#Wytchwood review full

This is also accompanied by an appropriate sound effect. I mostly stand back and enjoy the animations if you go digging for ingredients in the sandpiles in the docks, for example, sometimes a crab will leap out, and do a wild snip-snap with its claws.

There are some creatures that will become angry and move to attack you, but their attacks are telegraphed so you can usually scuttle out of the way like the wiley witch you are. The docks music uses the same theme, but makes it more jaunty and cartoon pirate-y, and I love it.Īnd though I referenced some levels being harder than others, they're not really. Different areas have different musical themes, and the village first introduces the little loop I think of as Wytchwoods 'people live here' music. But I'm also a massive fan of the village and docks, especially the music. The forest, the first area you go to, is one of my favourites: orange and autumnal, it feels cosy, and is a great contrast to the more dangerous and spookier levels later on. There are a few areas to explore, each with a few ingredients that can only be collected from that location, and you reach them via a network of portals hidden in decaying corners. It's flat, but has a sense of depth, in the way a paper diorama is both 2D and 3D at the same time. Wytchwood's world is playful and whimisical.

#Wytchwood review full

The full list of things you can make is, as you can see, pretty big. This allows you to highlight things and discover - or remind yourself - what you need to do to collect a certain ingredient from an animal or thing. Your spellbook contains all the recipes you can make, and you learn more by taking a moment to look around using your special witch's sight. To describe a cake as eggs collected from a hen, flour ground from wheat, sugar refined from sugarcane, butter from milk collected from a cow, does not include how magical it is to eat a cake, right? Dreadful grimoire It makes Wytchwood sound far less lovely and engaging than it is. But that needs a stick, some meat, and some thistle heads and you see where this is going.Īnd that's kind of the whole game: you get ingredients to craft traps for critters and monsters, to get ingredients to craft another thing a pixie or a sad unicorn has asked you to craft, to get you closer to your goal of stealing an evil soul. The exorcism charm requires two bat wings, and you only have one right now, so you'll need to craft a bait stick trap to catch another bat. You get ectoplasm from a specific type of ghost in the graveyard, but you need to make an exorcism charm to banish the ghost and get the ectoplasm. To get through the locked gate you need to craft an acidic reagent, and one of the ingredients is ectoplasm. For example, one of the second group of souls is a rat living in an abandoned church. The path to getting each soul is littered with tasks.

Each of them turns out to be a terrible person, though, so it's cool. Your job, as related to you by the Black Phillip-esque goat outside your swamp-cottage, is to collect wayward souls owed to him. In fact, she's an adorable crone with a stompy little walk and a pot for a head, and developers Alientrap have had a lot of fun with that premise. Hahaha! I'm here all week! But seriously folks, as the title suggests you play a witch in this crafting RPG (CRPG isn't taken, right?). The difference is, in real life, my daily to-do list only includes 'make shiny lure to catch an elf and steal its shoes' on Tuesdays. Wytchwood is a to-do list game, with each item cascading into a sub-list of more things to be ticked off. Thus, like an advanced robot, I store my memory outside my body in the form of daily to-do lists that I write up every morning. If my mind were any kind of structure it would be a Lego creative box of randomly mixed bricks. I am not great at keeping my mind palace organised.

Publisher: Whitethorn Digital, WhisperGames.

You'll fall in love with Wytchwood's no-nonsense crone. A dark fairy-tale to-do list that takes full advantage of its premise and has a lot of fun with it.