Reigns: The Witcher review

Dandelion sure does spend a lot of time imagining colorful new ways for Geralt to die. He also seems to know a lot of details about Geralt's sex life? Let me back up and explain what's going on here.

The Reigns series started in 2016. It's a survivor from the era when paid mobile games could still compete with free mobile games, a golden time that turned out to be a mere blink of the gaming industry's leviathan eye. In Reigns you were a king presented with binary decisions about how to rule, which you'd choose by swiping left or right. The consequences eventually led to a colorful "off with your head" scene appropriate to those choices, and you'd begin again as the next king in line.

Sequels and spin-offs became more complicated, and found homes on other platforms. There's been a sci-fi one, a Chinese one, a Game of Thrones one, and now a Witcher one. Instead of being an heir to the throne trying to navigate coronation ceremonies and diplomatic affairs, you are the Geralts who exist in Dandelion's songs—trying to stay alive long enough to achieve the three random goals you're given each run, like winning a certain number of duels or making sweet love down by the fire, which is where Dandelion knowing way too much about what Geralt gets up to at night comes in.

Eventually the ballad ends, not always in death, and your score is tallied while the quest-completion sound from The Witcher 3 plays and confetti shoots up, with a final blast based on how long you lasted. Sometimes, when you've had a real short run, the pitiful spurt of confetti comes across kind of sarcastic.

Of dairy and darkness

One of those choices lets me steal cheese from a tyromancer (that's someone who divines the future from dairy, a deep-cut reference to a Witcher 3 sidequest), which I could give to a halfling chef, making the non-human community like me more at the cost of angering the magical community. To win back their hearts I might refuse a noble's request to knock down a mage's tower for being taller than his, but doing that will annoy the human community. The three bars measuring these reputations fluctuate constantly and unpredictably, and if any get too high or low the ballad ends. Most of mine end with Geralt being hanged for fraternizing with the Scoia'tael because I maxed out the non-human bar by accident.

I've also had my blood sucked out by multiple vampires and been shot by a dryad, as well as having ballads end where I re-skilled to become a baker or retired to the country to judge beer competitions. Avoiding those endings is a real balancing act. The fourth bar measures your commitment to the Path of the Witcher, and if you spend too much time on diversions it'll drop so low Geralt abandons the job altogether. Filling it up isn't a game over, though. Instead, it triggers combat.

Combat uses a system that's new to Reigns. Where the original had a clumsy duelling minigame and follow-ups have tried alternatives like the card game in Reigns: Three Kingdoms, here it's an arcade thing where Geralt hops left and right to dodge falling claws and fists while trying to land on swords and signs. Monsters might block columns with fiery breath or a sonic attack, while landing on an igni sign can burn away a few of their attacks or a quen shield you from the next blow.

The battles feel better on thumbsticks than they do with a mouse, so I mostly played Reigns: The Witcher on a laptop with controller in hand. It's Steam Deck Verified and an obvious fit for that platform too. Most runs are over quickly and after two or three I'm ready to do something else, which seems ideal for a handheld game.

Which is why it's odd that, like the other Reigns games, there are multiple endings—and even more secret endings—tucked away at the end of a long grind. From the first Reigns there's been deep lore stuff going on, whether a devil had cursed you to reincarnate as doomed kings forever, or whatever was going on with the goddess whose appearances were accompanied by odd glitches in Reigns: Your Majesty.

To uncover these secrets you have to jump through a huge amount of hoops, unlocking specific cards and performing niche actions, but the amount of repetition needed to do that is so offputting I've never bothered. It's an oddity of the Reigns games that they're well-suited to short snacky play, but devoted to hiding stuff behind hours of experimentation and boundary-pushing.

The mild hunt

Reigns: The Witcher does feel true to the source material. Geralt's always being hassled by people who want him to be an assassin or otherwise do random stuff that's not technically witchering, and he's always trying to maintain balanced neutrality in the face of political forces trying to use him, which never ends well.

When my careful plate-spinning makes for a decent run with plenty of new crises and characters, I think Reigns: The Witcher is a pretty good time. Sometimes I unlock a between-run song puzzle, where a demanding audience member makes Dandelion construct something poetic out of inspiration cards and specific deaths I've unlocked, which is a pleasant change of pace. But then I get runs where hardly anything is new and I die because a particularly ambiguous situation upends the apple cart I've only just started spinning plates on, and then I think Reigns: The Witcher is just sort of fine.