An amazing marriage of world-class storytelling and strategic card gaming, Thronebreaker: The Witcher Tales is a fantastic RPG in its own right.

The Witcher Tales is a strange potion that is surprisingly good. From a logical point of view, a game that mixes so many genres together can’t be this amazing, but then comes CDPR, a company that is just unable to develop bad titles.

Thronebreaker: The Witcher Tales could have been a lackluster, uninspired spinoff in an attempt to capitalize off the Witcher’s success, but it is so much more than that. Sure, I have some minor gripes, such as the lack of a mini-map and guide markers, or the anticlimactic final battle, but they all seem trivial when looking at what Thronebreaker accomplishes as a whole. The intricately layered story and carefully crafted characters and writing are some of the best I’ve seen this year, and the card play is more rewarding than it’s ever been before. Whether or not you are a fan of the Witcher series, or even card games in general, Thronebreaker deserves your attention.

The standalone Gwent release is free on GOG, and I encourage those who enjoy it to shell out the money for Thronebreaker, a strong expansion of both the base game and the Witcher universe. Geralt’s portion of this story may have concluded, but the folks at CD Projekt RED seem committed to sharing more tales from this world, and I couldn’t be more excited.

Thronebreaker: The Witcher Tales is a tough and pure RPG without compromise, with a great card-based combat system.

It's a spin-off of a spin-off that improbably couples the lighthearted but surprisingly complex mechanics of the free-to-play multiplayer Gwent: The Witcher Card Game with the dark, moral storytelling of Wild Hunt.

Thronebreaker struggles as a card game but excels as a Witcher game due to its rich narrative and excellent, if simple, worldbuilding.