There are large parts of The Witcher, the 2007 RPG that introduced both CD Projekt Red and Geralt to the world outside Poland, that simply aren’t fit for purpose anymore.
If you imagine each chapter of the game as a boat bobbing on the surface of Lake Vizima, the swampy yet beautiful mere that surrounds the busy capital of Temeria, then Chapter Two is the one that deserves scuttling. An intended detective story that sets you loose on city's streets, it’s riddled with unclear choices and baffling developments. As remake developer Fool’s Theory lifts it from the water, they’ll discover its entire underside has rotted away, and needs replacing wholesale.
Yet there’s at least one other vessel that’s still shipshape, needing only a new lick of paint to make it shine and protect it from the elements. And that’s Chapter Four. Built as a break from exposition, this segment of The Witcher took you away from Vizima and the machinations of its major players. It embraced a simple structure, and invested heavily in vibes.
Geralt is effectively in the area on garden leave – teleported out of the city by Triss Merigold in an effort to keep him out of trouble. The witcher finds himself on the opposite shore of Lake Vizima, in the vicinity of an unassuming hamlet named Murky Waters.
Blood in the water
On the face of it, the bleak title is a misnomer. Under the divine auspices of the Lady of the Lake, the area has flourished agriculturally. Every day, it seems, the sun beats down, and the crops grow tall. In the morning fog, the Lady can be seen dressed in white, stepping lightly over the dewy grass.
It would be idyllic, out in the fields, if not for the soundtrack. A violin bow seesaws across the strings in eerie, slow-motion mockery of a festival dance, while a flutist drifts in and out of discordance in a single, protracted breath. The same wheat stalks that signify abundance also evoke classic horror tropes: UFOs and scarecrows and Stephen King. They match Geralt for height, and hide noonwraiths – the spirits of wronged maidens who force farmers caught in the midday sun to dance until dusk, or death, whichever comes first. You might know the noonwraith from an early Witcher 3 side quest, or perhaps as Lady Midday, the figure from real-life Slavic mythology used to personify heatstroke.
This is the foreboding backdrop to an interpersonal drama unfolding in Murky Waters. There, the village chief's daughter, Alina, is to be wedded to a wealthy merchant from Kovir, named Julian. Celebratory garlands and ribbons are already strung from poles along the road to the village inn – yet the couple are merely the focal point of a spiky set of love triangles. A local boy, Adam, is writing a bad poem designed to win over Alina (“Marriage is never an obstruction to true love”). And the bride’s sister, Celina, seethes with resentment. “My sister will wed a man she doesn’t like,” she says. “I have naught to wear to the wedding, for our father expended his savings on his beloved daughter’s dowry.”
As you might expect, it ends badly. Pushed to the ground during a sibling argument, Alina dashes her head on a rock. The first Geralt hears of it is a confrontation in the fields, during which a grief-stricken Adam cuts down Celina with a knife – a Shakespearean act of revenge. Julian sees to his arrest, and Adam ultimately dies by his own hand. Though not before finishing his poem. Ironically, tragedy gives him something meaningful to write about.
This being The Witcher, however, the dead rest uneasy. Alina becomes a noonwraith, and her sister a nightwraith, two sides of the same, bloodied coin. As ever, it falls to Geralt to send them to their rest. With the help of the village witch, he pieces together a shattered mirror that once belonged to Alina – and shows the corpse bride her true visage, so that she can come to terms with her death. Only when noonwraith and nightwraith meet at twilight can Lady Midday depart, safe in the knowledge she has been avenged. Finally, the sun goes down.
Folklore
Those outside Poland aren’t to know, but the whole sorry tale is an homage to the country’s history of romantic literature. According to CD Projekt Red, the story in which Alina kills her sister in the raspberry patch “will be familiar to anyone who graduated from elementary school”. The developer’s commitment to making The Witcher a kind of cultural exchange program pays off, enabling them to bypass the usual tropes of RPG storytelling and lean into their roots.
Less harrowing, though no less human, is the story of the Lady of the Lake herself. Out in the fields, beneath the barrows guarded by the local hermit, lie the bodies of knights who died defending the Lady’s honor – plus one innkeeper, who asked customers not to piss in the lake.
“Many fine knights set out seeking the Grail, abandoning their roles as guardians of peace and justice under the guidance of the Lady of the Lake,” the hermit says. “Now the knights are gone. Do you think goddesses cannot be lonely? The gods ultimately created us in their own image.”
When Geralt visits the Lady on her island at the center of the lake, where she wades amid water lilies, he finds the hermit’s interpretation accurate. Though the goddess assists Geralt in matters of destiny, what she’s really after is companionship. “If you return intent on a mission of paramount importance, believe me, I can be unpleasant,” she warns. “I have enough worshippers. I lack one who sees me as other than the object of a cult.”
Pursue the matter, and Geralt will compose vague and distant compliments about the Lady’s wisdom and shimmering beauty, until he ultimately lands on the words she’s been waiting to hear: “Your ass puts others to shame.” It’s a wry twist on the fairytales, worthy of Witcher author Andrzej Sapkowski, whose own short stories began with grounded and gritty reversals of established yarns like Beauty and the Beast and Rapunzel.
I hope Fool’s Theory applies a light touch when it comes to rebuilding The Witcher’s fourth chapter, since it was the first to demonstrate what CD Projekt Red was capable of – not just treating Sapkowski’s fiction with respect, but advancing on it too. Lacing this simple adventure with daylight horror and dry comedy, the studio learned how to drop the reverence and make its own voice heard in the Northern Realms
