Thronebreaker: The Witcher Tales

Nobody asked for a long narrative campaign built on Gwent. That is precisely why Thronebreaker is interesting. When CD Projekt Red shipped it on November 9, 2018, the studio was juggling Cyberpunk 2077 and a free-to-play Gwent client that had just been rebuilt from scratch. Thronebreaker was the odd one out: a single-player, fully voiced, choice-driven RPG that happened to resolve every fight with cards. The studio later admitted it sold below expectations. Critics disagreed with the market; it sits at 85 on Metacritic.

The premise is pure Sapkowski. You are Meve, queen of Lyria and Rivia, a minor northern monarch who exists in the novels mostly as a footnote and a rumor about knighting Geralt. Nilfgaard invades, her court betrays her, and she is forced into exile with a shrinking retinue and a growing grudge. The campaign moves through five hand-painted regions, from the burning farmland of Lyria to the dwarven halls of Mahakam and the swamps of Angren, and every stop asks you to spend gold, wood and recruits on an army that is always one bad decision away from deserting.

Market positioning has shifted over the years. On PC and consoles it launched as a premium, full-price story game aimed squarely at the Witcher 3 audience that wanted more of that writing without another 100-hour open world. On iOS and Android it now lives as a free-to-start title where the first chapter is free and a single in-app purchase unlocks the rest. That pivot is where the reception splits: Steam and console players took to it, while the App Store rating sits at 3.3 out of 5. Same game, very different feelings about how it was sold.

• Queen Meve as protagonist: A middle-aged, war-hardened monarch rather than a monster hunter. Her authority, her temper and her exhaustion drive the story, and the writing treats her as a ruler making trade-offs, not a hero collecting quests.
• A long list of world states: Choices lock permanently. Villages burn or survive, companions like Gascon and Reynard stay or walk out, and the ending you reach reflects a ledger of compromises rather than a single fork in the final hour.
• Streamlined Gwent: A large deck built around distinct archetypes, most battles resolved in a single round, with the Homecoming-era ruleset trimmed for pacing. Familiar if you play Gwent, learnable in an hour if you don’t.
• Puzzle battles: Bespoke encounters with fixed hands and one intended solution. Rescue a hostage, escort a caravan, break a siege. These are where the design is most creative and, occasionally, most frustrating.
• The mobile camp: Between fights you upgrade a travelling war camp. The Workshop unlocks and improves cards, the Training Grounds boosts their stats, and other tents govern morale and deck rules. Every upgrade is paid from resources scavenged on the map.
• Full voice acting and a narrator: Every line is voiced, and a storybook narrator carries the transitions. Paired with an original soundtrack, it sells the fairy-tale-with-teeth tone the series does best.

The Gameplay Loop

Thronebreaker runs on a three-beat rhythm: explore, decide, fight. You steer Meve across an isometric map, clicking on wreckage for wood, chests for gold, and grieving villagers for recruits. Every few minutes a vignette interrupts. A deserter begs for mercy. A priest asks you to torch a plague village. A dwarven clan wants you to look the other way. You pick, the narrator tells you what it cost, and the map keeps going. Then a battle, then camp, then more map.

That loop works because the resource economy is tight enough to make choices hurt. Recruits are the scarcest currency and the one you need for the best units. Sparing a band of bandits might net you a pile of recruits and a card that turns out to be poison for army morale. Executing them keeps the ranks loyal and leaves you short. The game rarely tells you the mechanical outcome ahead of time, which is the correct call. You are ruling, not min-maxing.

The map exploration itself is the weakest beat. The regions are gorgeous but the interaction model is shallow: walk to glowing thing, click glowing thing. It is built for a handful of points of interest per region and gets rote as the maps grow — corners get swept out of loot compulsion rather than curiosity. Fewer but richer points of interest, or a navigation puzzle or two, would have cut a lot of tedium from every hour.

Streamlined Gwent

CD Projekt Red made the right call by not shipping full Gwent here. Most fights are a single round, which removes the bluffing meta of passing early to bait card advantage and replaces it with a straightforward question: can your deck out-score theirs before both hands run dry? The card pool gives you real archetypes to build toward. Lyrian infantry that buffs when adjacent. Dwarves that gain strength every time they take damage. Spies that sit on the enemy row and bleed points. Meve herself is a leader card whose ability changes with the weapon she carries, several of which are unlocked through the story, which is a lovely way to make narrative choices show up in your hand.

The problem is the AI opponent. On the default difficulty it plays cards in a mostly predictable order and never really punishes a greedy engine deck. Gwent veterans will find one strong combo early and ride it to the credits. The harder difficulty tightens the screws, but it does so by stacking the opponent’s numbers rather than making it smarter, which is a cheap fix. If you have never touched Gwent, the curve is pleasant. If you have a ranked history, start on the hardest setting and accept that some fights will still be a formality.

Puzzle Battles

The puzzle encounters are the game’s best idea and its most divisive one. Each one hands you a fixed set of cards and a board state with a story reason behind it: a burning bridge that damages units each turn, a queue of prisoners you must free in order, a monster that grows every time you kill one of its spawn. Winning means reading the board and sequencing your plays exactly right. When it clicks, it plays like a chess problem written by a Witcher novelist.

When it doesn’t click, it feels like guessing the developer’s password. Several puzzles have precisely one solution and give you no feedback beyond failure. The design would be far stronger with a hint that surfaced after two failed attempts, or with two or three valid lines instead of one. As designed, the puzzles are a highlight more often than not and a web search the rest.

Choices and Consequence

This is where Thronebreaker earns its reputation. The writing is closer to The Witcher 3’s Bloody Baron questline than to any card game. Decisions land in a morally grey zone where the “good” option often gets people killed and the ruthless option often keeps your army fed. Companions have their own lines they will not cross, and the game does not warn you where those lines are. Losing Reynard, the loyal old marshal, because you made a pragmatic call two regions earlier lands hard precisely because it was earned.

The world-state count is a marketing number, and many of the variants differ in shading rather than substance. But the shading is what matters. The epilogue narrates the fate of every major character and region based on your ledger, and it is specific enough that two players comparing notes will have genuinely played different stories.

The art direction is strong work by CD Projekt Red’s standards. The five regions are painted rather than modelled, and it shows in the best way: Lyria’s autumn farmland reads as a storybook illustration that has been set on fire, Mahakam is all amber lamplight and carved stone, and Angren’s swamps drip. The isometric camera keeps everything at a fixed, legible scale, and the card art, much of it shared with Gwent, is consistently good. Animated premium cards add motion without distraction.

The UI is where the polish thins. The map layer is clean, but the deck builder buries its filters and the camp screens use a nested menu structure that costs an extra click for nearly everything. Card text is dense, and on any screen under ten inches it is hard to parse mid-battle without zooming. The narrator and full voice cast paper over a lot of this, and the soundtrack, all lutes, drones and Slavic choir, suits the material well.

Technically it is a Unity game, and a 2D game of this scope is light on hardware — the demands are modest on PC and consoles alike. Mobile is the outlier: crash reports are common across the Android reviews, and the always-online requirement means a dropped connection can interrupt a single-player card game that has no business needing a server.

Steam. The strongest version. Drag-and-drop card play was designed for a mouse and it shows. The larger screen makes the dense card text readable, the deck builder is tolerable with a cursor, and the always-online requirement does not exist here. Controller support works and the game is comfortable on a handheld PC, though you will squint at card descriptions.

Nintendo Switch. In handheld mode the touchscreen makes it feel like the mobile version with none of the monetisation baggage, and that is a compliment. Docked, the Joy-Con cursor is slow and card targeting becomes fiddly. Text is small in handheld regardless of what you do about it. For a story you want to play in bed, this is the sensible hardware.

iOS. Touch is a natural fit for a card game and Gwent’s own mobile client already proved the interaction model. The problem is everything around the game. The switch from a paid app to free-to-start with an in-app unlock left early buyers feeling burned, and the 3.3 rating reflects that more than the game itself. The mandatory internet connection is an unforced error, and on smaller phones the card text becomes a legibility problem the game never solves. Play it on an iPad if you have one.

Android. Everything from iOS, plus device variance. The Play Store rating is weighted by crash reports and the same purchase-model complaints. On a flagship it should be fine; on a mid-range device from a few years back, the larger battles are the likely stress point. The free first chapter is the right way to test your hardware before spending anything.

Thronebreaker is a better RPG than it had any right to be. It takes a minigame that was once a distraction from monster contracts and makes it the vehicle for a mature story about what a ruler owes to the people she cannot save. The card battles are a solid foundation with a soft ceiling, and the puzzle design needed one more pass. Those are real flaws, and they are the reason this lands at Good rather than higher.

The mobile situation deserves its own paragraph, and it is a sour one. The game itself works on a phone. The wrapper around it — the always-online check, the crash reports, the purchase-model reversal — is the kind of thing that turns a good port into a bad review. Play it on Steam or Switch if you can. If mobile is your only option, treat the free first chapter as a hardware test before you commit.

Either way, Meve’s story is worth telling and worth hearing. Few card games have aimed this high, and this one mostly gets there.