this, about re-enchanting the world and the darkness of original fairytales, got me thinking, I’ve been playing through the Witcher DLC the other day and it really is one of the best games-as-narratives I’ve ever seen

like the gameplay itself isn’t that deep tbh. dialogue choices and a third-person melee system that’s pretty sparse by prevailing Dynasties May Creed standards

but there’s so much atmosphere, and so much of it feels like these Polish devs just getting the ground-level fedualism right

and part of it is that there’s this interesting high/low distinction where the common village people live lives full of curses and magic and wondrous beasts

on top of which are layered these grand sweeping epics of military conquest that are just incredibly mundane, when you get down to it it’s a bunch of unremarkable people doing tedious logistics as a way to manipulate resource flows in a way that doesn’t at all affect lived meaning

like great kings and nobility might tangentially encounter magic as a macguffin on the way to resolving an incredibly petty dispute with significant bloodshed; to the extent it touches on their lives it’s often to the extent that they aren’t any different from the rabble

like there are flying humanoid monsters and the possibility of using them in war is lampshaded specifically to be mocked, battles are fought with armies full of village bullies slapped into cheap armor

(and there is an absurd amount of attention paid to material logistics as an aesthetic element, if an army is in the field there will be beachheads and depots not as a particular mission setting but just because it makes sense; every settlement, in environment designs that have no attached mechanics, serves a discernable economic purpose; there are pollarded trees)

but a nobleman’s unhappy marriage or thwarted youthful romance will manifest as like, actual monsters, presented with a backstory so psychologically real it’s not til halfway through the questline you realize you’re playing a riff on a famous fairytaile

drives home the point that a lot of folk tales were #relatable by virtue of being about human suffering