After death threats and accusations, women are returning to video games – and the games themselves are changing

Holly Baxter wasn’t immediately convinced when she was introduced to the Bloody Baron, but now she’s a convert to the world of ever more nuanced video games

Could gaming be given its own Oscar category? (CD Projekt)

The Bloody Baron has a mission for you: he wants you to find his wife and daughter. They went missing, he says, after his castle was broken into and ransacked. They were probably kidnapped during a burglary.

Because you’re a non-human magical being called a witcher, you can use your senses to search the castle for signs of who the kidnappers were. But when you investigate, something seems amiss: there is widespread destruction, but nothing has been taken. The stench of alcohol is everywhere. A protective talisman is hidden under the floorboards in the room the baron’s wife, Anna, shares with him, as if she had known well in advance that she was in danger.

You go to the local pellar – the man who Anna bought the talisman from – and find out that she had come to see him for “protection” a few weeks earlier.