The next Witcher spin-off game is about Dandelion sharing his version of Geralt's adventures with the world: 'you might encounter a stuffed unicorn'

Nerial is the French indie studio behind Card Shark and the Reigns series, and not immediately the team you would pick for a Witcher game—unless it was a singleplayer Gwent story like Thronebreaker perhaps. Instead, Nerial is adapting the Reigns series to Geralt's adventures, having had what they call "great success" with a Game of Thrones version in 2018. A conversation with CD Projekt Red at GDC a couple of years ago got the ball rolling, and later this month they'll be releasing Reigns: The Witcher.

"The games were our first point of reference, as we're working with CDPR", creative director Francois Alliot and narrative designer Oscar Harrington-Shaw say, answering my questions via email as a gestalt. "So you'll meet familiar characters such as Yen, Triss, and Regis who more closely resemble their character in the games rather than the books, and we've adapted many popular quests and iconic moments—you might encounter a stuffed unicorn, or a mute druid."

While this game's cartoon versions of everyone from Dandelion to godlings are faithful to The Witcher 3, Nerial has added to the lore as well. Playing a preview build I was eaten by a tarasque—not the D&D monster with two Rs in its name, but the lion-headed dragon-turtle of French mythology. As Alliot and Harrington-Shaw say, "we love how [Witcher creator Andrzej] Sapkowski poached from lots of disparate strands of mythology to inspire the books, and so we also took this approach when writing new storylines, taking inspiration from Euripidean tragedies, the lais of Marie de France and even Provençal folklore."

Getting their game to gel with the existing world of the games and the books was made easier when they hit on the structure, with each of your pick-a-path adventures a ballad being composed by Dandelion based on Geralt's saga, rather than a "real" event from his life. It took a while to come up with this more fanciful spin on the regular Reigns structure of playing a ruler and then their heirs.

"One thought was to frame the game as though you were playing through a mage's prediction of a potential future for Geralt," they say, "using cards to divine possible upcoming events. We wondered if the reveal at the end could have been that this card divination was in fact the original use of Gwent cards, as though Reigns: The Witcher was the backstory of Gwent. Sort of the reverse of the history of Tarot, which began as a card game and was later used for fortune-telling. But it was hard to square this with the chronology of the Witcher universe."

Each decision you make has an effect on four meters measuring how liked or hated Geralt is by different communities, and how committed he is to the witcher's path. Turn down a noble who demands you burn a mage's tower for daring to be taller than his own and the magical community will like you more, while the human population will like you less. Make enough decisions that bottom out Geralt's human appeal and you'll be lynched. Making decisions that top out meters can be just as dangerous, like when I cozied up to the mages too much and died of overexertion in a drug-fueled sorceress orgy.

An earlier version of the favorability system "placed too much of an emphasis on the class politics of the Witcher world, as opposed to human vs nonhuman conflict, and didn't allow much focus on combat," the developers say. "By reducing the factional values to three (human, nonhuman and mage) and introducing the monster-hunting value, this shifted the balance closer to the source material, where Geralt is balancing the favor of hostile groups, but also trying to survive as a sword for hire. When the monster-hunting value reaches the maximum it triggers a fight with a monster, generally the one you're currently tracking."

These fights are new to Reigns, a rhythmic minigame where your opponent rains attacks down a board as you hop left and right to dodge them while trying to catch swords and land on signs to defeat your foe. While traditionally Reigns has found most of its audience on mobile, where swiping to make decisions has a deliberately dating-app feel, this makes it seem more at home on a handheld. "We've done a lot of our testing on Steam Deck", Alliot and Harrington-Shaw say. "It's been Steam Deck Verified by Valve and we think it's one of the best ways to play the game. It feels right at home."

Though if you're playing it in public, don't let anyone see what you get up to with the stuffed unicorn and the sorceresses. Reigns: The Witcher will be available on Steam and GOG from February 25.