The dark Slavic atmosphere is highly successful and I like the music a lot, but the maps and enemy placement are rough, with repeated monsters, recycled patterns and extreme difficulty spikes. It is worth looking past its flaws, because it has its great strengths.
The Witcher is the role-playing game with which the Polish studio CD Projekt RED made its debut on PC in 2007, built on BioWare's Aurora engine and based on Andrzej Sapkowski's saga. You play as Geralt of Rivia, a witcher, that is, a monster hunter who has undergone mutations since boyhood, and who at the start of the adventure is found unconscious and with no memory near Kaer Morhen, the fortress where witchers are trained.
Paradoxically, after the attack and the theft of the mutation secrets used to create a witcher, Geralt finds himself up against a decaying society in Vizima and its outskirts, and has to put up with its pressure. You soon begin to realize that the protagonist is practically doing charity work: of course he works on contract, but he can hardly hold on to any savings, because he spends them on oils and decoctions for his next assignment.
Though sterile, the protagonist has a talent that many players have criticized: managing to make love even in the most questionable situations, for example with the nurses, right in front of the patients. Gwent was invented for The Witcher 3: here you play dice poker (which Kingdom Come: Deliverance took inspiration from, but with more tactics and the option to cheat).
The game opens with music that is very easy on the ears and a style close to classic real-time cRPGs. Every hunt, what is more, calls for a strategy, whether it means defeating a monster or even murdering a human being (something that will happen very often). Geralt's controls are not simple but, unlike the first Pillars of Eternity, the gameplay is not messy. The Witcher gives you abilities and a skill layout that hang together, built around the experience of the mercenary, that is, Geralt.
The Witcher is the exact opposite of what you could call a friendly game. It has a heavily accentuated dark Slavic atmosphere: people are a bunch of egoists driven by personal goals, and even your best friend is ready to stab you in the back or even stir up a full-blown witch hunt (or witcher hunt). And this construction works very well: plenty of references to Sapkowski's books, a plot that makes a lot of sense, and the fear of the White Frost as a recurring idea.
Unfortunately, the maps and the mob placement are not any friendlier or, as many put it, they are rough. Early on, the developers' inexperience really shows: the same monsters turn up almost all over the map (barghests and drowners), the map design is cryptic, some patterns are recycled and there are extreme difficulty spikes (the final battle of the first chapter). These flaws become less and less noticeable as you progress through the game and reach the new maps. But I like the music, and I like it a lot.
The game shapes up as the start of a new adventure in a world that will become extremely vast. I would suggest looking past its flaws to discover that, in reality, it has great strengths of its own.