Reigns is an odd little game. The original version was released in 2016 by developer Nerial and publisher Devolver Digital and is quite popular for such a bite-sized game. Nerial went on to produce a number of different Reigns games including a Game of Thrones version and a Three Kingdoms version. Now they’re back with the newest spin on Reigns – Reigns: The Witcher.
If you’re familiar with The Witcher in video game, novel, or TV formats, you’ll know that a bit of comedy goes hand and hand with the character. That combination of violent intensity and humor is perfect for a series like Reigns and Reigns: The Witcher leans heavily into comedy. You’re not actually playing Geralt here though. Instead you are Dandelion, a bard that has made a wager with Geralt that he can become the greatest bard ever in a far too short amount of time. To do so he’s going to tell stories of Geralt’s exploits, woven together with various prompts in order to entertain the tavern-goers.
This all plays out in the form of binary card decisions. Each round you are dropped into a story with Geralt based on three different story threads that Dandelion chooses at random. During the round, a series of cards drops and you drop into the persona of Geralt, choosing how to respond to each comment. Your decisions are guided by the goals of each of the story threads, displayed on the bottom right of the screen. Each one has three stars and your choices for each card sometimes provide a star to fill in the challenge for that goal. Completing all three stars for a goal will provide Dandelion with inspiration to create a new story about Geralt with new goals.
In addition to trying to tell an effective story, you’ll also have to fight the occasional monster. It is The Witcher after all. Combat consists of Geralt as a tile moving constantly across the bottom of the screen at a steady rate. The enemy is at the top dropping attack tiles and combat tiles also fall slowly down. Your goal is to control Geralt’s card, making him walk into the sword icons as they fall and avoid attacks. Magic spells appear along his path as well and moving into them triggers them. Collect enough swords and you will finish off the enemy. Fail and die.
Death is always in the cards for a Witcher anyway, but since this is Dandelion’s story and not Geralt’s actual experiences, the end of every story has Geralt dying in a different and often humorous or creative way. When the run ends, the game totals up the number of stars for each idea that you managed to achieve and converts all your choices into points. These points represent how successful Dandelion was in captivating his audience with his story and if you managed to get three stars in a new goal, you’ll unlock a feather of inspiration and a new story that will be mixed in, further expanding your card and dialogue options. You’ll also slowly level up which unlocks new narratives whether you’re successful in gathering stars or not and also makes storylines a bit more complex.
Once you’re successful enough, you’ll have to perform for various nobles as well. They’ll ask you to perform specific types of songs and you’ll have to choose from your repertoire of ideas which one best suits the client’s requests. Succeed and you get additional acclaim, fail and, well, fame is fleeting, isn’t it? Either way, once you’re done it’s back to storytelling in taverns and repeating the same gameplay loop.
The visuals in Reigns: The Witcher are in the same art style as other games in the Reigns series, with minimalist line work and chiseled cartoon imagery. They work well for the tongue-in-cheek style of the series and the Witcher content looks pretty cool shifted down this way. It’s a good fit here for the Witcher, though some of the iconography for various popularity metrics is a bit weak at the top of the screen and the vibrations when you have a key choice are a hair too subtle. Audio is quite good however and the game ends up having a decent soundtrack, only somewhat marred by repetition in the short gameplay loops with recycled ideas.
The real problem with Reigns: The Witcher is that it isn’t particularly compelling. Selecting cards is fine but when you pick something that clearly relates to a star choice and then it doesn’t trigger a star, it’s both confusing and frustrating. The same goes for triggering a star when you had no expectation of doing so. It makes your choices seem arbitrary in the game, and while that is kind of a function of the mix of story goals you get, you’d think reasoning would be able to help you here. Sadly it doesn’t always, leaving you ever unsure as to how to react to any given story choice. You’ll often find that you get to the end of a story and didn’t manage to do anything you meant to, heavily limiting the fun factor of the game.
What’s weird about this is that it should be more fun. The bite-sized design of the Reigns system is excellent, the scripting is funny and clever, and the interactions between Geralt and Dandelion are reminiscent of Jaskier from the main series. Leaning a little harder into that back and forth would have made the script more compelling, as would meaningful choices but unfortunately neither are implemented here and you feel somewhat lost after round after round of guessing what choices might work and trying to memorize them for the next round. You’re not going to be playing Reigns: The Witcher for extended sessions anyway as it’s not designed for that, but it just doesn’t flow as well as it should.
One last weird thing is the control system for the game. Reigns: The Witcher is very specific that it is played more effectively with a controller than keyboard and mouse, but after trying the game on the Steam Deck with the touch screen, the Steam Deck with a controller, and on a keyboard and mouse, the controller felt like the worst way to play the game. On controller you had to hold the stick down to make a card selectable, the touch screen felt more intuitive to drag and tap, and on a mouse, simply hovering over it in the right spot put a card into selectable positioning with a simple tap to choose it. Similarly the responsiveness of the controller in both stick and touch screen mode was limited compared to a keyboard during combat. Both analog controls and touch screen had a slight (milliseconds) delay while a keyboard allowed you to dance around enemy attack cards with the arrow keys easily. Usually the recommendations are accurate for games but here, the keyboard and mouse were easily superior, especially for the combat minigame.
Reigns: The Witcher is a clever concept with good design elements, fun art, and creative dialogue, but the actual gameplay simply doesn’t come together or flow well, making the experience more than a bit frustrating. There’s only limited depth here and this is clearly a casual time-filler game, leaving players feeling like there should be more than there is. While the Witcher world is fun and well-implemented, fans are used to much stronger narrative and continuity in Witcher properties and might be disappointed by this lighter, fluffier version of the Witcher experience. All in all, Reigns: The Witcher is ok for the whopping $6 price tag, but don’t expect too much from it.
This review was based on a digital copy of Reigns: The Witcher provided by the publisher. It was played on a gaming PC, standard laptop, and on the Steam Deck and ran equally well on all three. Reigns: The Witcher is also available on mobile for both Android and iOS.
Nate Van Lindt has been a gamer since the days of yore (aka Commodore 64), and has played a bit of virtually everything out there. He's also an avid comic book collector, both vintage and current, and reads a fair amount of sci-fi and fantasy. On top of that, he watches a fair number of movies and TV shows as well. Oh, and he has a family, a full-time job, and lives somewhere in the urban wilds of Southwestern Ontario, Canada, foraging for old video cables and forgotten game soundtracks.