A longer game than you expect, especially if you adopt the "clear all map markers" approach that I feel the icon-filled map encourages you to take. Its main and side stories were strong enough to keep me playing on account of strong writing, voice acting and difficult choices.

However, Gwent (the card battles) can become quite stale. The game doesn't incentivise much deck-building. Personally, I chose my playstyle quite early and the remaining 30 or so hours just involved slight refinements as I swapped and upgraded cards. Thus, standard best-of-three round battles felt quite repetitive by the end of the game. On the other hand, puzzle battles were typically fresh and encourage the player to think about some cards in a new way.

Finally, its writing sometimes stumbles when positioning the player to make a choice. There can be a dissonance between the choice made and the tone/wording of the actual dialogue that can lead to an outcome that the player may not have intended.

Ultimately, the presentation and story is absolutely strong enough to keep you playing to completion, but don't expect the card battles to remain wholly interesting (possibly experimenting with difficulty in either direction could mitigate this?).

I’m really torn on this one. The story is interesting at times, with curious oddities and strange conversations, and then other times the story just seem so predictable, the mood is juvenile, and the gameplay can be so utterly banal. On the gameplay front, there is an annoying, repeating formula: go to a location, grind in boring “dungeon”, listen to a boss ramble, fight, read a wall of text, and hope you grinded just enough so that you don’t have to grind some more. There’s some cute animations and characters, however, overall, I’m simply not a fan of the art style.