Reigns: The Witcher

A brilliant fusion of the Witcher world and Reigns mechanics with excellent replayability, though reputation balancing may challenge traditional Geralt fans.

Introduction

I'm a fan of The Witcher and familiar with other Reigns games. I love how the Witcher world was incorporated here. The main gameplay loop is making choices by swiping left or right to decide on scenarios. You're faced with one scenario after another, and the goal is to balance your reputation with different factions: humans, non-humans, sorcerers, and Geralt's quest as a monster-killing witcher. Get any of these reputation meters to fully fill up or deplete and Geralt's journey will end.

Embracing Death

I started trying to survive the most amount of rounds, but then I started embracing the deaths because some are very clever and entertaining. I'm actually looking forward to dying in a run now, which says something about how creative the scenarios get.

Dandelion's Tall Tales

I love that the game is framed as a series of nonsensical tales narrated by Dandelion to his audience. This turns Geralt's story into a random series of events based on the choices you make during scenarios. There's no clear good or bad answer, which keeps things interesting. There are so many scenarios, and couple that with the inspirations you can activate for each run, you have yourself a game where no two runs are similar. This offers great replayability.

Combat Minigame

In some cases, you might find yourself needing to fight an enemy. There's a minigame where you jump back and forth on a grid while avoiding enemy damage squares coming from above, while also trying to land on Geralt's attack squares. It feels more like a rhythm game. I don't love or hate it personally. I wish there was a more engaging system for these because after a few of them, I wasn't much interested to do more.

The Witcher Fan Dilemma

I started hating this aspect at first. The reputation balance requires that you throw away whatever morals you have in favor of which choice is best for the balance. Your Geralt might not be doing what you're used to Geralt doing from the other games. I had to dissociate and accept that this wasn't the Geralt I know from the main series. Once I started looking for absurd scenarios instead of trying to roleplay properly, it became much more fun.

While the Dandelion framing gives this narrative cover, I can see this being a pain point for fans of the original games. The Witcher series focuses heavily on choice and consequence and Geralt's morality. If you want to advance further in a run for a higher score, you need to set aside those expectations and just play for the meter management.

Verdict

Reigns: The Witcher is a clever marriage of two beloved franchises that works better than it probably should. The Dandelion framing is genius, and the four-faction balance creates genuinely difficult decisions. The replayability is excellent with tons of scenarios and the inspiration system keeping runs fresh. The combat minigame is repetitive but doesn't ruin the experience. The real question is whether you can let go of playing Geralt as he appears in the main games. Once I stopped trying to make him act like "my" Geralt and embraced the meter management game, I had a much better time. If you need your Geralt to stay true to his principles from the games, this might frustrate you. But if you can accept that this is Dandelion's nonsense, you'll find an excellent bite-sized decision game.