I’m not good at keeping my mind palace organized. I don’t even have a mind palace. If my mind was on any kind of structure it would be a Lego creation box of randomly mixed bricks. So, like an advanced robot, I store the memory outside of my body in the form of a daily to-do list that I write down every morning. Wytchwood is a to-do list game, with each item lining up a sub-list of many other things that are ticked off. The difference is that, in real life, my daily to-do list only consists of ‘make it up to catch a goblin and steal its shoes’ on Tuesdays.
Hahaha! I’m here all week! But seriously everyone, as the title suggests you play as a witch in this crafting game RPG (CRPG is not used, right?). In fact, she’s a lovely person with a squishy walkway and a head with a pot, and the Alientrap developers have been happy with that premise. Your job, related to you by the Phillip-esque black goat outside your swamp cottage, is to collect the wayward souls indebted to it. However, each of them is a terrible human being, so that’s cool.
The path to each person’s soul is a pile of tasks. For example, one of the second group of souls is a mouse that lives in an abandoned church. To get through the locked portal you need to make an acidic reagent and one of the ingredients is ectoplasm. You get ectoplasm from a specific type of ghost in the graveyard, but you need to do an exorcism to expel the ghost and get the ectoplasm. The exorcism requires two bat wings and you only have one right now, so you’ll need to create a sticky trap to catch another bat. But that takes a stick, some meat and some thistle tips and you’ll see where this goes.
And that’s kind of the whole game: you get materials to craft traps for creatures and monsters, for materials to make something else a pixie or a sad unicorn has asked you to craft. , which helps you get closer to your goal of stealing evil souls. It makes the Wytchwood sound much less lovely and appealing than it is. To describe a cake like eggs taken from a hen, flour from wheat, refined sugar from sugar cane, butter from milk from a cow, excluding how magical it is to eat a cake , right?
Your spellbook contains all the recipes you can make, and you can learn more by taking a moment to look around using your special witcher vision. This allows you to bookmark things and discover – or remind yourself – what you need to do to collect a certain ingredient from an animal or thing. The full list of things you can create is, as you can see, quite large.
Wytchwood’s world is playful and whimsical. It’s flat, but has depth, the way a diorama on paper is both 2D and 3D at the same time. There are several areas to explore, each with certain materials that can only be obtained from that location, and you can reach them through a network of portals hidden in decaying corners. The forest, the first area you arrive, is one of my favorites: the orange and fall colors, cozy feel and a great contrast to the more dangerous and spooky levels later on. But I’m also a big fan of the village and the pier, especially the music. Different areas have different musical themes, and the village first introduced the little loop of what I think is the Wytchwoods “people living here” music. The music docks use the same theme, but make it more fun and cartoon-y pirate, and I love it.
And although I did refer to some levels as being harder than others, they weren’t really. There are some creatures that will become angry and move to attack you, but their attacks are signaled so you can usually dodge like the wiley witch. I mostly stand back and enjoy the animations; for example, if you go digging for ingredients in the sand at the dock, sometimes a crab will jump out and do a wild butt with its claws. This also comes with a proper sound effect. In fact, both the animation and sound design are loved from top to bottom. Look for “WoooOOOOoooooooooooooo!” you pass by some ghosts in the graveyard, or the creaking and swaying of ants come to life in the woods.
Instead, much of its difficulty lies in the amount of materials you need to craft something. Recipes get more complicated over time, and there are some dishes that only require one step to get to another. Sometimes when playing Wytchwood you’ll be like “What? Gargoyle wants three pairs of goblin shoes and a gnome hat? But getting a gnome hat means I have to make a jigsaw. Although!“And then you’ll shut this game off overnight. But the next day you’ll come back to it, feeling refreshed, remembering exactly what steps you needed to take to build that puzzle box. Be the little witch. Your nonsense goes back to the witch’s rotation, and so should you: it’s the same kind of gratification you get from mastering a process in something like Dark Souls, but more beautiful.
Wytchwood isn’t all nice. After all, you are collecting souls for Satan. It’s quite dark sometimes. One of the souls you collect is an Ox who sold his family to an enchanted scarecrow, in exchange for a bountiful harvest. But it’s the shadow of a fairy tale, in the same way that if you take a step back from Little Red Riding Hood, you’ll realize how freaky it is. So Ox’s rival in farming is a giant radish in a straw hat growing a lettuce plant. Sure, to get your lizard eyes you have to mix with the rest of the lizard in some offal, but you can’t make an omelette without blowing up a few creatures, like one speak.
This year has blessed us with games that show care where you can tell that the people who make it really love the process of making it. Wytchwood is like opening a hand-drawn pop-up book and finding a cheeky little rabbit inside, throwing traps at live pumpkins and screaming, “I’ll chop you up!” when the mushrooms changed little giggles. And who doesn’t want to tick “chop that nasty little mushroom” off the to-do list?
