Reigns: The Witcher narrative designer Oscar Harrington-Shaw thinks Geralt of Rivia has a promising future as a private eye. “Another source of inspiration which I quite like leaning on, which the games do and the books do, is hard-boiled crime detective stories,” he tells me, when I ask whether his work on Nerial’s latest narrative card RPG has given him any wild notions for Witcher projects. “Geralt actually sort of lives in that world. So it could be cool to have like a spin-off neo noir crime detective film. Almost like Knives Out, even, but with Geralt as the detective.”
My question has an obvious undertone of ‘please render unto Caeser a daft Witcher quote that I can crowbar into a headline’, but it’s not entirely malapropos. Much like previous licensed Reigns collaborations, Reigns: The Witcher is carried along by a pleasant element of ‘what if’. It’s sort of a celebration of fan fiction, here reimagined as an older tradition of oral storytelling. The game casts you as the Witcher’s best mate Dandelion, who is trying to achieve the status of an immortal bard by spinning fanciful yarns about Geralt – tall tales that typically end in Geralt’s demise.
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As in previous games, players are dealt a series of event cards with binary outcomes, ranging from scuffles with ghouls to invitations to a ball. You make choices by swiping left or right, while trying not to empty out the character gauges at the top of the screen. The Dandelion stage improv framing gives Nerial plenty of scope to mess with the source material, or rather, play up its intrinsic messiness. There are nods to scenes like having sex on a unicorn or the infamous bubblebath, alongside dog-eared quotations like ‘how do you like that silver?’ or ‘wind’s howling’ – chunks of Witcher ephemera that have taken on a life of their own online. And there are a few more contemporary real-world allusions of Nerial’s own devising.
“We sort of draw inspiration from all sorts of places,” Harrington-Shaw continues. “With other Reigns games, there can be a slight sort of anachronism to these things, and we want to have cards that are inspired by modern events. We might be reading the news. We also make reference as you’d expect to all sorts of questlines and sidequests, things we love from the CDPR game. So we might like find a quest that we love, and as a tricky decision try to distil that – how can we make that fit into one card?”
The Reigns card format innately allows for a more exploratory and spontaneous adaptation process than you might find in the average licensed game. “We don’t write a script,” explains Nerial’s design director François Alliot. “We do like a deep analysis, we read everything, we watch everything about the games, about the books. We even look at the fandom and everything that’s around the lore, created by the fans – fiction, memes, everything. And all this sort of becomes like [storage] for a lot of ideas. We write a lot of small events, things that we would like to see in the game, and then we turn that into cards.”
When Nerial are in full flow, the team writes dozens of event cards a day. “We explore the lore through that system of trying to gather as many ideas as possible,” Alliot goes on. “Create a lot of accidents and then output all these little cards. That’s that’s how we we write, and it’s different from writing a ‘normal’ game.” Nerial have worked closely with CD Projekt’s loremeisters throughout the creation of Reigns: The Witcher. Indeed, the latter have supplied a few ideas for cards. “We’re coming up with cards and showing them, but then they’re also coming up with cards off the back of what we’ve done, and so they were very involved, which was great,” says Harrington-Shaw.
Naturally, Nerial have been careful not to bend “the rules of The Witcher universe” too far. But the devs do point out that the Reigns pick-and-mix ethos is, in its way, faithful to the subject matter. Harrington-Shaw notes that Andrzej Sapkowski’s original books themselves distil and mash together a lot of wider folklore and myth.
“Sapkowski is a kleptomaniac with mythology,” he says. “He’s taking inspiration from all sorts of areas – Arthurian legend, classical myth. So we also thought how can we adapt – which is kind of what they do at CDPR, and we were talking with them about this – how do you take an existing fairytale, or a Euripidean tragedy, or the Lais of Marie de France, and adapt that, subvert it in some way. Like in the Sapkowski books, there’s the short story A Grain of Truth, where you have Nivellen the boar man in the haunted house, as a subversion on existing myths.
“We’re trying to balance it being faithful and also being a bit bold and experimental,” Harrington-Shaw continues. “We put it in this frame of you’re playing through the songs of Dandelion, and so in each run you’re surviving as Geralt but you are also within a song of Dandelion, and on the one hand that gives us more scope to experiment, we can afford to almost make it a fan fiction simulator, playing around with the content. But on the other hand, we hope people find that the game feels like a parody of the events of The Witcher, but coming from a place of love.”
Given the vehemence of recent arguments about The Witcher 4’s interpretations of canon, it’s useful to play a Witcher game that acknowledges that The Witcher is broadly a work of colourful appropriation and reinvention. CD Projekt’s games have been praised for the coherence of their ‘world-building’, extending from the rites of combat to the culture of Gwent, the Continent’s own tavern cardgame. By contrast, Nerial’s latest RPG invites us to shelve consistency and enjoy the practice of cobbling together ideas on the hoof to win the crowd. I, for one, am rooting for the eventual announcement of Glass Orbuculum: A Silver Swords Out Mystery. In the meantime, Reigns: The Witcher is out today on GOG and Steam.