You can wait to play Witchfire

The Vanishing of Ethan Carter is one of the best walking simulators of the last several years. The graphics were divine and the scenery was realistic and atmospheric. The puzzles were quite difficult and the world was quite empty and lonely. This loneliness is typically a sign that the indie studio didn't have the biggest budget for their games, and Astronauts obviously had their challenges, but they still released a stunning and mysterious game that has given them the confidence to tackle a new genre, the roguelike genre. Witchfire, their latest project, takes inspiration from the Souls series, the roguelike genre and first-person shooters to create an eclectic take on an intersection of a game that I have been given early access to. I tried Witchfire on the Epic Game Store, where you can buy the early access version right now.

I'll start by saying that Witchfire is far from finished yet. The version I've played has many missing elements that need to be implemented before the game takes its full form. I have therefore focused on what is actually available. Something that isn't really included in the package that is Witchfire is the story. There isn't really one. There's no voice acting or any real intro film or anything like that. You're just thrown into the game and you have to choose your class. You can choose between Slayer, Berserker, Hunter, Shadow, Saint and Penitent, and depending on what you want, your play style is based on the stats that each class specialises in. So a class might focus more on strength and hitting hard, or it might focus on magic, so you can throw around various magical abilities, or maybe you're more into your weapons just doing more damage. There's a class for whatever you fancy, although there's not much information about what these specialisations do to the play style. It's a bit bare bones, which is general for the game. You're just dumped on a beach and have to start fighting through the many hordes of monsters that mysteriously appear behind you. The way the many opponents just appear without any animation is quite jarring as you can actually see them materialise out of thin air. As I said, Witchfire needs a lot more time in the oven.

Witchfire is a roguelike as mentioned before, so when you die you have to start over and fight the same monsters again and again until you get stronger so you can survive a little longer. This game design is quite familiar to fans of the genre, but this is where Witchfire falls down a bit as you lose all the so-called crystals that you can use to make your character better when you die. You can get an upgrade if you're lucky, which means you only lose half of your crystals when you die, but I found it quite frustrating that the first many attempts led to no progression at all. You die many times before you get any kind of progress. You get some non-permanent upgrades by killing monsters, such as faster reloading or your opponents having less health. In this way, you can gain certain benefits in each attempt, but I found the balance to be a bit skewed. Some monsters jumped directly into your face and took way too many shots to take down. Some monsters moved very quickly and unpredictably and were frustrating to fight. Of course, there are positives to be said, such as the shooting mechanics themselves, which are quite excellent, and if there is a better balance, it could be very entertaining.

Witchfire is inherently about defeating a witch, who is the boss of the game. However, this boss cannot be accessed until you buy access to what the game calls Gnosis, which unlocks different wings of the castle you are in between completion attempts. You are unleashed in an open area where the boss is in the northern part of the map. In between, there are areas of varying difficulty that you can take on as you see fit, which is super cool and a new idea for roguelikes. So, if you're feeling strong, you can just head over to the eastern part of the island and take on monsters that are harder, with better opportunities to get more crystals to upgrade your witch hunter. However, in the same breath, consider whether you want to gamble your hard-won crystals, as the chance of losing them is higher, resulting in a loss of progression. You can then run to a dead body to pick them up again, but that's easier said than done as you start out super weak.

When you die, which you do a lot in the beginning, you can find keys to various portals that allow you to return with the crystals so you can upgrade your character. So you can escape with your crystals, but it requires luck, skill and, not least, patience. Something I'm not a world champion at. If that wasn't hard enough, the witch can throw a curse at you called Calamity, which slowly ticks down, and if you don't find this tornado in time, you die. I'm not sure how I feel about this mechanic, mostly because you have to run across the map a few times to stop the deadly whirlwind, but if you defeat it, you are rewarded with a lot of crystals and you get the opportunity to jump out of the game and use the loot you have collected to upgrade your character.

Witchfire has great potential, but it lacks content. Nvidia DLSS is one of the things that will come later. More of the stages will come at a later date. The story also comes as an afterthought, and some of the upgrades you can fight your way to are not implemented in the game yet, and without all these things, it's a lacklustre experience. You get a bit of an idea of what the game is going to be, but it seems that the developer is not the most resourceful operation, so I think it will be some time before Witchfire is at its peak. In addition, there are some things that I personally miss, such as being able to make the font bigger so that you can actually see the little nuggets of the story that you sometimes find in various chests. If anything is an early access game, it's Witchfire, and you have to respect that not every game needs to be released with all the content, when it is inherently early access to the game and a taster of its future content.

Witchfire is very exciting and has great potential, but I'll wait a year and a half before playing it again. Witchfire lacks content and is a thin cup of tea right now, but there are so many enticing things that haven't been implemented yet, and when they're added, I'll be the one left standing, but right now it's not much fun.