Witchspire is like Wizard 101 meets Pokémon with a bit of survival crafting thrown in to spice things up.
This charming indie title, which has just entered Early Access, is a delightful blend of genres and one with bountiful style. It puts players in the shoes of a witch of their own making, who finds themselves stranded in a vibrant, life-filled, albeit mysterious, new world. Using the magic learned at their academy of choice alongside their wits and the bountiful resources provided by the land, it’s up to them to craft and cast their way to salvation.
Witchspire is a fighting-exploration game with some survival-lite mechanics and an emphasis on gathering and crafting. Upon entering the world from the dream, you follow a series of quests that guide you both toward the game’s narrative as well as through its mechanics. You’ll begin by eating berries and crafting sticks until eventually you find yourself carving ritualistic altars and soaring through the air on a broom.
Survival doesn’t really play into the game, despite the obvious inspirations from the survival-crafting genre. Food, hydration, and other basic survival needs are absent. Instead, resources are used directly for progression, and food is nothing more than a convenient healing item to be used in or just after battle. You don’t even lose all of your items upon death, which helps to make the game feel a lot more forgiving.
Crafting is essential to progression, with almost every element of the game’s progression questline requiring you to craft an item, and said items being vital to your journey. Though you will find powerful weapons and relics across the world if you explore hard enough, the items you craft at your various workbenches are the key to finding those relics in the first place.
While crafting is essential, base building isn’t. You’ll find that all of your crafting benches can be placed outside and often should be, as they’re rather large and don’t fit well into the game’s player-made structures. The base building itself is fine, albeit somewhat unwieldy and awkward, with the pieces not snapping together super intuitively. The base building itself feels rather basic and rudimentary, and doesn’t impress me as much as it would in other games in the genre, so I hope this is an area that gets more attention during development.
Combat is also basic, but it is still fun, and I don’t think I personally would add too much to it. Fancy combos or split-second reactions are ignored in favor of a basic beat-’em-up style, where the weapons you use have their own attack patterns and effects that make them unique. The game uses both wands and swords to give you melee or ranged options, and every single one you find is unique both in stats and in its actual attacks.
While pretty cool, I actually really don’t like how the game handles its wands and spells. Namely, every attack you use in your wands or swords, or even the spells you use to mine rocks and chop down trees, is tied to specific tools. Every tool has a left-click and a right-click, and does something different on each. I would much rather the game instead gave you a spellbook and allowed you to use each spell from a singular wand, you know, as a witch might do. The game instead paints a picture not of a magically inclined and learned caster with a wealth of spells at their disposal, but instead someone who reaches into their pocket for a series of wands that each do something different. While this is admittedly a cool concept, the execution kind of fights the idea of being a magical caster in favor of just being the survival-game norm.
One of the more interesting mechanics is the creature-collector side of the game, where you can capture and upgrade familiars to help you in battle. Nearly every creature you encounter seems to be catchable and comes with its own moveset and upgrade tree. This is a really fun addition that gives the game a lot more life beyond the traditional survival game progression and mechanics.
As you might expect from the fact that Witchspire is an Early Access game, there are some drawbacks to be expected should you choose to get into the game now.
The game, of course, isn’t finished. There are missing features in the current build as the developers continue to expand the title. While I think there is a lot to do already, it didn’t take long for me to feel like the loop was somewhat repetitive, and the game felt somewhat empty. A lot more needs to be added to the game, and I fully expect that some of the issues I presented in this review will be addressed, and more content I haven’t even imagined will be brought to the game.
You can also expect there to be bugs. In my playthrough, I found my character respawning underground, sounds layering on top of each other when casting spells in quick succession, and enemies spawning in huge waves where they shouldn’t be. That being said, the game is much more stable than many Early Access titles I’ve played, and I watched some elements of the game being actively patched by the developers as I played.
Witchspire has promise. Its unique setting and style add some much-needed variety to the survival-craft genre, and the game serves as a welcoming, forgiving experience that still has its fair share of challenge. Since it’s in Early Access, it still has some elements that need adjustment, bugs to fix, and features to add, but I think you’ll enjoy giving it a try even in its early state.
Pros
- Charming blend of survival, exploration, crafting, and creature collection
- Magical (pun intended) setting and strong visuals
- Accessible and forgiving gameplay
Cons
- Base building is basic to a fault
- Some elements feel thematically or mechanically awkward
- The game definitely feels like an Early Access build, missing content and occasionally feeling empty
- Some Early Access bugs
Try Hard Guides was provided a Steam code for this PC Early Access Review of Project Mist. Find more detailed looks at popular and upcoming titles on our Game Reviews page!
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