I’m repeatedly drawn to games with strong visuals, and Wytchwood is no exception. In its first moments, you wake up like a witch, herself a chubby figure who looks like a pot on her head, in what looks like she’s walking out of a pop-up book from a fairy tale in the hut. From your bookshelf to the bubbling cauldron over the fireplace, everything looks two-dimensional, but the environment seems to be full of life.
To appease the witch’s creaky bones, you gather some ingredients and learn how to mix potions using your magic book, a very intuitive process with simple controls even on the console. A nasty goat turns out to be a demon that orders you to collect souls if you want to fulfill your contract with it – unfortunately, the old lady doesn’t even remember.
Wedgwood launch trailer.
What she does remember, though, is how to mix potions, and how to use her witch eyes to tell you which different creatures you encounter are weaker to which ones. So you explore many beautiful landscapes and…kill most of them to get parts. Witches can build and place traps for critters, chop wood, net pixies, pickpocket people with the right tools, and more. The materials she obtains are then used to craft more complex items, both conventional and magical in nature. During your travels, you will meet different people and anthropomorphic people who will ask you kindness or exchange items you need to craft something else.
In the spirit of any good fairy tale, these tasks can get pretty morbid — you’ll have to make some digestive pills, for example, in order to get the Frog King to burp the corpse of an old woman’s husband. day’s work. The different characters never talk to you for long, but they really come to life thanks to some excellent portraits with a truly memorable visual style. The writing is also well done in tone, capturing the fairytale vibe perfectly with some flawless prose, albeit a little too goofy at times – the racial fable about the black sheep being bullied by Aries didn’t really land with me, Neither are vegetable farmers with a German accent. But it’s all harmless, which unfortunately applies to the general plot as well.
Here’s the real problem – Wytchwood is inherently a busy game, and other games can afford to get quests to artificially stretch out the playtime. For about five hours out of ten I found the gameplay very relaxing in an unconscious way, but then I delivered my first set of souls only to find I had to do the same thing all over again in a different place .
If Wytchwood ended up there, I’d remember it as a very craft-loving game – great foley design and controls (though the on-screen UI tasks can be a little hard to read), a soothing soundtrack and a lot of fun item combinations, big Partially accessible mission design.
Instead, I started to resent it a little bit because it’s a game that doesn’t end, which brings me back to a well for water…well, more than when it’s fun, because no matter how much material I try to gather just in case, I always miss that one thing and start a rather tedious backtracking process for it. In many ways, Wytchwood does exactly what it says it does on the tin, an adventure about craftsmanship. It’s just largely outgrown its welcome to fit in all its ideas, stumbling into its own grand fairy tale.
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