When The Witcher 3 released back in 2015, the game received critical acclaim. It won The Game Award for Game of the Year and remains a fan-favorite for its combination of a huge open-world and tight character-driven storytelling. But there’s one aspect of CD Projekt Red’s fantasy RPG that hasn’t received the attention it deserved.
The Witcher 3’s Ladies of Crookback Bog, AKA the Ladies of the Wood or the Crones, are some of the best examples of dark fantasy in video game storytelling. Everything from the pacing of their introduction to their physical design keeps the player on the edge of their seat, and manages to invest the player in stakes that are separate from Geralt’s own fate or even his main quest. Here’s why The Witcher 3’s Ladies of Crookback Bog should be a guiding light for game designers and fantasy storytellers alike as RPGs enter the next generation of consoles.
The Witcher 3’s Ladies of Crookback Bog are perfectly set up to be terrifyingly eerie even before they’re anything more than a name. The player is first introduced to the Ladies of the Wood through a fairytale. The very first inkling the player gets of these characters is in “The Ladies of the Wood” book which sorceress Keira Metz gives Geralt. The book’s final few lines read:
“Find a child, young and innocent, and take it to Crookback Bog. Search out the Ladies’ shrine – that is where the Trail of Treats begins. Set the child off on the trail and it shall follow its sweet track and find the Good Ladies. The child will never want for anything ever again, for the Ladies are kind and generous.
Standing before their shrine, pronounce your request and the Good Ladies will hear, for they see and hear all that takes place in their demesne. If you made the offering as it must be done, your supplication will be heard.”
The implication is immediately harrowing, with parents seemingly giving up their children as “offerings.” The idea that the Ladies will look after the children seems like a comforting lie to say the least, and a way for parents to soften the psychologically blow of their sacrifice. When Geralt of Rivia visits the Bog, the children he finds are singing a creepy rhyme, raising the question of what kind of sacrifice was made exactly.
The Ladies don’t appear for a while, and the anxiety at this point of the quest is palpable. Gran, the Crones’ servant, shows Geralt a mural to The Witcher 3’s Ladies of Crookback Bog which depicts them as young women engaged in some sort of bloody ritual, setting the Witcher 3‘s player up for a real shock when their actual appearances are revealed.
The next part of the build up to the Ladies involved finding Johnny, who, before he opens his mouth, is pretty creepy in his own right. Johnny is a Godling, a small monster in The Witcher universe with huge eyes and purple skin that acts like a child. The player is surrounded by children or child-like characters and is increasingly given hints at a disturbing yet unseen force in Crookback Bog. Geralt is quick-witted, powerful, and generally unfazed, so CD Projekt Red ingeniously sets up plenty of other far more vulnerable characters for the player to fear for.
The game near-perfectly builds up fear for the orphans, even before the Ladies of Crookback Bog have been revealed. This sets up the player to make one of the hardest decisions in The Witcher 3 during the quest The Whispering Hillock, where the player can release a powerful spirit after getting it to promise to protect the orphans of Crookback Bog.
Making this decision leads to Gran – revealed to be the Bloody Baron’s wife Anna, dying, and the Bloody Baron himself committing suicide. The spirit also kills most of the villagers of Downwarren, where it was haunting, making the price of saving the orphans extremely high.
When Geralt returns to Crookback Bog Anna’s true identity is revealed, along with the fact that she was fattening up the children for the Crones to eat. Not only that, but The Witcher 3′s Ladies of Crookback Bog are revealed themselves—they are not a pretty sight. Like the Fates of Greek mythology, there is only one eye the player can see between the three of them. In this case, however, it’s a horribly swollen, hole-pocked growth on the face of one of the Ladies.
The design of the Witcher 3’s Ladies of Crookback Bog is the perfect mix of body-horror and fairy-tale simplicity. The game realizes the characters such that players can understand how a child’s description of the Crones would translate into the typical fairy-tale description of a witch in the woods, without being able to truly describe how terrifying the characters look. One even wears a big pointy hat, while another wears an apron reminiscent of tales of witches cooking children. The third is larger and wears a hood with a basket over the front covering her face as well.
Their theme, “Ladies of the Woods,” is also among the most recognizable music in The Witcher 3, and has a trance-like repetition which makes their presence all the more intoxicatingly repulsive. The Witcher 3’s Ladies of Crookback Bog are a great example of dark fantasy at is best, because they tap in to some of the ways that even the most child-aimed fairy tales of witches gobbling up naughty children still rely on fear as their main storytelling device.
The Witcher 3 translates that fear into the far more adult anxiety of losing children even when the adult in the picture – Geralt – seems totally capable of protecting himself. Though he’s later able to defeat the Crones, their appearance in the Bloody Baron’s story elevates it to one of the best quests in RPG gaming.
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is available now on PC, PS4, Switch, and Xbox One
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