CD Projekt Red has launched new single player title based on the Gwent card game from The Witcher series. Gwent: Rogue Mage is a roguelike deckbuilder, in which players enter a procedurally-generated map and fight their way through a series of monsters and bosses using a deck of card-based abilities and characters deployed on the battlefield.
The game is set hundreds of years before the events of The Witcher 3, with players taking on the role of the mage Alzur as he attempts to create the first ever Witcher. However, the story is mostly just set-dressing, with game director Vladimir Tortsov telling IGN: “We do not treat this expansion as an official addition to The Witcher lore.”
The game is available today on PC, iOS, and Android, and Tortsov says it will take around 30 hours for players to explore it fully, with each game loop running for up to an hour. In terms of gameplay, Tortsov compares the title to Slay the Spire, a roguelike deckbuilder in which players battle their way through a tower of enemies.
Rogue Mage is the latest attempt by Projekt Red to build on the popularity of the Gwent card game, which was a minigame-turned-main-attraction (for many players anyway) in The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt.
The developers first launched Gwent: The Witcher Card Game as a free-to-play title for various platforms in 2018, before shutting off support for consoles in 2020 in favor of mobile and PC play. The original game was multiplayer, but Projekt Red also launched a single player Thronebreaker “expansion” (as a 30-hour RPG title it felt like much more than just an expansion) which was critically lauded but sold poorly.
Rogue Mage, then, is one more experiment within the Gwent format. It’s currently available on the Android Play Store, iOS App Store, Steam store and GOG store for PC, for $9.99. Meanwhile, Projekt Red is still working on the next installment in the main Witcher series, for which details are so slim as to be practically non-existent.
