T w e n t y S i d e d

It’s a bit of an abridged entry today due to the holiday, but I thought I’d button up some of my thoughts on the first part of the game.

In Which I Try to Figure Out What Exactly Is Going On

After finally gathering up various macguffins (the phylactery, the incantation to activate it, and a weird baby thing called Uma), Geralt and company are ready to polish off the first half of the game. If you haven’t played The Witcher 3, or even if you have, the parenthetical in the previous sentence might be a bit confusing. It’s still confusing to me, and I’ve played through the game several times.

Basically, we’ve been on Ciri’s trail this whole time, following rumors, gathering clues, and talking to people who met her passing through, trying to figure out what exactly has happened to her and where she is now. This is difficult because Ciri is a child of the “Elder Blood,” also known as the “Hen Ichaer.” I won’t lore dump about this right now, but suffice it so say she has unique magical abilities, chief among them the ability to teleport.

The problem is that she doesn’t entirely have control over these abilities. If she gets into a sticky situation, she can teleport out, but she won’t always know where she’ll arrive until she gets there. This obviously makes tracking her difficult, and it explains why we have to trek all over creation to piece together her story. Now I’m a reasonably attentive person, and I’ve played this game multiple times. However, even I am not entirely sure what exactly happened to Ciri and in what order. I’m going to try and reconstruct my understanding of events, without cheating by looking at the wiki.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “The Witcher 3: Drunk-Megascoping Sorceresses”

Bob Case MrBtongue is the Pele of complaining about videogames and will soon be the Garrincha of complaining about TV shows. You can find his Youtube channel at youtube.com/user/MrBtongue.

Skellige is too sprawling to be summarized in any kind of wieldy way, so instead I’ll pick out a couple of high-water marks I particularly liked and find instructive.

The Cave of Dreams

I suspect a good chunk of players don’t know this quest even exists. I know I missed it entirely on my first playthrough, and probably would have missed it again on my second, had I not learned about it on the internet in the meantime.

You can start it either by stumbling across “Blueboy” Lugos (son of Clan Drummond Jarl “Madman” Lugos) outside a cave in an out-of-the-way spot most probably won’t go to, or you’re directed towards the quest after completing a Witcher contract to unhaunt the local haunted lighthouse. The wrinkle is that Blueboy Lugos dies in an entirely different questline, so if you do that one before the lighthouse contract (which I would guess is the case for most people) you’ll never see this one.

In fact… I botched my current playthrough, and finished the bear attack quest long before (long enough that I had no saves to reload) remembering I wasn’t supposed to do that. So I had to pull screenshots off the internet.

In any case, Blueboy Lugos and his two friends Uve “Jabberjaw” and Jorulf the Wolverine (Skelligans have the most advanced nicknames of any culture in the Witcher universe) are preparing to explore the “Cave of Dreams,” which in the local folklore is said to be the place where you face your greatest fears. It’s something like a vision quest – you go in the cave, eat a variety of hallucinogenic herbs and mushrooms, and then trip out. And CDPR is up to the task of pulling this off.

Once inside, Blueboy and his two friends each face their respective greatest fears. Uve Jabberjaw fears insulting the King again (his did it once while drunk and tore his own tongue out to keep his honor), Jorulf the Wolverine faces his guilt over indirectly causing his father’s death by becoming distracted by Sirens, and Blueboy Lugos faces down a ghostly version of his own father. Finally, Geralt faces a ghostly Eredin and confronts his greatest fear – losing Ciri.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “The Witcher 3: Skellige, Part 2077”

Bob Case MrBtongue is the Pele of complaining about videogames and will soon be the Garrincha of complaining about TV shows. You can find his Youtube channel at youtube.com/user/MrBtongue.