The Witcher mobile game makes the real world less fun

The best thing that happened in my two hours of walking around outside squinting at my phone to play The Witcher: Monster Slayer came in the first five minutes or so. In the opening tutorial quest, I investigated a monster attack that left a horse’s decapitated head lying on the ground. Except in my game, after I flicked on augmented reality to make The Witcher’s monsters appear in the “real” world on my phone screen, the severed horse head hovered a couple feet off the ground, embedded in a parking sign. If the AR feature were consistently that funny, it might’ve saved Monster Slayer from being such a boring and disappointing use of the Witcher setting.

The Witcher: Monster Slayer is a Pokémon Go knock-off that pushes you to venture out into the world to fight creatures from The Witcher’s fantasy world on random street corners. For the most part this means manically swiping your finger across your phone screen to swing a sword. I’ll charitably say that it has a little depth because you can swipe quickly for fast attacks or slowly for strong ones.