If you prefer air travel to climbing mountains or horseback, and are keen to try out cool The Witcher 3 add-ons made using its REDkit modding tools, it seems you’re in luck. As part of a big new quest mod that’s had its opening missions released early, you can take Geralt on a trip to a mysterious island via hot air balloon.

As far as I’m aware – unless there’s some pre-REDkit mod I’m somehow forgetting about and that a search hasn’t turned up, in which case I’ll happily hold up my silver sword-wielding hands – this is the first time someone’s managed to pull off letting you ride around in such a vehicle in TW3. Given REDkit’s allowed other folks to make it possible to sail a full-size ship, among many other things, this looks to be the latest one that’ll blow you away.

The balloon, though, is juat one part of ‘Song of Wind‘ a project from modder RoiJean in which “Geralt goes on the hunt for Whispering Island, a place that nobody seems to know about…”. It’s called the Whispering Island, a name which definitely checks all the mysterious isle boxes.

RoiJean writes that the mod is “designed as a new mini ‘expansion’” with “only the first two quests” currently being on offer, because the modder wanted to get the project uploaded before the deadline of the CD Projekt modding competition that’s currently running, which challenges folks to “tell your own tale and forge an adventure made of 2-3 interconnected quests”.

As you can hear in the teaser above – or check out in this full showcase of the two missions currently on offer, which I’m only linking to in case you want to avoid spoilers – according to its creator, Song of Wind uses a mixture of custom voice acting for its new NPCs and spliced together lines from the base game for Geralt’s dialogue. Yes, because of the world we live in now, my first thought when I saw this was ‘oh god, please don’t tell me this otherwise cool thing’s ruined by some crappy AI voices’, but it would thankfully seem that isn’t the case.

As of right now, once you complete the mod’s second quest, which sees Geralt fly to the mysterious island with a professor in a balloon the medieval fantasy science man’s dubbed a “wind vessel”, you’ll just be teleported back to Novigrad, which is where this level 50 mini-adventure begins.

Naturally, that isn’t the ideal ending RoiJean has in mind. “I haven’t had time to do the end of the story as it’s my submission for the redkit modding competition,” they wrote in a comment, “I’ve got the whole story in my head, but I’ve got to cut it short to get it out in time… I hope I’ll have time to finish it one day.” They added in another comment: “I can’t promise a date for the rest, I’ve spent 3 months working full-time on this mod and I have to put development on hold now.”

So, probably one worth keeping an eye on to see if it gets fleshed out fully, even if you don’t fancy checking oit out in its current state. Do you think Geralt would find a way to hate hot air balloon travel more than he does portals? Lety us know below.