Analysis Children of Mold. Being a witch is hard.

The Growing Stones begins with a narrative adventure with lots of pagan lore.

The Mildew Children is an adventure that you will read about. This is the basis of the game with some exploration, mini-games and puzzles that complete an intriguing and deep story set in a pagan village with Celtic customs.

Pagan novel.

Kyrphel is a witch. The least powerful of the 4 who make up the coven. They have an important mission: save the village through a dangerous ritual that must be completed within a week. When the story begins, the youngest witch dies and must be replaced. It’s Kyrphel’s job to find a replacement, train her, and prepare her to save her people who hate them.

We have a story, okay. Apparently nothing out of the ordinary. It’s the packaging that makes everything look great. It is the Village and its inhabitants that make the collection of this game grow. To begin with, they have a pagan culture based on nature, earth and death. And few of them reach the age of 20. These are all children who had to grow up earlier than expected. The first character we interact with is a priestess of death. A smiling girl dressed in black and carrying a scythe who lives in the cemetery where she helps the dead to be reincarnated. All the characters have an engaging and well-constructed story. And storytelling is The Mildew Children’s strong point.

You must read.

It is a video game that relies on text to advance the story. It’s not a completely new visual due to its minimal touches of exploration and mini-games. But we must be aware that the game is in the text. The bad news is that it is not translated into Spanish. We can only read it in English and Russian.

If you speak English, you should know that the narration is very careful and how the writing adapts to each character. He doesn’t graphically change his words as we saw in Pentiment, but his expressions and way of speaking do, helping with immersion and character description.

Choose your own route.

The exploration element is minimal, but The Mildew Children requires you to travel back and forth, mostly visiting the town. You can chat (or not) with a few villagers chosen depending on the moment in the story, adding secondary missions. These missions can interfere with the flow of the story by positioning the characters.

There are also choices or mini-games in conversations that will decide the characters’ opinions in the future. What is always stimulating is here released without explanation or time for assimilation. There are dialogue elections against the clock. It takes time to read all the options and in the end you choose more or less by chance. In many ways, choosing the right one is vital. Yes, you can die in The Mildew Children. But as it happens in “Choose your own adventure” You return to the previous page and can continue playing.

All these mini-games can be modulated in terms of difficulty, or even removed from the pause menu at any time. You can opt for a fully narrative adventure without any obstacles. In my opinion, these moments add a lot of dynamism and tension to the text. They fit very well into the story.

Art book.

The word video game in The Mildew Children is something that could be discussed.

Graphically, this is a hand-painted game. With very elaborate and beautiful miniatures for the characters. The village environments are also neat, both beautiful and eerie. As I draw, the Growing Stones’ work is excellent.

In execution, the character’s movement could come from a Flash video game. The figure is always in profile and the joints move in a flat landscape. This is very vague side scrolling. There are no animations but fade to black. He only draws attention in a few esoteric sequences that I won’t spoil.

Conclusions.

Stay for the story and nothing but the story. It wraps you around like one of those blankets that’s really warm but a little itchy. The characters are very well developed, they are not stereotypes and the story does not resemble that of a video game either. If you can save the language moment, you should try it. As a video game itself, not so much. But that feeling fades when you understand what it means to be a witch. Without being any of those things, The Mildew Children hooked me.