Witchcrafty Reviews

Witchcrafty is the perfect example of a game that has so much potential, but falls flat in nearly every aspect. Let's start with the positives. The music is absolutely awesome. Every stage has an awesome musical accompaniment that reminds me of GBA games. This game also uses my favourite GBA aesthetic with its graphics. It's truly gorgeous to look at and evokes feelings of nostalgia. That's about where the positives end, though. Nearly every aspect of this game was extremely difficult to push through. First and foremost, while I love the graphics, this game definitely feels like it should be a low-stakes cozy game. I was really surprised and disappointed to find out that this game is actually quite difficult, especially compared to the games I usually play. There's also no difficulty setting in this game, so if it's too hard, you're out of luck. Because this game is a Metroidvania, whenever you die, you go back to the last save point. You don't get to retain any of the gems you collect; it's like you literally go back to your previous save. It's frustrating because you can spend all this time collecting every gem and killing every enemy, only to die on the way back to the save point, and you have to do it all over again. It's even worse when the game doesn't register your movement and you die because of it (this happened more than once). I wouldn't mind this feature if the save rooms were spread more sporadically throughout the levels. There are very few save points in the game, which makes every screen more intimidating to get through. Furthermore, enemies come back after you return to the screen. So you can't just kill all the enemies and hope for a safer run. Also, some of these enemies have really cheap moves, like the fire and ice mages. I ended up learning their patterns, but taking damage was almost inescapable. There are boss fights in this game that look cool, but they just feel really cheap. I essentially had to cheese the Twin Mage boss fight, which I still don't even know was the intended way to beat them. I get that final bosses should be difficult, but this one was almost unfairly difficult. I really wanted to love this game a lot. But I just encountered way too many bugs to say that this was a polished experience. And some of those bugs cost me precious time since they killed me, and I had to restart my progress. If there's one thing I hate in video games, it's losing a bunch of your progress. It's the reason why I love low-stakes games. Witchcrafty is not one of those games. I know this game goes on sale, but I would say skip it. I do believe we need to support more indie developers, but not when they're released in such a buggy state and never optimized.