Wytchwood from Alientrap Games is a crafting-centric adventure game. Your average Steam reviewers (within their positive reviews, I hasten to say) will remark that Wytchwood “is just a bunch of fetch quests.” And that’s not true. But even if it were, these “fetch quests” lead you back and forth across a world not only created with charm and confidence, but spilling over with so many ways of expressing itself.
First, there’s the vibrant paper-cut-out art, which is undeniably beautiful. Then there’s all the critters teeming about, often waiting to be trapped, zapped, or plucked–but sometimes lurching at you to BASH you if you dawdle past. There are major NPCs, most of them brashly vile beast-people, the harvesting of whose souls is your primary goal in the game. They manage to be familiar folkloric archetypes, tragicomic cartoons, and surprisingly modern villains (a ruthless landlord, a sexual predator) all at the same time. Oh, and your main quest giver is basically Black Philip from The Witch:
At the wide bottom of the World-Expressive Pyramid is the STUFF. Stuff pops out of nearly everything when you press the right button or apply the right tool: Spongy purple mushrooms that plop forth from a decaying forest stump; Miyazakian soot-sprites that bound out of a pile of ash; the probosces of giant mosquitos that make handy sewing needles; curled raven feet, pillars of salt, a ghost’s exorcized skull, fairies that vaporize into glitter-dust inside your butterfly net.
All these pinches of powder and putrid plants and piles of monster offal get combined into more useful objects according to your recipe book, called the Grimoire. The list of recipes constantly expands as you encounter new obstacles or victims and scry them with your “Witch Eye” power to learn their weaknesses.
To be clear–because you might expect this from a crafting game–there’s no waiting in Wytchwood. You’re never holding down a button for minutes on end watching a bar fill and fill and fill again. If there’s any tedium, the worst of it is in revisiting a lush, bustling biome you left an hour earlier and vacuuming up more of its peculiar fruits. If you’re really playing properly–if you’re wytching well, if you will–the first time you traipsed through the swamp or frolicked through the farm fields, you weren’t blindly speeding to the next objective, but instead you stopped to snip some reeds or dig up some bones or net some grasshoppers as they crossed your path. This approach leaves you often pleasantly prepared to cook up whatever new cursed contraption you find you need next.
So this is the greatest challenge in Wytchwood–a game with no jump button and no attack, and sure as hell no dodge-roll:
DON’T RUSH. The killer strat is instead: Harvest thoroughly while on a useful trajectory. That is true secret of Well-Wytching.
