Camera unresponsive in Witcher 2; how can I get it unstuck?

Question

I'm playing the Prologue quest in Witcher 2 (via Steam). I've descended into the well, and drank the cat potion as the tutorial prompt suggested.

Everything went greyscale, I hear a heartbeat, and I see the red glowing outline of a human's skeleton/blood vessels in the distance, which I assume are the effects of this potion. Cool. So I'm walking around in the dungeon, and I drop down a hole in the floor to a lower level.

Suddenly my camera is stuck. I know the game itself isn't stuck because the potion countdown timer is still ticking. I still hear the heartbeat. I can see a dead body on the floor, and the red glowing outline is standing above it not moving.

I can still move Geralt around, but it's a little hard when the camera isn't following him. He can draw his sword and attack things (well, the air anyhow.) Attacking the red glowy person doesn't seem to help. According to the tutorial prompt, I can exit out of the potion's effect by meditating, but the ctrl hotkey that would allow me to access meditation appears to have no effect. Basically any command that would pop up a dialog or overlay isn't working -- inventory, character gen, journal, tutorial (tab), etc.

Thinking it might be a problem with the potion itself, I let the timer run out. The monochrome display effect disappeared, but my camera is still stuck. Turns out the red glowy thing was some sort of weird fish person -- I can't interact with them at all other than bump into them, and whacking them with a sword does nothing.

I can't quick save (F5 causes a message that says that I can't save here). There a really old thread on GoG that suggests reloading an old save, though the "stuck camera" described there doesn't quite match what I'm experiencing (they can't move at all; I can technically move I just can't see what I'm doing). I really don't want to lose my progress -- is there any solution to this other than finding a previous save that isn't bugged out?

I have no mods (does this game even have mods?) and this is my first play through. No customization of anything. Normal difficulty.

Answer 1

It indeed seems to be a rare problem, and whenever a solution is given, its fix, like you say, is to reload an old saved game. So, we have to look into possible indirect fixes.

To answer one of your other questions in the process - which might have been rhetorical - the game does have mods, and this one, called 'Enhanced Camera', changes the in-game camera, so I'd suggest installing that, and see if it changes anything. It will overwrite the default camera behaviour, so if that is where the bug lurked around, it ought to be dead now.
(According to this Projekt Red thread, that camera mod was taken from Rise of the Sword, which actually has a better implementation, so I'd suggest downloading the file from here, and only drag the folder characters/templates/camera (with the file camera_graph.w2beh) to your Witcher 2 installation folder).

If that fails, or alternatively, you might want to give 'Better Camera for Master Witcher Redux' a try. It's meant as an addition to 'Master Witcher Redux', but using only the camera_graph.w2beh file ought to work perfectly fine.

If this method fails, I might look for other options. Good luck!