REVIEW | Wytchwood

LifeisXbox’s Wytchwood review | Sometimes, when us gaming journalists get lucky, we get to review a game that we’ve been keeping our eye on for a while. Wytchwood is one of those games that I’ve been wanting to try out ever since I first caught wind of it. Developed by Alien Trap and published by Whitethorn Digital and WhisperGames, Wytchwood is a crafting adventure with an adorable art style set in the land of gothic fables and fairytales. We got an immediate release for PC, Xbox, Switch, and PlayStation, so whatever platform you prefer, Alien Trap has got you covered with Wytchwood!

Wytchwood sucked me into its dark fairytale world and enchanted me with everything it has to offer.

ℹ️ Reviewed on PC | Review code provided by PR/publisher, this review is the personal opinion from the writer.

What we liked!

• Fairytale art style and joining soundtrack | As is often the case, the first thing that attracts you to a certain game, is its art style. This was no different with Wytchwood. I immediately fell in love with the fairytale storybook art style. The characters all have a unique look, and your main character, a witch, also look different than you would expect her to look. And then we have the areas, like the forest, swamp, and graveyard. Each has their own look and feel, filled with detail and all have their own monsters. I absolutely loved exploring every area of this gorgeous game.
• Crafting in the simplest way | The main feature of Wytchwood is, of course, crafting. And let me tell you, it’s so much fun! You pick up a grimoire at the start of the game, and this is where you will keep track of the spells and reagents you’ve discovered. Your quests will mostly involve crafting particular things, and you just simply open your grimoire, look at what ingredients you need, gather them and craft the required item. It sound easy enough, but trust me, you’ll need something, but to make that something, you need another something, and so on. Never a dull moment, that’s for sure. You don’t need a crafting table or anything, you can just craft whenever and wherever you want, which I thought was great. Finding the required ingredients is also quite fun. As mentioned, there are several areas in Wytchwood. When you need, for example, an eye of newt, the grimoire will tell you in which area you need to find it. In this case, you’ll need to look in the swamp. And that’s pretty much all the info you get, which was, again, something I loved. The game does require you to look around and explore a bit, and doesn’t show the exact location of ingredients.
• Witches eye | Early on in the game, you get introduced to the witches eye. By inspecting objects and creatures with this, you’ll pick new recipes to add to your grimoire. It’ll also give you short descritiptions of items and creatures and whatever you can scan. It provided to be quite a helpful tool when you encountered new enemies and didn’t know how to get past them. All in all, a nice and easy way to explore.
• Story(telling) | Wytchwood has a great story to follow, set in a dark fables theme. You play as a witch who is just living her life (mostly sleeping in her chair) until one day she is woken up from her beauty sleep by a talking goat. Apparently, she made a deal with said goat in which she promised to find twelve wicked souls in order to save the soul of a sleeping maiden. Small note: the witch herself does not remember any of this, but still sets out on an adventure to find all twelve souls and bring them to the goat.
  Fair warning: this game has you do a lot reading. And yeah, sure, you can just skip through dialogue and focus on the quests and you can perfectly solve evertyhing without the story. However, I strongly suggest you don’t do this. The story is quite elaborate, and the writing is great. I thoroughly enjoyed every conversation I had, with every weird creature I ran into. There was also some humor inserted into the storytelling, which I can certainly appreciate, and it definitely added even more value to an already amazing story.
• Adventure with quests | Wytchwood is not a difficult game at all. You get clear objectives in your journal (and shown on the top right of your screen), and you can solve them in any order you want. The quests are always straightforward, and even though they have you wandering around a lot, it’s always fun to fulfill the objectives. Enemies are dealt with by crafting as well, like making a snap trap or dreadful doll, making them drop necessary ingredients. This game really manages to suck you in with its very easy yet addictive gameplay. I actually wanted to take a first look at Wytchwood when I received the code, but I immediately sunk three hours into this wonderful gem, so that basically says enough, doesn’t it.

Somewhere between

• Grinding | I guess, if you really need something that is not perfect about the game, it’s that it might become kind of grindy after a while. I mean, you are running around gathering ingredients all over, and crafting spells. At some point, I thought I’d get sick of this quite fast, but somehow I didn’t! Still, I can imagine that some people might feel that it’s too much grinding. To those people, who easily get tired of this, I say: it’s a crafting game, so keep that in mind. Wytchwood really does bewitch you in the best way, but if you think you’ll get tired of gathering and crafting after an hour or so, just pick a different game.

What we disliked

• Really nothing? Really nothing!

How long to beat the story | About 15 hours
How long to achieve 1000G | About 15 hours

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