Recent reviews by StayWithYouu

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I spent forty minutes playing cards with a drunk blacksmith while a family was falling apart in the background. Not because the game forced me to. Because Gwent is genuinely better than most standalone card games, and somehow that felt more important than helping a man find his missing wife. That's the problem with this game. Or maybe that's exactly the point.

The Bloody Baron quest happens early. You meet this alcoholic warlord, classic video game villain material, right? Except the game doesn't let you off that easy. Twenty hours later you're still thinking about the decisions you made in his questline, and none of them feel good. There's no "correct" ending tucked away behind the right dialogue tree. You can research optimal paths all you want, but the Baron's story ends badly no matter what you do, and the game doesn't apologize for it. Some quests give you choices that matter. This one gives you choices that haunt.

What gets me is how the side content consistently outshines the main story. I remember a throwaway quest about retrieving a frying pan more vividly than entire chunks of the Wild Hunt plotline. The pan quest is literally just walking into a house and grabbing cookware, but the writing turns it into something people still talk about years later. Meanwhile, Ciri's story, which should be the emotional core of everything, sometimes feels like an obligation you're rushing through to get back to exploring another question mark on the map.

The friction points nobody warns you about:
Combat feels sluggish if you're coming from anything with tighter controls. Geralt moves like he's wading through honey, and the lock-on system has a personal vendetta against you during group fights. Also, the game has a bizarre fixation on making you walk slowly through dialogue scenes, which sounds minor until you've done it for the fiftieth time and you're internally screaming. And yeah, Roach. Your horse will teleport onto rooftops, get stuck on invisible rocks, and generally behave like a confused deer. It's charming exactly once.

Who this actually works for:
If you treat games like books and don't mind spending three hours in a single session just talking to NPCs and reading notes, this is your poison. If you want mechanical perfection or respect for your time, probably not. This game expects you to slow down, to care about a random merchant's dead son even though it has zero impact on anything. Some people find that immersive. Others find it exhausting.

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I finished the main story three weeks ago. Still thinking about what I could've done differently for the Baron. Still haven't figured out if I even want to know.

There's a specific kind of frustration that comes from watching your archers stand idle while goblins hammer your walls, knowing they're idle because you chose to look at a wheat field instead. That split second where you realize the mistake but it's already too late. That's this game in a nutshell, and I can't stop playing it.

The gaze mechanic sounds gimmicky on paper. Your buildings only work when you're looking at them, so you get this L-shaped or V-shaped grid you shuffle around like a spotlight. Need resources? Look at the farms and mines. Need troops? Swing over to the barracks. Enemies breaking through? Better hope you swapped to your hospitals in time because if you didn't, well, good luck with that. What makes it work is how the game never lets you relax. You're constantly behind on something. Always one building short, always wishing your gaze covered just one more tile, always gambling on whether to expand your army or patch up your economy. The tension isn't manufactured, it's baked into every decision. Do you train more archers now or mine more gold for upgrades later? There's no comfortable autopilot here.

The progression between runs feels slower than I'd like, though. You're grinding for permanent upgrades to make the next attempt easier, but unlocking new kings or meaningful buffs takes enough failed runs that it occasionally crosses from challenging into tedious. When you know exactly what you need to progress but the game makes you die five more times to afford it, the loop starts showing its seams. Still, the next run always feels like it could be the one where everything clicks.

If you want deep lore or a narrative reason for any of this, look elsewhere. There's no story here. Just you, some pixel art peasants, and an endless parade of increasingly angry monsters. But if you like puzzles disguised as strategy games, if you enjoy that specific itch of optimization and adaptation, this will grab you. It's for people who don't mind restarting twenty times to figure out the right build, who get satisfaction from finally cracking a problem that felt impossible ten runs ago.

I closed the game an hour ago and I'm still thinking about whether focusing on cavalry earlier would've saved that last run.

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