this, about re-enchanting the world and the darkness of original fairytales, got me thinking, I\u2019ve been playing through the Witcher DLC the \nother day and it really is one of the best games-as-narratives I\u2019ve ever\n seen
like the gameplay itself isn\u2019t that deep tbh. dialogue \nchoices and a third-person melee system that\u2019s pretty sparse by \nprevailing Dynasties May Creed standards
but there\u2019s so much atmosphere, and so much of it feels like these Polish devs just getting the ground-level fedualism right
and\n part of it is that there\u2019s this interesting high/low distinction where \nthe common village people live lives full of curses and magic and \nwondrous beasts
on top of which are layered these grand sweeping \nepics of military conquest that are just incredibly mundane, when you \nget down to it it\u2019s a bunch of unremarkable people doing tedious \nlogistics as a way to manipulate resource flows in a way that doesn\u2019t at all affect lived meaning
like\n great kings and nobility might tangentially encounter magic as a \nmacguffin on the way to resolving an incredibly petty dispute with \nsignificant bloodshed; to the extent it touches on their lives it\u2019s \noften to the extent that they aren\u2019t any different from the rabble
like\n there are flying humanoid monsters and the possibility of using them in\n war is lampshaded specifically to be mocked, battles are fought with \narmies full of village bullies slapped into cheap armor
(and there\n is an absurd amount of attention paid to material logistics as an \naesthetic element, if an army is in the field there will be beachheads \nand depots not as a particular mission setting but just because it makes\n sense; every settlement, in environment designs that have no attached \nmechanics, serves a discernable economic purpose; there are pollarded trees)
but a nobleman\u2019s unhappy marriage or thwarted youthful romance will manifest as like, actual monsters, presented with a backstory so psychologically real it\u2019s not til halfway through the questline you realize you\u2019re 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