I played The Witcher 1 over ten years ago.

Great story and even better ideas about consequences, but even then it was a rough gameplay experience.

It makes more sense when you realise it was originally going to be a PC port of Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance, but it leads to this awkward mix of gameplay styles that are hard to grasp at first. There's really not much to the combat other than clicking when the icon glows and moving.

The hardest fight in the game is a dog very early on, which you can cheese by stunning it with Aard (RNG based iirc) and landing a one hit finisher, but the fact that there's an unskippable lengthy cutscene right before it is absolutely obnoxious. And fighting something two levels above you is a death sentence, leading to a bit of exploring to get enough XP to be able to do everything.