Game News Before Doom The Dark Ages, this shooter is the back-to-school sensation. Dark Souls fans will feel right at home
Few video games can claim to have risen from the ashes, but nothing could be more natural for Witchfire than a resurrection. The Astronauts Studios’ FPS (for first person shooter) could well be the start of the 2024 school year sensation on Steam (PC). At the intersection of Doom and Dark Souls, this is the ideal adventure on steroids to wait for the release of Doom: The Dark Ages.
A resurrection on Steam
The life of an “independent” video game can rarely be described as a smooth flow, as the obstacles faced by the studios that put their heart and soul into these projects are numerous. Even veterans of the industry sometimes have great difficulty reaching the general public with their video game creations. Witchfire belongs to that category of titles that have everything to offer, but have all the trouble in the world escaping the sphere of the initiated in first-person shooters.
10 years ago, these Polish studios based in Warsaw, Poland captivated PCs on home consoles with the supernatural investigation The Vanishing of Ethan Carter, which received a 16/20 rating on JV and an average score of 80% on MetaCritic. It has to be said that the members of The Astronauts know what they’re talking about. As founders of People Can Fly, they are behind the shooting games Painkiller and Bulletstorm. It’s therefore logical that we’d find her at the helm of an edgy dark fantasy FPS in 2023. Witchfire was released in Early Access on the Epic Games Store on September 20, 2023, and on Steam a year later, thus benefiting from a second spotlight.
A dark fantasy FPS
Witchfire is a shooter video game (commonly called FPS) set in a dark fantasy universe that will no doubt seem familiar to those familiar with the genre. Here you play as “Preyer” – a witch hunter – who has been personally commissioned by the Pope to eliminate the threat and find a sacred artifact. This purely solo adventure puts the survival of this Christ-like Inquisitor at the center of a challenging video game experience that forgives nothing (or almost nothing) to the poor guys who dare to challenge it.
Developed and published by The Astronauts, the title sits at the intersection between Fast FPS with its energetic approach to confrontations and Souls-like with its rogue-lite framework and its tendency to kill the protagonist over and over again. The creators of Painkiller encourage you to take risks in the hope of finding more and more resources to increase your power, but this decision can quickly cost you your life and, with it, your hard-earned loot.
However, it is not about making gunpowder and magic speak without ever taking the time to observe one’s surroundings. Witchfire urges you to explore the different areas in the Black Sea region to progress in a story told through high-quality illustrations and an epic voice-over without cutscenes. Then visiting these places is the promise of important resources and artifacts to transform your “prey” into a divine emissary. This includes acquiring new weapons, new spells, and much more.
What surprised me personally about Witchfire is the artistic direction towards “dark fantasy”, which hits the heart of the Berserker fan that I am. It would be dishonest of me not to also mention the technical dimension of this video game. The goal of Astronauts Studios is not to redefine contemporary industry standards, but to satisfy FPS fans, of which I am one, with a successful, passionate and exciting project. And the best is yet to come. Since Witchfire is currently in Early Access, it should benefit from several notable improvements and various content additions in the coming months.
