I have so much to say about Kingdom Come, so many anecdotes to tell, so much enthusiasm to share, that I was tempted to write it all down while playing the game. I ended up doing nothing, but those memories won't be lost.

Kingdom Come really is what it was advertised as -- a realistic medieval epic, a Witcher 3 without magic or monsters.

There is also no better publicity for the CryEngine than KCD, as it's just beautiful and has incredibly short load times compared to the competition. The engine is closer to Skyrim than The Witcher 3, and the various console commands and mods allow you to really go through the game without having to deal with the many, many gameplay decisions that would normally make the game unplayable to me. (I'm talking about combat, or the annoying fast travel -- just being able to track an NPC and use "goto 123 456 50" to immediately move somewhere else really changed everything for the best.)

In fact I did my best to role-play my character, and ended up getting my long-awaited Merciful achievement after very carefully completing the game and all of its sidequests without killing a single human being -- except for that stupid mandatory kill in the middle of the main quest. It's a small world, a realistic map of a few square miles (in reality, Sasau and Skalitz are much farther from the other villages than what the game is telling us, but let's just say Sasau was an important addition, so it's something I'm happlly willing to let go.)

I should point out that I played the game in French with English subtitles, for good reason. The English voice of Henry is terrible and anti-climactic at best. His French voice is the same as Tetsuo in Akira (which had a really fine French dub back in the day). It was a no-brainer for me. Why English subtitles? Because the translation fluctuates between quality research (mostly for medieval terms) and many, many translation errors, mostly literal translations of typical English expressions. Ouch. Anyway, best of both worlds.

If you can accept that the game has some bugs (mostly due to modding), it's surprisingly stable and well thought of. Many dialogue scenes have subtle differences depending on the outcome of other, unrelated quests, and that's something I was really happy to see. So much love, such a deep universe with lively characters... Sure, it's no Witcher, but then again what is? Only CDPR can outdo the Witcher. That doesn't mean I can't spend dozens of hours on another beautiful world and enjoy it as it was designed.

I will definitely follow Warhorse from now on, and given the fact that I got the game cheap through Humble Monthly, I know I'll be buying the sequel day one. Their games are worth it.