Down the sinews of memory lane again.
You have this spirit caught in a tree in the Whispering Hillock that utters : "A mare, wild and free...In meadow's pasture caught...Dark as a bottomless well...Black as the depths of night...Such a beast, no other." It's one of the best moments of the game. The whole quest smells like putrid devotion, with a love for language old and profane. Instances like these are when you truly understand how enamoured Wild Hunt is with speech and its intricacies, the way it can flood back and forth between rustic tongue twisters and theatricalities. This, to me, is the draw, at all times, in a game such as Wild Hunt.
But words are precious things and a story like this one always has too many of 'em. In the process of playing a videogame, of sitting at the desk for hours on end - consuming swathes of informations even in the most restrained of environments - we tend to fuse with it. A mouse movement becomes a handy one / You learn how to instinctively use the array of systems at your disposal. Ease of play ; you ride through the mechanics, swinging your sword aimlessly before picking up a thousand little materials that you can never grasp anyway. Then you press A to have your horse get you to the next dialogue. Imagine bearings of all places in a fantasy setting - but let's say for a second that it's the point, because it is effectively the point. Speeches of all shapes and sizes are Wild Hunt's way of framing the moments, big and small, that tend to make or break our experience. You don't necessarily remember the time you looted a Witcher's grave but you do remember setting up a stage play with your best friends at the end of the world. Speeches, short and long, are Wild Hunt's way of conveying theme. Of manifesting (and maybe even warping to the extent of our choices) the text. Wild Hunt, as it happens, has a lot of thoughts on human nature. On society. On being a father - every ten hours of gameplay or so.

But in these moments all I really care about is Johnny the Whiterun guard that told me about the arrow once lodged in his knee. What gets me thinking - what got all of us thinking in truth - is just how common of a name Johnny was in Northern Tamriel and how many arrows seemed to be flying, daddyless and unsupervised, around Skyrim's terrain.
This interaction is revelatory to me.

Because the more you play Wild Hunt and the more you realise that its open-world is full of Johnnys. Because what I need to know about Phillipe Strenger is not a façade reproduction of abuse or some kind of temporal puzzle that would allow me to solve the riddle of his humanity.
I don't care about the how, only the why. Why did you take up arms in war ? Why did you choose that woman ? Why did you no longer choose her ? Why why why. And in the absence of answers to this question, a movement then, something to bend me towards the videogame.
It's like, I could never trust someone whose favourite game is The Stanley Parable. It's not about whether The Stanley Parable is good or bad. It's about It being a game of hows and ways. Of metatext for the sake of the metatext - so just a text, then.
Wild Hunt is a game that asks the Skyrim soldier the circumstances of his crippled knee, but rarely why he wanted to venture the wildernesses in the first place. And I think that's preposterous.

One of my favorite lines in the Whispering Hillock goes as follows :

"It is done already...
It cannot be undone.
There are no roads...
To Aard Cerbin."

This is the pIace. Somewhere beneath the veneer. I wish we could go there. Leave the boring social apparatus to the kings and the elves and instead chase a wilder one. Be explorers, adventurers of strange forces beyond Geralt's comprehension. Actually, I'd just wish I could feel his body, his thoughts sometimes incorporated in play or dialogue variances. But I'm always away - away from men, from him - and decidedly following foot-tracks to learn the name of a killer when all I really needed to know was the shape and colour of their favourite dagger.