Ashina: The Red Witch Reviews

Love all the characters and heavy themes

This is really nearly a hidden gem, but unfortunately the achievements kind of drag the experience down. The dev used game making software, but you wouldn't know it while playing since it's pretty seamless and the artwork is beautiful. Ashine: The Red Witch is essentially an exploration game with puzzle elements. It's dialogue heavy, so you probably won't want to play through it more than once. With that said, there are 43 achievements and while they are all fairly simple to unlock you need to use a guide or you will just be playing forever searching for them. This really makes the game feel pointless since the only guide is on Steam and it's going to explain step by step how to beat the entire game. I would've preferred fewer achievements, that way I could still play through just once or twice and solve the puzzles and figure everything out on my own. With that said, this game's dialogue is pretty funny and the story is interesting, even though it becomes incomprehensible near the end. There is so much to play with when you're in a world of Japanese ghosts (youkai) and this dev has a lot of fun with it. While the mechanics aren't particularly great, they are coded in such a way that you will have little moments that make it feel like a real game (A character following you, or a moment where you have to chase a character down, for example). I would've vastly preferred to figure things out on my own but I didn't want to spend more than a few hours on this. 43 achievements might seem like a selling point but since most of them are just handed to you it makes the game more annoying parsing through it and not being able to play at your own pace- that is of course, unless you could care less about the achievements, in which case, it probably doesn't make a difference.