I’ve been following Wytchwood’s development ever since I saw the trailer for the first time. I love dark-ish fantasy, and I love unique visual styles, witches, and imaginative gameplay. Wytchwood lives up to its premise, but it also has a few issues that keep it from being truly great.

Wytchwood is a puzzle/crafting game where you play as an unnamed witch, who awakens after being asleep, only to discover that a black goat has managed to get in her home, eating the pages out of her grimoire. She discovers afterward that this goat is more than he seems, and she has (at some point) made a pact with him. Therefore, she must go and claim souls from bad creatures terrorizing the nearby areas.

The gameplay is simple. Most of the quests are fetch quests, you either go and get ingredients to make a potion that lets you solve a problem, or you go and do various tasks, which may require you to use the Witch’s spells and potions to solve puzzles. In essence, it is a lot of crafting, material harvesting, rinse and repeat.

The story is interesting though, and as you progress you get new tools with which to take on the various harvesting tasks and enemies. You may need an axe to chop lumber and dismember beasts, while you may need a trowel or some other instrument to harvest other items. You do not fight creatures directly. Instead, every creature has some sort of weakness that you can uncover using the “Witch’s eye” mechanic.

This lets you inspect your surroundings, along with the enemies and NPC’s around you. This may tell you useful information about how to approach various tasks or overcome various obstacles. The big issue I have though is that the gameplay gets very repetitive after a while. You quickly realize that the gameplay boils down to talking to NPC’s, just to figure out what they want from you so you can craft the requisite item and move forward.

When you aren’t doing that, then you’re backtracking to various areas to make sure you have the required ingredients, and stockpiling other commonly used ones so you don’t run out. With that being said, I do quite like the story that Wytchwood tells, I just wish there were some quality of life improvements. An example would be perhaps a trader, where you can trade certain ingredients for more hard to get or less common ones.

I only had one crash in Wytchwood, and the game had autosaved just before, so I didn’t lose any progress. In fact, the game autosaves pretty regularly, so even if you aren’t playing on Switch and you lose power or something, you shouldn’t have to worry too much. If you like crafting, darker (yet humorous) narratives, and games that take inspiration from folktales and myth, then I think Wytchwood will treat you well.

While it isn’t the best game I’ve played, and it isn’t likely to win any major awards, I did enjoy Wytchwood. I think it has some solid charm to it, and I think anyone who loves the look of it or any of the mechanics I mentioned here, will definitely find something to enjoy.

A Nintendo Switch review copy of Wytchwood was provided by Alientrap for this review.

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Wytchwood

$19.99

8

Score

8.0/10

Pros

• Charming Aesthetic
• Fun Characters and Dialogue
• Easy to Understand Controls and Gameplay
• Clever Puzzles
• Autosaves Frequently

Cons

• Gameplay Gets Repetitive
• Minor Crashing Issues
• Small Lag Issues