While the game is a bit dated by now, it's a surprisingly complete, very adult tale that bleeds detail and charm.
The Witcher is a pretty straightforward and traditional role-playing game. The game opens with your character, Geralt of Rivia, being brought to a castle inhabited by Witchers (mutated professional monster-hunters) and he suffers from amnesia. The castle is attacked and a cache of precious mutagens (magical gene-altering items that give the Witchers their power) are stolen. Geralt sets out to find the Salamandra bandits that instigated the attack, and thus begins the adventure.
The game is broken down into chapters. Similarly to the second game, each chapter takes place within a contiguous and finite open-world area. You're not getting Skryim-esque levels of sheer exploration, but there is plenty to discover and a lot to do in these areas. Quest-givers pepper the landscape and the full day and night cycle gives you breathing room to explore during the day, while the freaks and monsters come out at night. It's a good touch, and it's woven pretty well into the game's narrative, as certain quests and activities require venturing out into the night to fight various monsters or perform other actions.
Graphically, the game is a surprising winner. Obviously, the level of technical detail doesn't even begin to approach the awe-inspiring visuals of the sequel when played on ultra settings, but The Witcher has an artistic style that wins you over with the little things. The game runs on BioWare's Aurora engine from 2007 (the same engine that ran the original Mass Effect), and the graphics hold up surprisingly well even today. Any mid-range GPU should be able to handle the game on full settings. My Radeon HD6790 can't keep the framerate up at 16x anisotropic filtering, but at 12x, I'm running well over 60fps with all settings on ultra at 1920x1080. The game does have some graphical hitches, and character models are a bit bland and some are recycled, but the environments themselves are very well thought-out and feel natural and wild.
The gameplay is a bit of a mixed bag. On the one hand, you have a surprising amount of things to do and see, which is fantastic. On the other hand, quests can pile up and sometimes someone will give you a task that seems like a quest, but is not added to your questlog, requiring you to simply remember which generic character you need to go and talk to. This has led to a few missed opportunities on my part, where I remembered one of these assignments well after I had passed that portion of the game. Despite a few quest-related nuisances, the overall questing and gameplay is remarkably complete and well-rounded. Geralt is a monster-hunter, so you'll be doing a hell of a lot of monster-hunting. You'll also save non-humans from being harassed by racists, rescue cornered women from rapists, and perform all manner of deeds for the community, from hunting dogs and gathering herbs to discovering lost treasure in ancient towers. All in a day's work for a Witcher, I guess. Unfortunately, the combat is one of the weaker aspects of the game. You have a silver sword for killing monsters and a steel one for killing humans. When you attack, you have to time your clicks in what's almost a strange little combat mini-game. Click too early or late, and your combo gets broken. Geralt dodges and blocks automatically, making combat feel kind of passive. On top of that, there are three combat styles: strong (for fighting large armored foes), speed (for fighting small fast foes), and group (for swinging and hitting multiple foes at once). Using the wrong style against and opponent results in Geralt sometimes refusing to swing his sword, or causing little to no damage. On more than one occasion, I was fighting one person with my style accidentally set to "group" and doing almost no damage against him. You get used to the idea, but it's just not a very good one on the whole. But combat is only part of the package, and the exploration and questing is just as fun as in the game's sequel. There are some pretty interesting moral dilemmas too, that often force you to pick between two or more morally dubious choices, and these choices have real and surprising effects on the narrative.
The game's audio is quite good. Considering that the game was originally in Polish and translated to English, the dialogue and voice-acting is sharp and at times genuinely emotive, while other times it approaches Resident Evil 1 levels of stiff delivery and absurd inflection. I would say that the voice acting is pretty much in the middle of the road, with standout performances on both sides of the curve, but it's mostly just okay. The sounds of the environments are crisp and believable, and change with the time of day. It does a lot to aid in the immersion of the experience, and it's usually very well-rounded and gives you a lot of spacial awareness.
In the end, you need to think about what you expect from this game. If the sequel doesn't particularly interest you, then this game won't be the one to change your mind about it. I am well aware that there are those out there who find the gameplay and pacing of this series to be absolutely insufferable. I'm not here to make judgments. I play games for the pacing and story, and this game- like its sequel- isn't going to hold your hand and guide you toward your goal. This is a game that requires thought and patience. It's perfectly understandable why some gamers would be hesitant to delve into the game, but if you're interested in role-playing games, you like good adventure, and you're a fan of the fantasy genre, this is one grown-up story that's absolutely worth experiencing if you're willing to look past a few gameplay missteps. If you have a halfway decent rig and some time to spare, $10 to experience this amazing story is money well spent.