Thronebreaker: The Witcher Tales

Probably some of the best writing to come out of CDPR, and it is a damn shame they didn't make more games like this. There's a massively untapped potential for some quality non-linear storytelling in a game that doesn't focus the majority of its efforts on being marketing for Nvidia. It is unfortunately a bit of a niche game. It's an isometric RPG, where encounters play out in Gwent battles, and most of the gameplay outside of that revolves around collecting resources for those battles, and searching out new encounters. It does have an option to skip Gwent battles, which leaves only the narrative portion of the game. If you don't like Gwent, especially this games iteration of it, it is still well worth playing purely for the narrative.

---{ Graphics }--- ☐ You forget what reality is ☑ Beautiful ☐ Good ☐ Decent ☐ Bad ☐ Don‘t look too long at it ☐ MS-DOS ---{ Gameplay }--- ☐ Very good ☑ Good ☐ It's just gameplay ☐ Mehh ☐ Watch paint dry instead ☐ Just don't ---{ Audio }--- ☐ Eargasm ☑ Very good ☐ Good ☐ Not too bad ☐ Bad ☐ I'm now deaf ---{ Audience }--- ☐ Kids ☑ Teens ☑ Adults ☐ Grandma ---{ PC Requirements }--- ☐ Check if you can run paint ☐ Potato ☑ Decent ☐ Fast ☐ Rich boi ☐ Ask NASA if they have a spare computer ---{ Game Size }--- ☐ Floppy Disk ☐ Old Fashioned ☑ Workable ☐ Big ☐ Will eat 10% of your 1TB hard drive ☐ You will want an entire hard drive to hold it ☐ You will need to invest in a black hole to hold all the data ---{ Difficulty }--- ☐ Just press 'W' ☐ Easy ☑ Easy to learn / Hard to master ☐ Significant brain usage ☐ Difficult ☐ Dark Souls ---{ Grind }--- ☐ Nothing to grind ☐ Only if u care about leaderboards/ranks ☑ Isn't necessary to progress ☐ Average grind level ☐ Too much grind ☐ You'll need a second life for grinding ---{ Story }--- ☐ No Story ☐ Some lore ☐ Average ☐ Good ☑ Lovely ☐ It'll replace your life ---{ Game Time }--- ☐ Long enough for a cup of coffee ☑ Short ☐ Average ☐ Long ☐ To infinity and beyond ---{ Price }--- ☐ It's free! ☐ Worth the price ☑ If it's on sale ☐ If u have some spare money left ☐ Not recommended ☐ You could also just burn your money ---{ Bugs }--- ☑ Never heard of ☐ Minor bugs ☐ Can get annoying ☐ ARK: Survival Evolved ☐ The game itself is a big terrarium for bugs ---{ ? / 10 }--- ☐ 1 ☐ 2 ☐ 3 ☐ 4 ☐ 5 ☐ 6 ☐ 7 ☑ 8 ☐ 9 ☐ 10

Gwent has trouble with balance. Everything somehow feels both overpowered and underpowered at the same time. Most "real" matches of Gwent feel like a coin flip for who can get lucky enough to draw their combo twice. The story is fine; there is just too much of it. Large portions of the game feel like filler. Littered with references to other games, it gives away the fact that Thronebreaker can't stand on its own merit. Similarly the difficulty curve feels very at odd with how the story plays out, with most of the game being very easy when Meve is supposed to be without much of an army, and suddenly difficult in the last battle when Meve is at her storywise strongest. One can go the whole game running the same deck, winning every battle, and never be forced to adapt to a different play style.

Very cathartic if you absolutely despise Nilfgaard, 10/10

Far too many puzzles, not enough battles. They could have just taken Gwent from The Witcher and had escalating real games of Gwent. I do not want to play a puzzle game, I want to play a card game. Far too late to refund but still disappointed in this game.

This game is very nice and unique on its own. Who likes Witcher games and witcher world will love this game. It is set between Time of Contempt and Baptism of Fire.Its rpg card game but its has nice story, good world ambient and good characters. Card game is good and follows story very well.

beautiful story, rich and deep combat, and witcher univers atlas !

That's a high quality game with interesting story. And even that fact that this is a gwent game does not spoil it. Had a great time with it.

Fantastic platform game, makes you not wanna go to sleep :)

Wonderful game, if you enjoy gwent or if you read the books you will absolutely love it! 10/10

Highly underrated, story is exactly what you want from a Witcher game. Gwent pretty nerfed but you can skip it to just enjoy the story

Again the story and artwork of CDPR games 10/10. I liked every expect of the game from interaction to visuals to sound tracks, to exploration and ofc the GWENT how can I forget that. Lovely 10/10

Great Game ! fully voiceacted, with great voiceactors, thrilling story, events, cool characters and with a sprinkle of easter eggs. there is no time for boredom in this game, ever expecting the unexpecting, while carefully thinking of each decision you do. i really liked this one ! The only thing i would have liked is a minimap, i didnt want to miss anything and went into every nook and crany. ofc thanks to your scouts its hard to miss anything, but constantly opening the map could have just been replaced by a minimap. For the puzzles, i only needed to look for a solution for the she-troll puzzle. iam not the smartest chap, neither did i really think through what i was doing in those puzzles, but i came through just fine. first part of every puzzle is to understand what you even have to do in it, reading the descriptions of the cards aswell as trial and error of its functions are important to understand them. some are easy, some are hard, some are weird, some are refrences to other games. thankfully you can look up your decisions on the internet for each and every little thing. i made use of it from time to time, when i reaaaallly didnt want to mess up, but in the end all went well.

Basically "Gwent: The Single Player Videogame" If that makes you happy, buy it. If it doesn't, don't.

I have played the Witcher series, I am a witcher fan and I have read its books. It was a bit tough to play GWENT in the witcher 3 some decks was overpowered and sometimes you should only win by pure luck. Thronebreaker tells story of Meve the queen of Lyria and Rivia during invasion of nilfgaard, you will see some of characters from story in books or their family members. I was skeptical at first, because GWENT stand alone game was very hard, confusing and complicated. Thronebreaker step by step let you learn the mechanics and it doesnt overwhelm you. It offers very good puzzle games, generally I dont like puzzle games but this one was good. I liked the story and progression in the game. There are some choices that have impact during your play through which I found them marvelous. It has a unique Art style. If you liked the card game inside witcher game or gwent and like the witcher lore, give it a try.

Is it possible to make a story-focused singleplayer card game? Yes, clearly. Did Thronebreaker succeed at doing that? I don't think so. The game captures the Witcher's world faithfully, choices have consequences, and most of the time your options are two evils and you have to choose the lesser one. The encounters have some variety, with proper 3-round standard battles, 1-round shortened battles, often with special rules, puzzles. At certain sections there were too many battles, but they fit narratively (getting ambushed while going through a Scoia'tael forest shouldn't come as a surprise), and the game was stretching too long which explains the number of encounters. You can build your own deck, and sometimes through events and choices you get cards for your collection, but most of the time you get Trinkets (~spells), you get very few units and you have to craft those. You can upgrade your camp to improve your cards and be able to craft new ones, as well as put more/stronger ones into your deck. There is an achievement for buying all camp upgrades, and at the final boss I had about half of them even though I fully explored every map (and I spent very little on crafting new cards), so the difficulty definitely affects the economy. (It likely also affects battles, some enemy cards were extremely overstatted compared to what I had access to.) The dialogue is well written and voiced, but there is a lot of it, way too much in my opinion (although it does help with pacing the encounters, which could get monotone otherwise - but the game is just too long). Why did I not like the game: You have to craft most of the unit cards you use (the ones you get from events and choices are usually centered around a specific strategy and they aren't very good otherwise, named characters are exceptions), and you don't get enough resources to experiment. For most of the story the game pushes you towards playing an interactive deck: play cards that can damage and kill enemy units, because they will do this to you and you can't beat their combos with stats alone. (There are also enemy decks which contain a 2-unit combo that can kill one of your units every turn unless you can kill one of them.) Unfortunately the final boss completely flips this on its head, and killings his units is useless or even detrimental, so for that fight you have to change your deck. But the checkpoint is far back so after changing your deck you have to go through a bunch of story+dialogue again to face the boss (you can't skip the whole thing at once, you have to skip page-by-page). And you can only have one deck, you can't save loadouts to make experimenting easier. There are a lot of events where the moral or ethical choice is one that avoids a fight - it's not fun to take the decision that feels "right" or fits the role I'm trying to play but it deprives me of gameplay (and resources, potentially even cards). There are also events where the choice to fight is given with the narrative that it'll be dangerous and risk the lives of soldiers for something unimportant - when mechanically there is no cost to losing a fight, you can restart it immediately. There were events that activated upon walking into an invisible trigger, and they would take some of my resources - these were extremely annoying because I was hoarding most of the time (I was doing fine in battles and wanted to see what new things I get before committing), and every time it happened I Alt-F4d before the game saved, spent as much of my money as possible, then walked into the trigger again and lost significantly less than I had the first time. There were treasure maps that lead to golden chests, which contained cards for the Gwent multiplayer game. I didn't even know that that game was still alive! But those rewards are worthless for me, those chests really could have held some resources as well. The thing that annoyed me most with the game is that there was a story battle that I knew from the start would happen (because it was in the books). During that battle I got new, mechanically unique hero units!... that were hard-countered by the opponent's deck (specifically designed for this fight) - I either either used their active abilities and they died in two turns, or I didn't use their abilities and they died slower without doing anything interesting.

[h1][b]4/10[/b][/h1] Story driven card battler with isometric exploration sections. But... it's a bait and switch after an hour or so. It's not a deck building game half of the time, it's a puzzle game that literally throws out your entire deck and uses predefined cards. Multitudinous puzzle battles and severe deck restrictions in normal fights completely ruined the game for me. I simply didn't feel like I had any choice, and couldn't use any cool cards. Couldn't see any reason to continue to suffer to see if it got better later on. [h2]Pros:[/h2] - Looks great. Does the "storybook style" thing without having too light of a color palette, which tends to happen if there's too much "book". There's a good balance here, with some appropriate pops of color for important characters or certain cards - Very good voice acting - Good story. Not going to win any awards, but I didn't just skip past it [h2]Mehs:[/h2] - Exploration segments look cool but otherwise suck. Movement is VERY clunky & slow and you have to get very close to something, stop, then hold right click to pick things up which is kinda silly. Why not just quickly left click instead? Or just auto-pickup? [h2]Cons:[/h2] - Almost no game settings available. No text or UI scaling - Card combat is kind of awkward. There are 3 rounds, and when a round ends, all cards are removed... but then you both just end up playing the same cards again for 1-2 more rounds? It doesn't really make sense that all units would just magically disappear - Card combat is a bit slow and boring compared to many games. Desperately needs some more satisfying & visceral elements other card games have. Most units literally don't even have any kind of attack here - Enemies get to play with decks that are *way* cooler than yours - Game has 42 "Puzzle Battles" which can only be solved in a single way, with a preset "deck". Extremely unfun. If there were fewer puzzles, I would have kept the game, so I guess this was the straw that broke the camel's back

It has a good story, but the gameplay gets grindy and frustrating the more you near the end. It is better as an interactive novel game than a card building one.

It might be my last review for a while. Not sure what's going on with me lately—nothing really makes me happy. Everything feels distorted, colorless, bland... like I’m missing something or someone👀? (and no, I don’t have jaundice 😑). I genuinely enjoyed reviewing stuff over the past few days. Not sure if I was just sharing thoughts on games… or quietly trying to say something else🦋. But with my creatively unorthodox communication style, I’m pretty sure I could’ve made a solid secret agent. Lmao. Though honestly? Not sure how successful I was. I might’ve been too subtle. Not everyone puts points into their Perception stat like I did (yeah, BG3 reference— couldn't resist). Normally, my Steam feels like a ghost town , except today, it was brightened by a divine presence 💙🦋. I should feel happy. Still... everything feels off. I might write some journal entries on Threads later, though that too feels a bit pointless. Nothing ever really happens in my life. But you know what’s not disappointing? Heck yeah—it’s Thronebreaker, baby. 😍 CDPR is like that grandma whose handbag is always full of unexpected gifts and candy. And Thronebreaker is one of those gifts—the kind you put somewhere safe and just admire how beautiful it is. A handcrafted world, a gripping story, and a god-tier soundtrack that wraps around your soul—this game pulls you in if you let it. But what really stood out for me? Queen Meveeeeeeeeeeeee. Never thought playing as a queen-mother would be this much fun. That’s how you craft a strong female lead. She’s beautiful, badass, kind, intelligent, and commands respect like it’s second nature. (Very close to my crush, lol. Of course I had to sneak her in here too 💙🦋) Wandering through the war-torn yet picturesque lands of Lyria from Meve’s eyes—meeting bandits, peasants, merchants, monsters, the Sisters of Melitele, dwarves, even dragons while making tough choices that balance kindness, pragmatism, and consequence... it’s more than fun. It’s meaningful. It lowkey taught me some life lessons I probably needed. Now, I’ve never been a card game fan. Never touched Pokémon or Hearthstone or whatever else nerds play. But Gwent? Thanks to The Witcher, I’m hooked. And here, that card-based battle system fits so naturally into the gameplay. It gives you a moment to think—you can't just unga-bunga slash your way out. The voice acting? Top-notch. The storytelling? Criminally underrated. I’ll admit—I originally sailed the high seas with FitGirl to play this game. But I loved it so much I had to buy it legit on Steam, just to keep it as a trophy. A reminder of how beautiful gaming can be and how it can still make you smile, even on days when nothing else does. Absolutely recommended.

Side mission puzzle is more a headache than fun, and the final battle is ridiculous. Majority of battle is easy, but the final battle is ridiculously hard there's no in between.

Great story + GWENT

I had an unforgettable time playing this title.

Great game, it makes you think

Pls help - i'm addicted to Gwent! 😭

great game

good game

good

RPG Gwent! What's not to like?

Masterpiece.

cool but 9gb damn

10/10 sick game

Good story + gwent

No 21:9 support.

zalypa