It does start with a significant advantage over most gacha game or MMORPG stories in that it's based on a familiar tale, one that's been very successfully adapted several times before. Still, building on sound foundations doesn't always mean that what you're building is going to stand. This is solid.
The narrative adapts the horrifying events of the Salem witch trials, particularly as they were presented by Arthur Miller in The Crucible. Like many people, I read the play at school, when I was in my teens, and I also went to see it performed. I found it disturbing enough, back then. I found this adaptation even more so.
Miller wrote The Crucible as a response to the McCarthyite witch hunts and show trials of the fifties. None of his fears have been alleviated in the slightest over the years.The lessons he'd have wanted the audience to learn are as relevant now, as crucial as ever.
Games, like movies and television and pretty much every other medium, often take their ideas directly from pre-existing works. The results can range from travesty to transcendence. The Witch may not eclipse a classic like The Crucible but it more than justifies the decision to take on such difficult, challenging and disturbing subject matter. It succeeds on almost every level in both honoring and interpreting its source.
As must be obvious, I was very impressed. I'd say I loved it but the themes and implications hit too hard and probe too deeply to inspire affection. Respect and admiration feel like more appropriate responses. But I did love it, all the same.
The story begins when Blackbird, the mysterious Esper who lives at the Witch's House, contacts the Appraiser to offer her a commission. Blackbird has received a letter from someone by the name of Merula, who says Blackbird is the only one who can help her.
At this point, I'd love to link to a full walk-through so anyone interested in finding out the full details of what happens next can go read the precis. I'd love to but I can't because as far as I can tell, there isn't one. I'd say that's an ill omen for the game but it also might just be because the quest, if we're comfortable with calling it that, is very long. Maybe no-one's gotten around to writing it all down yet.
There are several full-length videos of the whole thing on YouTube. I haven't watched any of them myself but I'll link to a couple in case anyone has a few hours to spare. I can't vouch for the presentation. Here's one with the male Appraiser. And one with the female version.
I played through the whole thing in two sessions. There are eight chapters. Thanks to GeForce Now giving me a summary every time I log out, I can say with accuracy that first session took me two hours and fifteen minutes and the second an hour. Allowing for a very small amount of housekeeping, from start to finish, "The Witch" takes about three hours.
Of those three hours, I'd estimate about two hours and forty-five minutes involve cut scenes and conversations. The whole thing feels like a long movie or a full season of a TV show.
There's very little combat indeed, just a short and easy boss fight close to the start and another, only slightly harder, right at the end. A couple of times, a handful of ordinary mobs need to be dispatched but those fights are so trivial they amount to not much more than shouldering past someone blocking your path.
There aren't any puzzles. No objects to manipulate, devices to use, doors to unlock... nothing. There isn't even much running around. Most of the action takes place in St Arbor, a small village, where everyone you need to speak to lives right around the corner or just down the street - and you get a marker to show you exactly where they are.
Almost the entirety of the action involves either eavesdropping on townspeople talking then discussing what they've said and deciding what to do about it. There's a lot of talking. And it's rivetting.
It wouldn't work if the writing wasn't so good. It's uniformly excellent, managing to find a tone that feels authentically appropriate to the time period and the setting, while never coming across as awkwardly archaic or forced.
That's no small achievement. I've seen many games attempt to find this tone. "18th century New England witch trial" has been a very popular quest setting for as long as I've been playing online games. Few writers manage to catch the tone they're seeking. Usually it falls flat.
Here, it works particularly well, partly because The Appraiser and Blackbird both already have somewhat formal speech patterns, more so than many video game characters and certainly much more so than most of the other characters in NTE. I'm not sure how well Mint or Chiz would have fitted into the milieu.
Assuming the original writing wasn't in English, the translation is exemplary. There's still the occasional hint of that unmistakable "Translated from Korean" syntax but by now I hear that as a charming inflection, almost a dialect or an accent, never a flaw.
Which isn't to say the writing is flawless. There are a couple of slips but they're barely noticeable. A word, pluralised in the text, when it's singular in the voice-over. Tiny things like that, easy to ignore.
The voice acting, as always, is solid-to-excellent. Blackbird is very charming and I really love the way the Appraiser sounds. I'm not sure now, whether it sounds like my character's voice would sound in my head or if her voice sounds that way in there because of the voice acting. Either way, it's perfect.
Blackbird, in whom I'd previously had very little interest, emerges as a fascinating, complex character. Apparently she's lived in the Witch House for hundreds of years, only very rarely stepping outside. She know little of modern life other than what she's gleaned from anime, to which she's addicted.
Her affairs are managed by Lavinia, a severe and somewhat unnerving character, a kind of dark reflection of the more amenable Adler at Eibon. It's curious how almost every grouping in the game has these sorts of quasi-familial structures in place, flattened hierarchies in which authority is hard to define.
At the conclusion of the story, which I won't attempt to recount or spoil, Lavinia offers the Appraiser another commission: take Blackbird out and show her all the good things there are to see and do in Hethereau. As Blackbird puts it:
It's a bittersweet way to end what's most likely felt like a solid three hours watching an anime. You have to wonder how much irony was intended.
The story itself is as dark as the village of St Arbor, a place where the sun never seems to shine and where almost everything of consequence happens at night. Anyone who's seen or read The Crucible ought to be prepared for the psychological horror, although I must say my own inoculation against the sensation of existential threat had long worn off. And at least, when I saw the play, no-one actually got burned alive on stage.
It's a hard watch at times. In deference to the game's PEGI 12 rating, the camera cuts away for what I found to be the most disturbing scene, the one where live animals are fed to the fire. When it's the humans' turn it's similarly over in a moment with a short scream and a flare of light. Towards the climax, though, there are some prolonged scenes of immolation that don't bear much thinking about if you want a good night's sleep afterwards.
Unlike the graphics, the dialog pulls no punches. There's no skipping lightly over the actions of the villagers or the impact of the choices they make. People die for no reason other than that someone bears them a grudge or wants their property or to save their own skin.
And since it's a ll a pre-ordained story, nothing anyone can do, note even the Appraiser and Blackbird, can change a thing. It's not exactly what I'd call entertainment but The Witch absolutely earns its right to be taken seriously.
Even so, it's still an adventure story in a video game about extra-dimensional entities and psychic powers. It takes some doing to integrate something like that, successfully and convincingly, into a real-world historical setting, much less layer it with some heavy social commentary. The Witch not only manages to do that - it makes it seem almost easy.
Perhaps the hardest disbelief to suspend is the repeated, confident assertion that the best way to nullify the Inquisitor, the anomaly behind the terrible events locked inside an anomalous realm, inside another anomalous realm, just to make it even harder, is to release it into Hethereau, where society has advanced to such a stage that no witch hunting anomaly could hope to gain enough traction to prosper. In other words, humanity has outgrown the kind of fear and hatred that feeds such a phenomenon.
Nice to think so. But then, Hethereau is, self-evidently, a much nicer place to live than anywhere in this real world. I'd move there tomorrow, given the chance.
I've enjoyed all the stories in Neverness To Everness I've seen so far but this is without a doubt the most tightly constructed and the most successful in what it seems to want to achieve. Assuming, that is, that what the writers set out to do was give moral instruction. It seems hard to think any player of the game could come away from The Witch without a clearer idea of what fear of the other leads to and how moral courage is imperative in standing up against prejudice.
Unless, that is, that player opted to skip all the dialog. Which is an option although I can't say I understand why. It might make sense in other games that rely much more on combat and action but, given that the eight chapters are pretty much all dialog, hitting the "Skip" button wouldn't leave a lot left for anyone to do.
I didn't skip. I lapped up every last word. I watched all the cut scenes. I crouched behind bushes and listened to all the conversations I wasn't supposed to be listening to. And I never once wished anything would go faster or that anyone would just get to the point. I found both the pacing and the content entirely to my liking. I'm very much hoping for more of the same as the game goes on.
It's also becoming a little clearer to me that the way Neverness To Everness has been conceived gives the writers more leeway to tell the story of Hethereau in this episodic fashion. The city isn't under imminent threat in the way we're so familiar with from other games. The characters aren't fighting a war or for their very existence. There's no sense of pressure of time.
The Appraiser, as is frequently emphasized, has a job. All the characters have jobs. Each storyline so far has either been a day's work or a day off. If NTE was an anime, it'd be a hybrid between a detective show and a slice-of-life drama with the cast investigating anomalies by day and playing games or going to the movies after work.
That a gamelike that can also encompass such a difficult and dark tale as The Witch and make it seem like an integral part of the setting is a tribute to the skill of the writers. A tip of the witch's hat to all of them.
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