Are you growing tired of gritty survival games with overhanging horror elements and high stakes? Do you long for a whimsical adventure with magical twists and a homestead you can rest your hat in? If so, then grab your broomsticks, because Witchspire may just be the exact game you have been waiting for.
The Path Of The Apprentice
You begin your journey, summoned to a new world, with only your familiar and an ethereal voice to guide you. This voice lends you strength and sets quests that walk you through the basic mechanics and introduce the plot. It’s bright and colourful, and eases you into the world nicely.
Survival/crafting games tend to have pretty shallow plots, but Witchspire reminded me more of MMOs than anything else. The story is largely delivered through notes in books scattered throughout the lands. This offers players deeper lore and character building, should they want it, but I never felt compelled to do so.
I finished quests to unlock items and find new upgrades, which would be a bad thing in a plot-driven genre, but here it works. Despite my avoidance, I still felt like the core gameplay loop of explore-build-expand naturally drew me into the boss arenas and plot points. So I was able to get a fulfilling experience without having to dig for it.
Fight For Your Future
Witchspire has a really interesting battle system. Firstly, your avatar can equip a range of wands and spellswords to the hotbar. You can craft wands and spellswords, and each gives a different effect, such as higher DPS or wider range AOE. Again, I was reminded of MMOs as I stacked my bar with heals and weapons, but it was a happy comparison.
Using the WASD to move your avatar, you use the left mouse button to aim and attack, with a heavy magic attack on right-click. I wasn’t a fan of the no-aim mechanic at first, but it was rather forgiving. Scrolling through your hotbar for weapons and items worked really well, but I did struggle with dodge mapped to the Ctrl key.
Alongside a full range of accessories and gear, you can also equip up to three familiars. These creatures attack on their own but can be commanded to unleash bonus skills with the Q and E buttons. With C to swap out familiars and the F-key to interact, it’s a lot of key binds to remember, and some accessibility (preferably more controller support) will be needed in the future.
Build Your Hearth
The heart of any good witch is measured by the warmth of their hearth, as will it be the heart of your operations in Witchspire. Upgrading your hearth will require a lot of base-building, exploration, and crafting. This rests at the core of Witchspire’s gameplay and is where I spent most of my playtime.
The building system is comprehensive and adaptive. Items merge into each other to hide seams, and resources are taken directly from crafters to save you from running back and forth. It’s not without its faults and takes some tinkering to fully understand, but it was fun and incredibly rewarding to see my base take shape.
Crafting and Creatures
I think Witchspire is best described as “Palworld meets Palia but witches” as you build and explore across a vast open world. It has enough unique mechanics to set it apart from its peers, but there are many points of comparison beyond the genre.
You can assign familiars to Witchspire to increase the efficiency of your crafting machines. This system is less comprehensive than Palworld and doesn’t require you to nurture your creatures outside of levelling them up. Capturing their “souls” to take home and add to your collection is largely based on chance, but you can use items to boost this.
The storage mechanics could do with a sort function on top of the “store all” feature. It’s workable as it is, but a universal storage is always preferable to rummaging through boxes. This won’t bother the majority of players, since crafting machines pull directly from chests.
One rather unique mechanic was the mining/logging tools. They worked largely the same as weapons, using the left mouse button to initiate the tool. You can then use the right-click to do a more powerful magic attack that clears a wider area. It’s not a huge thing, but it was satisfying to do.
Reach For The Stars
Witchspire has a vast star chart that serves as your upgrade tree. Some items are locked behind quest progression, while others require you to level up your skills or find/craft specific items. Each star unlocks crafting recipes or some kind of boon, but it’s largely up to you what you work towards and how you want to progress.
To The Witchspire
Playing Witchspire was an utter joy. It’s still in Early Access, and I didn’t run into any running issues or glitches. It looks and sounds amazing, and if not for the strain on my disabled fingers, I could easily lose myself for hours of gameplay without leaving the starting areas. There are a few things, like not being able to use furniture items, such as beds or cupboards, that felt like a strange choice, and others, such as teleporting between hearths, which were welcome additions. Players even have multiple character build options from the start, although I didn’t get to play with these too much at the time of writing.
Running around in search of materials was engaging and exciting. I couldn’t help but go into every nook and cranny just in case there was a rare item or creature to be found. Then I got my broom, and I was unstoppable.
Witchspire’s Early Access release is impressive, and the roadmap ahead is incredibly promising. I’m eager to see the full release and cannot wait to get stuck into a multiplayer run with all my friends.
Platform: Steam
Publisher: Envar Games
Developer: Envar Games, Envar Publishing
Code Provided By: PressEngine
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