• Price: $19.99 USD
• Developer: Alientrap Games
• Publisher: Whitethorn Games
• Release Date: December 9, 2021

A review code was kindly provided through IndieBros on behalf of Alientrap Games and Whitethorn Games. We thank them for being able to cover something they’ve worked so hard on.

If you are crafty, conniving, and love to craft, Wytchwood may be the game for you! You play as a witch who lives in the woods in a gothic setting. One day, you wake up to discover a goat in your house. Outraged and bewildered, you eject the goat from your house – but the goat chomps down on your prized grimoire full of recipes before leaving! As you chase after the miscreant goat who damaged your grimoire, you discover that not only have you now lost all of your recipes, but you seem to have lost your memories as well!

You’re left with a single recipe, and I suppose you are lucky that it’s at least a healing item for when you inadvertently run into something that can damage you. Gather ingredients from the environment outside to use for that recipe. The ingredients seem to regenerate fairly quickly after you have taken them from that gathering point. In the forest area, for example, you can descend into a well. Going in and out will make the ingredients appear again for harvesting.

What I really like here is that if an item can be gathered from your surroundings, the game will indicate that it’s possible to harvest it by having it light up. I also appreciate the map function, as the provided maps for each screen are fairly detailed.

You’ll have to clear some pathways to travel through the woods, and can do so by crafting items using recipes that you’ve found and added back to your grimoire. The witch can open her “Witch’s Eye” to ascertain an item or creature’s weaknesses. Then, you’ll craft those items to use against them. I really like when games help you out and don’t make things overly difficult and confusing, so I like the Witch’s Eye function. As you scan something, you may also learn the recipe that will help you against whatever it is that you scanned. I also appreciate being able to craft “out in the field,” as some games may only permit you to craft at specific places.

You’ll acquire several tools that will help you harvest crafting ingredients, like a trowel, shears, a hatchet, and more. I really appreciate that your main tools used to gather ingredients don’t break. The traps you make can also be picked up and reused should you fail to trap a creature the first time, or if the wrong creature gets too close to the trap instead of your intended target. Using the trap items can be slightly gruesome, with tiny specks of blood appearing with a crunching sound when a bird or squirrel is caught in the trap. It’s not super graphic or anything, but if you’re squeamish it’s probably good to know it’s in the game.

You have three hearts worth of health, but the game doesn’t involve fighting in the traditional sense. As mentioned above, you need to find enemies’ weaknesses and craft those items. Mosquitoes, for example, are weak against smoke pellets. You don’t use a sword against them, but instead engage in “combat” through crafting and setting traps, or throwing the items at enemies. You’ll craftily craft to combat your enemies. 😉 Some creatures can’t quite be defined as “enemies” in the traditional sense but still require careful maneuvering to harvest their ingredients, such as dog fur you snip off of a dog as they sleep. One major quest requires you to craft a puppet to lure away an enemy so that an accomplice can take them out. As someone with an extremely high sense of self preservation, I really appreciate not putting your character in real harm’s way. I liked the puppet function a lot, and wish it was included more because it was cool.

Although the story will ultimately lean more towards the dark side, the game’s vibrant colors serve as a nice contrast to the plot. I loved the character portraits that are visible when you speak to other characters, and the music is a nice accompaniment to the setting.

As you progress through the story, you’ll have several objectives running at a time. You’ll need to keep track of them, as you can end up starting one objective while working on others due to the specific ingredients you may have on hand at the time. You may start one quest and end up needing an ingredient from an area that will trigger the beginning of another quest. Working on the other objectives won’t cause you to lose progress on what you were working on before, but the objective that’s displayed on the top right of the screen may change and you may get a little distracted. You can change which objective is displayed by choosing to track it through the journal. I will say that depending on the environment you’re in, the white text with the tracked objective may get hard to read.

Each objective will require you to harvest different ingredients and use some of them to craft the required items. You may have to backtrack to different areas to harvest the same ingredients again. As a general rule, it’s best to harvest as much as you can at a time when you pass through an area so you don’t have to return over and over again. Fortunately, there doesn’t seem to be a limit to the number of ingredients you can keep with you in your inventory – or if there is, it’s not a small limit. (You may want to craft a decent amount of empty jars and fill them with water or milk, pick up as many twigs as you can, and also set traps to get as much meat as you can. Grasshoppers and frogs are other important ingredients you’ll need.)

The game reminds me a little bit of an extended Into the Woods (“…the cow as white as milk…the cape as red as blood…the hair as yellow as corn…the slipper as pure as gold…”). Instead of bringing items to a witch in the game though, you as the witch must bring some souls to the goat, who seems to be a darker being of sorts. Wytchwood’s quest is also much lengthier than the list of items from Into the Woods in terms of what you need to acquire over the course of your playthrough. There are twelve different souls that you will need to collect for the goat, but each soul will require you to complete a variety of side quests where you bring items you’ve crafted to other characters.

Personally, I didn’t mind exploring the world of Wytchwood and bringing items here and there; there are portals available in each area that connect to a single portal room. It wasn’t too much trouble to get around because of the ability to teleport. (There is also an item that will take you back to your house.) And like I mentioned before, the game helps you keep track of objectives in your journal. Your enjoyment of this game will depend on how patient/meticulous you are.

I did have an issue with the lack of manual saves; the only option is the auto save function – I’m one of those people who saves around three times before I exit a game. I wasn’t sure how or when the game auto saved, so that was a little anxiety-inducing.

Something I liked was the ability to use the touch screen to move around, open the menu, and craft. I did prefer moving with the Joy Con controls, but it was simpler and faster sometimes to use the touch screen to craft especially. It also only took one button press to access the grimoire screen for crafting, or the inventory screen.

I also really like that when you try to craft and lack an ingredient that requires crafting itself, you can select that ingredient and it will take you to that item’s crafting screen. The game will let you highlight ingredients to tell you where they can be found.

The twelve dark fairy tale scenarios in Wytchwood all feature malevolent creatures that commit acts of cruelty against the population. Some are worse than others – the cat, for example, commits acts of mischief that result in the town’s business owners turning against each other. Others try to take advantage of people financially, while a few even go so far as to commit murder. I liked the cat, ram, and stag quests the best because their quests weren’t quite as dark, and they had my favorite character designs as well.

I will say that by the end I was just slightly fatigued after the amount of work the last few major quests required in terms of gathering ingredients. But overall I enjoyed the beautiful character design and environments, the whimsical music that was well-suited for the ambience, and the moral ambiguity your witchy character displays over the course of the game. The witch will help a young girl find her father and help a couple in financial distress, then turn around and mercilessly crush the perpetrators who have caused their problems. She doesn’t kill with kindness – she kills to be kind.

Switch It ON or Switch It OFF? “Witch” is it? 😉 Wytchwood is a more “relaxed” crafting game in the sense that there’s no real combat. I do wish that the ending was a little more fleshed out and we had more interactions with the goat, and that manually saving was possible. Lovely art and music are a major plus here, and the game feels accessible with its added touch screen controls and ease of understanding for crafting. If you are patient, don’t mind traveling back and forth for ingredients, and appreciate gorgeous fairy tale settings with a morally ambiguous protagonist, this might be the game for you. 8/10