Video Games: The 12 Best Holiday Bets

The Scoop: The Witcher: Enhanced Edition. Genre: Role-Playing; by: CD Projekt; from: Atari; for: Windows; rating: Mature.

Info: A dark, grimy, occasionally explicit romp through a medieval fantasy world gets a second lease on life courtesy of an enhanced edition with expanded dialogue, reduced load times, and two new adventures.

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Ladies' man Geralt of Rivia gets around, and so does Atari's The Witcher, a sprawling, blackly ironic, ethically complex action role-playing game based on a series of fantasy books by Polish author Andrzej Sapkowski about this professional monster slayer and "witcher" (from the Polish neologism "wiedzmin," originally translated by Sapkowski as "hexer," which sounds arguably less weird than turning a noun into an adjective and back to a noun again). Witchers are humans who have elected to undergo trials that alter their bodies genetically. If they survive these trials, they're endowed with superhuman abilities but rendered reproductively sterile.

Nothing is quite as it seems in this patched-to-perfection version of Polish developer CD Projekt's inspired translation of Sapkowski's beautifully turbulent, morally fluid universe. Friends can be backstabbing cult members. Guards as well as thugs might be sinister sexual predators. Witches craft suicide solutions and voodoo dolls that compel siblings to commit fratricide. Barmaids and plenty besides will sleep with you for booze, money, gifts, or occasionally just for fun. Pious religious types turn out to be repugnant misogynists. Power-crazed mages become insane, slobbering oracles. And for all the wonderfully revisionist fantasy alghouls and echinops and graveirs and bloedzuigers you'll get to fight, the most disturbing creatures aren't the ones with three heads or ten tentacles, but other humans, like you.

Next: Sins of a Solar Empire