one about Geralt to being one about Geralt and Ciri.
Geralt remains the player character 90% of the time, as he did in the first part of the game, but the narrative (of the main questline at least) makes a passenger of him much of the time – it’s Ciri, as often as not, who’s making the decisions and moving the plot forward. While this is happening, the game does something very clever. I’m going to be coy and not tell you what it is yet, though I expect many of you have already guessed.
But I’ll give you a clue and say the first part of the clever thing involves a snowball fight between Geralt and Ciri. The Elven Sage, Avallac’h, is one of the few people who understands how Ciri’s powers work, and, in a bit of a disorienting time skip, we learn she’s been training with him long enough to become frustrated at her own lack of progress. She vents to Geralt, and hidden behind an innocent-looking dialogue option is the option of having a snowball fight with her.
(Ciri, incidentally, is a terrible snowball fighter. She takes way too long to put a snowball together, doesn’t know how to lead a dodging opponent, stands in one place for too long, and doesn’t make any decent attempt at evasive maneuvers, despite her teleportation ability! I personally was disappointed with her on Geralt’s behalf.)
It’s the first of several choices Geralt can make on how to interact with Ciri, which will become important later. It’s also a good tonal antidote to the darkness of Vesemir’s death. CDPR has demonstrated several times that it has a better grasp of tone than most developers. In lesser hands the entire Witcher franchise might have ended up mired in an endless swamp of grimdarkness. Instead, it makes good use of variety and contrast.
Some dialogue during this section sets up the next few quests: recruiting members of the Lodge of Sorceresses and finding ways to undermine the Wild Hunt. But first the game takes an unexpected left turn – a long, mostly on-rails run of encounters that I personally found rushed and disorienting. First, Ciri wakes Geralt up and tells him that she knows where Imlerith is. Imlerith is the member of the Wild Hunt who killed Vesemir, and a character I was barely familiar with at all up until this time during my first playthrough.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “The Witcher 3: Kaer Morhen Part Two and Bald Mountain”
