You can either track down the herbs she needs to perform the medieval fantasy equivalent of laser removal surgery, or put up with having a naked woman with a sword and shield prominently displayed on your neck for all to see. Geralt then turns to Triss, his sorceress girlfriend, for advice on what to do about his new ink. This being a Witcher game it predictably involves a brothel. Geralt’s quest briefly stops being something about some kings or whatever and becomes a much more immediate search for answers about what he got up to the night before. It begins with some knife-throwing, arm-wrestling, and shit-talking, and soon he’s waking up half-dressed on a riverbank with no memory of how he got there and a brand new tattoo on his neck. In The Witcher 2 a sidequest hidden in the starter town has him deal with the consequences of over-celebrating with a fantasy special forces squad called The Blue Stripes. The Witcher games in particular subject their ‘hero’ Geralt to plenty of that. There are other consequences to drinking too much beyond addiction, and the one most of us will have to deal with in real life is regrettable decision-making. Your stumblebum drunken fist attacks cause a lot of damage, especially the one where you topple over like a tipsy oak, though you have to keep drinking to keep the punch party going. When Hou is your companion he casually lobs bottles of wine at you in combat drinking them allows you to switch to the drunken master style of kung fu just like Jackie Chan. BioWare’s wuxia RPG gives you a companion named Henpecked Hou who is as much a drinking buddy as a member of your fantasy fellowship.
Drink the right booze in Jade Empire and you can learn martial arts. Games sometimes have odder ideas about the benefits of drinking than simple bonuses to your toughness or health. And if there’s some kind of bonus involved, like getting health back in Redneck Rampage, all the better.
My Commander Shepherd samples the krogan liquor, my Edward Kenway wakes up in a haycart after three or seven ales, and my Adam Jensen didn’t ask for this woozy tilting of the Earth or all the double images, please make it stop. I feel it’s my patriotic duty as an Australian. Underwhelming as it sometimes is, I’ll try getting drunk in any game that lets me.