Spoiler's abound in the gallery, folks! Be warned!

I couldn’t stop thinking about Moby Dick while playing The Witcher 3. The game isn’t a massive, meandering novel, but they do have something vital in common. Moby Dick is 25 percent traditional plot and 75 percent internal monologues on whale anatomy as a springboard for philosophy. It’s weirdly specific and tangential, and likewise, The Witcher 3 is 10 percent Geralt’s story and 90 percent the rest of the world’s. In other words, the game is at its best when it stops being about saving the world and is instead about anything else, like finding a frying pan for a distraught old woman in a decrepit riverside village. It’s these particularities in a massive world that give it a pulse. And while the main questline is good fantasy storytelling, it wouldn’t carry weight or consequence without being grounded in mundanity first. Don’t get me wrong; I enjoy sliding through The Hero’s Journey time and time again, it’s just always been a conduit—especially in games—to live somewhere else and care about something new.

There’s plenty of room for the particular in The Witcher 3, and from it springs the universal, or, a damn memorable, emotive game. Which is all to say there aren’t many mainline quests in our best of list—don’t worry, they’re all pretty great. It’s a compliment and not a criticism.

Will we spot some familiar favorites in The Witcher season 2 as well? We'll find out in 2021.

Oh, and once more. Here be spoilers.