The Witcher: Enhanced Edition - 2/20 hours

I can see why this game was given to me so soon after playing Ride to Hell. Its treatment of women is dubious. In the first hour there is only one female character, and she is kind of ridiculous. I don't mean to sound like a prude, and it is better that she exist than she not exist, but why is the mage assistant of a grizzled group of mystical survivalists dressed like she's late for her shift at the strip club? (And I mean this literally - the neckline of her blouse goes down about halfway to her navel, and she wears actual fishnet stalkings). Is it to set up the awkward and cheesy sex scene that happens when you've gathered the alchemical ingredients necessary to heal her of her coma? Almost certainly.

Maybe I should be charmed by the game's juvenile approach to sexuality. I mean, why shouldn't the woman who was knocked into a coma while failing to defend the secret laboratory from an invasion by mercenaries want to immediately bone like ten seconds after she regains consciousness? Maybe the potion was just, like, really effective.

I'll admit, I'm inclined to be generous because I do believe there is a place for the "heh, heh, boobies" school of erotic thought in this world. If the game plays like the fantasy of a horny fourteen-year-old boy, how can I possibly begrudge that, being a former horny fourteen-year-old-boy myself? I don't necessarily buy into the notion that just because games can be a rich artistic medium with an appeal and worth beyond mere adolescent power fantasy that everything that caters to the "stereotypical" gamer is automatically an embarrassment.

That being said, there is every possibility that The Witcher is, in fact, an embarrassment. In addition to Triss, the inexplicable stripper witch, there have so far been two other female characters in the game, and they both have a certain, um, boobicular focus in their character designs. This is most obvious in the case of a young mother who is traveling with her son when the two are attacked by demon dogs. The son escapes, but she is horrifically killed. So, you know, the choice to give her astonishingly (and perhaps distractingly) epic cleavage is kind of a mystifying one.

However, for now, I'm willing to cut the game a little slack, because its cheesiness is not confined to this one area. A good example is the fate of the son. After his mother dies, and the demon beasts dispatched, he becomes overcome with a mysterious blue energy that lifts him up into the air and gives him the power of prophecy. And then, when the fugue is over, he falls to the ground writhing in agony, but you, the main character, are almost instantly talking to some other sexily-dressed woman who is undoubtedly a plot-important badass. And while the subject of the conversation is your typical rpg-exposition, and more or less exactly what you'd expect from this portion of the game, all the while, in the background, you can see the kid on the ground, clutching is stomach and shaking back-and-forth, because the animation of him getting up and being mostly all right after his ordeal does not trigger until after you get done with the conversation. The whole thing was inadvertently hilarious.

The comparisons to Ride to Hell practically draw themselves. However, so far I can see two main differences. One, the plot of The Witcher actually makes a certain degree of sense. There are these super-powered fantasy monster police called the Witchers who just got robbed of their magical potions, so they need to track down the bad guys before they can figure out how to use the stolen goods to give themselves similar powers. Two, the gameplay is actually fairly compelling. You've got a simple point-and-click combat system and what looks to be a huge and complex system of alchemy to buff your character. It may turn out to implode in the later acts of the game (I could see the combat as not having enough depth to sustain interest and the alchemy becoming a nightmare of super finicky ingredient collecting), but this early on, I'm intrigued.

My big hope is that the story and characters get a little less by-the-numbers (cliches already hit - a hero with amnesia, magical elven prophecies, and genre-bending technological gnomes) and that I've already seen the worst of the game's sexism (the soft-core "trading card" you get after bedding Triss treads a line between "harmlessly lame" and "bizarrely skeevy" that I don't even want to begin to analyze). I suppose its naive of me to think that I've seen the worst of the game a mere two hours in, but surely the opening of the game is The Witcher at its most typical, in order to put the identifying traits of the game front and center. Only time will tell, but for now, I'm optimistic.