Indie witchcraft! (the video game kind) part 1

March 16, 2024

Within the past week, I've finished playthroughs of two indie games on Switch that have been in my wishlist for a while. The first, Wytchwood, was released in 2021, developed by Canada-based Alientrap. You play as a cauldron-headed witchon a quest to collect twelve souls to wake a sleeping maiden. You spend time exploring several different biomes to collect ingredients for potions, spells, and more to complete your task. I enjoyed the satisfaction of slowly filling out the grimoire with every recipe and reagent until it was full of the game's charming colorful icons. Thegame as a whole felt like twelve smaller fairy tales spun into one, with the collection of each villain's soul introducing more whimsical characters and areas. The standout of this game was the music provided by Ryan Roth and Liam Sauvé. Even though the collection of crafting ingredients could get a little repetetive, the gameplay never got boring for me. My Switch struggled to run the snow graphics in the mountaintop area, but it was smooth everywhere else. I appreciated the ability to complete each of the four quests in each of the three sections of the game in whatever order I wanted, adding to the freedom of exploration in this whimsical world. I recommend this game to lovers of the cozy game genre, good video game music, and fairytales.