So this time around, we're going to cover the Witcher III DLC's monsters! I tried to keep it all in one page, but Blood and Wine did have a fair amount of new creatures, so I ended up splitting it into two.As always, I'm going to go by the in-game bestiary, and am not going to include any named human NPC's. Hearts of Stone, I think, might actually be one of my favourite parts of my playthrough of The Witcher III. It's comparatively short, yes, compared to the main campaign or the second DLC, but the very well-executed story and the pretty fun antagonists in Olgierd von Everec and Gaunter O'Dimm is a very, very solid world-building and storyline. I dunno. The very story-heavy elements of this DLC really made me have a lot of fun playing through it.
Without spoiling too much about the plot twists and storylines, it basically puts Geralt smack-deep within a story between a man and his inhuman genie-esque/fair-folk-like/demonic patron, with a huge focus on wishes and be-careful-what-you-wish-for and all that jazz.
- Click here for the first part of Witcher III's bestiary.
- Click here for the second part of Witcher III's bestiary.
- Click here for Hearts of Stone.
- Click here for other reviewing monsters.
Wild Boar
Classified into the 'beasts' category in Witcher III's enemies, the Wild Boar is... sure? It fills up the boar/wolf/bear fantasy RPG video game trifecta, I suppose. Witcher III's boar has a couple of extra tusks, but otherwise it's honestly kind of forgettable in a world with Endregas, Rotfiends and Rock Trolls. It's nice that these exist, but I also find it kind of funny that out of the additions to this game from the DLC, one of it is just just angry wild boars. I'm not even mad, any more variety in enemies gets a huge thumbs up from me.
Arachnomorph
The other 'common' enemy that shows up in the overworld, random dungeons, caves and minor missions is the Arachnomorph. Witcher III already has buggy enemies in the Endrega and Arachas, but the new Arachnomorph (while using Endrega animations) are far, far more spidery. It's quite literally just a giant spider with stabby front legs, and its face is pretty unmistakably that of a spider! It's just a giant web-spitting spider and, sure, it doesn't quite have the part-reptile, part-plant Arachas or Endrega, but it's still a pretty fun little addition. In combat the Arachnomorphs, as mentioned, are basically reskinned Endregas, but are far, far faster and mobile in jumping around while wrapping Geralt up with web.
Toad Prince
Hearts of Stone's main story campaign is way more tight than the base game or Blood and Wine, so we've got a couple of extra chances to have some fun Legend of Zelda style bosses in the game. The first of these is the Toad Prince, classified as a 'Cursed One', and without spoiling too much, Geralt meets this giant frog underneath the sewers of the city of Oxenfurt, and this is one of the Witcher franchise's typical 'twisted classical fairy tale' since, as the name might clue you in, this is an adaptation of the Princess and the Frog. A lot of poor maidens go into the sewers to kiss the supposedly cursed frog prince, only to be killed and entombed in some Aliens-style nasty slime-goop that turns them into the Toad Prince's supper.
The Toad Prince's design itself is pretty appropriately nasty. Toads are inherently pretty gross and the model highlights a lot of the nastier, warty, beady-eyed parts of a frog... but adds a couple of extra details that make it extra nasty -- an extra pair of vestigial human-sized hands hanging from its chest, and the fact that the lower jaw splits aside to reveal a massive maw of teeth that a real toad most certainly don't have. (Thank you, Gwent card, for showcasing how the Toad Prince's mouth works). My favourite part, however, is how fast the Toad Prince is. Not that it's moving in super-speed or anything, but it's actually hopping around and moving in a way that's appropriate for a bulky, blubbery toad -- which honestly reminds me of the movement of actual bullfrogs! And, of course, there's the typical tongue-whip and the warts on its back acting as what's basically cannons shooting poison globs at you. A pretty nasty frog monster, and one that I actually do find to be pretty appropriate.
The Caretaker
In-universe, there is a lot of confusion even for Geralt himself when he meets the enigmatic cloaked figure called the Caretaker. He's a figure that's sent to watch over a certain mansion (again, I'm not going to spoil the story, and will just describe the Caretaker as a being) and while certainly creepy, turns out that the Caretaker is, essentially, just kind of a drone sent to dig graves and set tables in the mansion, sort of like an automatic butler. Turns out that the being that summoned the Caretaker summoned something from another plane that Geralt's bestiary and some other characters shrugged and said it's maybe a 'demon' or something, but the definition of demons in general is so questionable that the Caretaker and many other greater, supernatural beings in the Hearts of Stone expansion is kind of just questionable. Demons? Extradimensional alien beings? Greater fair folk? Elder gods? You decide, because none of them are going to be willing to tell Geralt!
The Caretaker himself is a pretty creepy design. A face without eyes isn't that creepy. That's just Gordon from Agents of SHIELD. A face with a smooth slab of skin stitched to where the eye and nose is supposed to be, though? The fact that it's a gravedigger just adds to the creepiness thanks to the connotations, and when you actually do fight him, it's perhaps one of the most Zelda-iest fight in Witcher III in that you really need to figure out the Caretaker's patterns and realize that its magic shovel heals the Caretaker for every successful strike it does -- either to Geralt, or to the random, ghostly specters it summons from the ground when it strikes the ground. A very appropriate twist to a gravedigger, I suppose, in that the Caretaker basically absorbs the spirits of its charges to become stronger. The animations for the Caretaker is great, and honestly, that alone made him way more memorable than any of the other bosses in the game.
The Wraith from the Painting & Ethereal
I'm not sure what piece of fiction popularized the 'ghost that spills out of a creepy painting', but the Wraith from the Painting, while using a model that's pretty similar to the common wraiths, is faced in a fun corridor with multiple paintings on the walls and until you figure out the (again, very Zelda-esque) trick of having to bash whichever painting the Wraith is trying to escape into, the Wraith will be an impossible boss fight that will keep regenerating to full health with no way to beat it. Again, it's not a particularly over-the-top change and it's a pretty simple gimmick when you figure it out, but the association with the painting adds a huge amount of memorability to this boss compared to the other half-dozen wraiths that show up in the game.
I'm also going to include the other boss from the same 'level' that the Painting Wraith shows up in, the Ethereal. Again, it's hard to really discuss them without going in-depth about the backstory, but the Ethereal is basically the manifestation of the Wraith's fear towards a certain other character when Geralt enters the painting world. The Ethereal itself is honestly just a Silent-Hill style figure that's constantly contorting its limbs and moving in unnatural, jerky ways, even if visually it's just some dude with a burlap mask. The boss fight itself isn't super novel, unlike the Caretaker or the Painting Wraith, it's just a bunch of Ethereals in a room, some of them being still like statue until they get 'activated' by the death of their brethren or, if you're like me, you brazenly charge in and attack the immobile ones.
Frightener
I'm not covering Olgierd and O'Dimm in the same way that I didn't cover Eredin and the rest of the Wild Hunt -- they are characters and we'll be here for a long while if I start dissecting individual antagonists and alternate pathways or whatever. So let's go into the Gwent deck in the Witcher III game! One of the Gwent sub-groups is the 'Monsters' segment, which also features a bunch of creatures from previous Witcher games that doesn't show up here (or is a stealth-nod to them showing up in Blood and Wine). We've talked about the Kayran and Draugr in Witcher II, but we've never talked about the Frightener, who only showed up in the first Witcher game.
And the Frightener is... a giant mantis! With extra-large legs. But as that Gwent card art shows, the Frighter's got a certainly not-quite-buggy head-and-neck, looking more like some sort of mutated fanged horse with two extra tusks jutting out of its lower jaw. It's also called the 'chimera' by some translations, noted to be created by a mad mage's attempts to combine other animals, and I can totally believe that this is some sort of combination between a reptile and an insect, although one that emphasized the non-insect parts. I do find it interesting that in the original sketches of the Frightener it was just a pretty cool straight-up giant mantis, but eventually evolved into the more unique bug-monster that it ended up being. And then the Gwent standalone game re-envisioned the Fightener with a skull head and camouflage abilities and it's genuinely frightening! Kind of a shame this critter never actually made it into Witcher III.
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