This guide will show you how to start and complete the secondary quest in The Witcher 3 Blood and Wine called The Hunger Game. You’ll also find out what happens if you decide to let Marlene stay or send her to town!
This guide is up-to-date for The Witcher 3 Next-Gen version (Update 4.04)
How to unlock and start The Hunger Game quest
The Hunger Game is a secondary quest available only after you have unlocked Toussaint and you own the Blood and Wine expansion of The Witcher 3.
The Hunger Game spawns automatically 48 in-game hours after you have completed the main quest La Cage au Fou. The only way to unlock and get The Hunger Game is if you lift the first and save the wight while looking for the wight saliva gland at the Trastamara Estate Ruins.
I have a full guide on how to complete La Cage au Fou and save the wight. You can always reload a previous save and make the choice to lift the curse from the wight.
The Hunger Game quest is recommended for level 42. There is actually no fighting involved, but to reach it, you’d have to go through quite a bit of a challenge at the end of La Cage au Fou, which will result in you being at or around that level.
To get the quest to spawn, you must bring Marlene to Corvo Bianco. It doesn’t matter if the vineyard is renovated at all or if you have even met Barnabas-Basil Foulty. You get the vineyard at the start of your adventures in Toussaint, so you don’t have to worry about anything else except lifting the curse from Marlene at the Estate.
After you bring Marlene to the vineyard, you can either play the game for 48 in-game hours or meditate to pass the time. You should do this outside of the vineyard’s area.
The Hunger Game Quest Walkthrough
The quest is actually short. It’s one conversation with Marlene at CorvoBianco, Geralt’s vineyard. It has two paths. I have described both below and the difference it makes if you choose either.
Talk to Marlene to see how she’s doing. She will tell you her sad story of watching her relatives passed away decades ago. She is all lonely now with nowhere to go.
You have two options, Allow Marlene to stay or encourage her to go to town and start a new life. The choice has consequences, though nothing too dramatic.
What if you send Marlene to town
If you choose the first option in the dialogue and send Marlene to town to start a new life, the quest will end.
This isn’t exactly a bad or wrong choice from a moral point of view. Geralt and Marlene split up with warm feelings. He encourages her to start her new life, he’s not throwing her away.
You’d lose out on additional Experience Points and other rewards. You also miss out on a few additional lines of dialogue with Marlene:
What if you let Marnele stay at Corvo Bianco
This is the better choice for several reasons. The moral one is that Marlene will be very happy and grateful.
Allowing Marnele to stay in the vineyard counts as the “Proof of Compassion” virtue for the Aerondight quest “There Can Be Only One”.
Marlene will tell you that you will always have a hot meal when you return. She will also want to thank you with some material goods as well. She will tell you of her father leaving her some valuables back at the Estate.
Since you have already been there, you now have unlocked the Fast Travel Signpost. There will be no barghests at the location anymore.
Enter the house and go to the basement. All the way down in the room with the spoons on the floor, you will find barrels on the front and right walls. The one you need to knock on is the second from the right. You can knock on all of them if you want, of course.
Inside you will find a trophy item, which you can place in Corvo Bianco and 460 Crowns.
The Trophy is called “Gold Stick of Joy”. It is a direct reference to the Golden Joystick Awards (which CD Projekt RED won for The Witcher 3). It also looks exactly as the annual award trophy.
The quest ends as soon as you pick up the items from the barrel. There is nothing more you can tell or ask Marlene back at the vineyard. Next time you go there, she will be in the kitchen, cooking.
Below you can see an overview of the Golden Stick of Joy trophy standing on the cabinet in the master bedroom where Geralt sleeps when he is home. You can get a second one to place on the other cabinet in the bedroom and create symmetry as the item persists through New Game Plus.
If you play on an Ultrawide screen, you might have noticed that the first video in this guide has black bars on the sides and the second video doesn’t. You can remove the black bars in The Witcher 3 cutscenes on Ultrawide screens very easily. Take a look at the dedicated guide I have for this.
