Forget your PS5 Pro or Switch 2 – this new Witcher game has me hooked to my iPhone

When you take straw polls of the best open-world games ever made, The Witcher 3 always features near the top – it's one of the most ambitious and well-realised gaming worlds ever built. It's also graphically stunning and beautifully designed, meaning it's never been ported to mobile platforms, so you need a console or PC gaming handheld to play it on the go.

If you're yearning for a bit of its wry tone and fantasy immersion, though, then I'd recommend you check out Reigns: The Witcher – a far simpler way to get into Geralt of Rivia's world, and one that you can play on your phone for basically pennies.

For just a fiver, this game takes the "swipe left or right" format that made the original Reigns such a runaway success, and transplants it onto The Witcher with a nice degree of light-hearted humour. I've had access for about a day, and I've already lost a couple of hours to it, which is a very good sign.

Rather than actually constructing a detailed new story for Geralt, the game frames your short adventures as stories being told by the bard Dandelion. He navigates Geralt through a huge array of "either-or" choices, all of which have effects on some popularity meters.

If any of those meters empties completely or fills completely, you're likely to die very quickly, so the game is all about keeping them all balanced through your choices. In the morally grey world of The Witcher, that ends up being a really apt way to approach things.

Reigns: The Witcher | Launch Gameplay Trailer | Out Now - YouTube

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Another fun layer is offered by a simple rhythm game that sometimes comes up if you get into a fight with a monster. This lets you time moves along a board to coincide with either attacks of your own or damage from the monster, and is a simple but fun enough way to make fights a risk.

From running into characters like Triss Merigold and Yennefer to collecting a wide array of grisly death scenarios, I've so far found things really fresh on each run. In the background, slowly growing Dandelion's reputation also lets you earn new scenarios and objectives to concentrate on during runs.

Those runs last a matter of minutes (especially if you make stupid choices), so this is a quintessential mobile game (although it's also on PC). I'll be pulling it out on trains and buses for the next little while, of that I'm sure. You can grab it on the Apple App Store here for £5.99 or $5,99, the Google Play Store here for £5.49, or on Steam here for £4.99.