Wytchwood is a beautiful idyllic game with a unique storybook art style where you play as a justice-driven witch who has to compulsively grab every single useful twig, loose rock, and patch of grass off of the ground because by god, she's going to need it later, she can feel it.
The core mechanic of the game is exactly what you see in the trailer - you are a crone from the swamps and you will wander through the various locales, scoop up exotic ingredients by crafting various items that will allow you to find rarer items, and use them all together to reap punishment on the twelve horrible souls that definitely deserve it. (well, one soul is three people working together, but details, details) By the end of the game, you'll have morphed into a fairytale witch yourself because you'll have an almost encyclopedic knowledge of what is found where in the world and what it's all used for.
The game isn't being coy when it says its genre is Capital C Crafting over anything else - the biggest gameplay loop is "pick thing off ground, use thing to make a second thing, use second thing to gather third thing, use third thing to craft important item with other third things in a chain" and if that sounds overwhelming, then you will hate the later portions of the game where every step of the way is filled with like ten different Things To Get. Finding all the things isn't THAT difficult but there certainly are some reagents that will get on your nerves. I for one learned to hate jars of water! Perhaps you'll hate crab claws or mosquito needles!
But don't worry, it's not just digging up rocks and gathering bundles of straw. The game's story is where Wytchwood really shines, and it's what pushed me to keep going as I checked off each item in my woodland gathering shopping list. The main character is a wonderful grumpy little witch full of piss and vinegar and there's little dabs of dry wit in every written line and description. The dialogue and the storylines are all so distinctive and interesting, with each character getting a very stylish dialogue portrait, with a fun biting dark humor to them that fits the amazing art style.
It wouldn't be fun to be a witch casting dark magicks on someone who doesn't deserve it, and the game's twelve animal-themed antagonists all have interesting stories and a variety of reasons as to why you'll feel good about killing them and reaping their souls to give to Maybe Satan We Don't Know. The first villain I dispatched was a humanoid leech who was faking a plague outbreak so that she could fill an entire wine cellar with poisoned blood because, in her words, "black fever adds a certain nutty quality", and I did it because an old lady asked for me to find her missing husband. It's the little touches to the story that make all the relentless twig-gathering worth it.
But that does not stop the twig gathering from being relentless (oh god you need so many twigs), and so you craft craft craft until the game ends about 8-10 hours later, and the ending just kinda ends on a vague little plot twist. The words "repetitive" and "slog" are often used to describe this game, and I'd be lying if I said these were unfair. But! If you're the kind of person who finds peace in gathering up a stock of supplies and then gets a short burst of joy from being overprepared for the current fetch quest and being able to make the complicated object right then and there, this is definitely worth a try. No one is going to judge you if you decimate the forest's population of fireflies. Honest.
P.S. During the first four souls, I assumed that the reason there were animal people is because their wickedness had corrupted their form and they were all wearing the skin of beasts as the result of their hubris (especially with the Ox, who has a normal human family), only to enter a village and find out that no, there's also friendly animal people and this is just a setting similar to Shovel Knight where the humans and the animal men live together in harmony.
The core mechanic of the game is exactly what you see in the trailer - you are a crone from the swamps and you will wander through the various locales, scoop up exotic ingredients by crafting various items that will allow you to find rarer items, and use them all together to reap punishment on the twelve horrible souls that definitely deserve it. (well, one soul is three people working together, but details, details) By the end of the game, you'll have morphed into a fairytale witch yourself because you'll have an almost encyclopedic knowledge of what is found where in the world and what it's all used for.
The game isn't being coy when it says its genre is Capital C Crafting over anything else - the biggest gameplay loop is "pick thing off ground, use thing to make a second thing, use second thing to gather third thing, use third thing to craft important item with other third things in a chain" and if that sounds overwhelming, then you will hate the later portions of the game where every step of the way is filled with like ten different Things To Get. Finding all the things isn't THAT difficult but there certainly are some reagents that will get on your nerves. I for one learned to hate jars of water! Perhaps you'll hate crab claws or mosquito needles!
But don't worry, it's not just digging up rocks and gathering bundles of straw. The game's story is where Wytchwood really shines, and it's what pushed me to keep going as I checked off each item in my woodland gathering shopping list. The main character is a wonderful grumpy little witch full of piss and vinegar and there's little dabs of dry wit in every written line and description. The dialogue and the storylines are all so distinctive and interesting, with each character getting a very stylish dialogue portrait, with a fun biting dark humor to them that fits the amazing art style.
It wouldn't be fun to be a witch casting dark magicks on someone who doesn't deserve it, and the game's twelve animal-themed antagonists all have interesting stories and a variety of reasons as to why you'll feel good about killing them and reaping their souls to give to Maybe Satan We Don't Know. The first villain I dispatched was a humanoid leech who was faking a plague outbreak so that she could fill an entire wine cellar with poisoned blood because, in her words, "black fever adds a certain nutty quality", and I did it because an old lady asked for me to find her missing husband. It's the little touches to the story that make all the relentless twig-gathering worth it.
But that does not stop the twig gathering from being relentless (oh god you need so many twigs), and so you craft craft craft until the game ends about 8-10 hours later, and the ending just kinda ends on a vague little plot twist. The words "repetitive" and "slog" are often used to describe this game, and I'd be lying if I said these were unfair. But! If you're the kind of person who finds peace in gathering up a stock of supplies and then gets a short burst of joy from being overprepared for the current fetch quest and being able to make the complicated object right then and there, this is definitely worth a try. No one is going to judge you if you decimate the forest's population of fireflies. Honest.
P.S. During the first four souls, I assumed that the reason there were animal people is because their wickedness had corrupted their form and they were all wearing the skin of beasts as the result of their hubris (especially with the Ox, who has a normal human family), only to enter a village and find out that no, there's also friendly animal people and this is just a setting similar to Shovel Knight where the humans and the animal men live together in harmony.