This one is a truly charming adventure that’s as gruesome as it is sweet. By focusing on the story and puzzles, it creates an item-focused adventure that rarely wastes the player’s time, and then gets out on one heck of a high note.
It’s bleak, it’s funny, and it has character for days. I’m used to crafting-themed games being huge, sprawling, self-guided odysseys, so compared to them, Wytchwood is a bite-sized revelation. I understand the design idea here - take the player on a tour of every location in the game before the credits roll - but it winds up feeling like a slog, and if I hadn’t been so interested to see how the story turned out, I would have found myself massively discouraged. Players then have to build incredibly complex items made out of the most challenging-to-obtain reagents in the game. The first nine souls the Witch must track down involve going to new places and discovering new challenges, but the last three are in maps the player has already seen. Wytchwood does have one major drawback, however - the last third of the game is a little more grindy than everything that came before. Instead of spending hours searching nooks and crannies for a particular mushroom, I scooped up valuables everywhere I went, and the game’s utter lack of inventory limits ensures that item collection never turns into a Sophie’s Choice-type situation. The result is a world that feels more alive than I’m used to in crafting-focused titles. Players will never have to tke more than a few steps to find something to dig out of the ground, slice off with some shears, or murder with a trap. While Wytchwood‘s map isn’t particularly large - there are eight different small biomes, each with a couple of sub-maps related to quests - every area is packed with beautifully-rendered details. For example, when they stumble upon a gob of goblin snot in the first area, how could they expect that they’d be processing it into an antacid to cure a leviathan’s tummyache five hours later? One invention leads to the next until, at the end of the chain, a villain is getting their comeuppance. It’s a feat of design that every new combination manages to solve a problem in a completely unexpected and frequently humorous way. Wytchwood manages to create a sense of adventure and discovery with each new spell. In a practical sense, Wytchwood‘s goal is to fill up the Witch’s grimoire so that she can deal with all of the villains, but from moment to moment, it doesn’t feel like the player is checking items off of a list. Every character, monster, or obstacle has a weakness, and by scanning them, the Witch will ‘remember’ the spell she’ll need to deal with the problem. The Witch has a special vision mode that she can use to pause the world and examine every interactable item.
In addition to tracking down animal-based reagents, players develop the spells they’re going to use by examining their surroundings. It’s so brutal that I found it crossed over the line and became hilarious, although that will probably not be true for all audiences. Crafting a trap, set it down, then wait patiently for an animal to wander over and explode into fountain of blood. The primary activity during the Witch’s quest is collecting reagents to build spells, which frequently involves catching and killing super adorable animals.
Even so, actions of the witch can still seem horrible as Wytchwood embraces black comedy with an almost inappropriate glee. From slave-driving farmers who feed their exhausted workers to the animals to bankers that sabotage their patrons so that they’ll default on their loans and lose their land, they’re all the worst of the worst.
#WYTCHWOOD RELEASE DATE SERIES#
From there the player heads out into an open world and follows a series of quest chains to collect these souls and save the woman! It would be an entirely heroic endeavor if the witch’s methods weren’t so frequently monstrous.Įvery villain the game presents is rotten to the core. A demonic goat explains that she’s been entrusted with saving the life of a sleeping-beauty-style lady, and the only thing he’ll accept for his part of the bargain are the souls of twelve local villains. This cartoon-styled 2D adventure kicks off when the Witch - a bird-limbed monstrosity with a cauldron for a head - wakes up and finds her memory has been erased. Wytchwood proves that crafting can stand on its own, and tells a charmingly dark story while doing so. The crafting genre frequently goes hand-in-hand with the survival genre as developers try to pad out the amount of time players will spend in barren wastelands, but the pure joy of finding items and transforming them into something new can be a good time on its own without constant interruptions from hunger and sleep meters. LOW The lack of closure on a particular plot point. HIGH Getting the Three (not-so) Little Pigs Their Just Desserts