Wytchwood Gameplay Preview

Wytchwood is a very colorful narrative adventure. The gameplay essentially boils down to you collecting and combining items to solve simple puzzles to proceed in the story.

The world of Wytchwood is very colorful and in more ways than one. The art style feels very much like a children’s story book come to life. It’s filled with vibrant colors and a cast of equally colorful characters. The narrative matches the feel of the game as well.

The story starts with you playing as an old witch waking up from an unusually long nap in her cabin. A mysterious goat appears to inform her of a deal they made a long time ago, where the witch must collect the souls of twelve evil animals in order to save a sleeping damsel. There’s only one small problem, the witch has forgotten her memories.

You are then off on your quest to collect the souls of the twelve animals, each in their own unique environment and with their own unique backstory. I started off with the snake first. He was in a hidden village in the center of a lake where you had to create a bridge using fairy dust. Inside the village, the snake had hypnotized everyone and was holding them prisoner. To free them from the spell, you had to go collect three mirror pieces, each with their own subset of collection quests. Once the mirror was completed, you manage to trap the snake in it and capture your first soul as well as free everyone from the snake’s hypnotic grasp.

The gameplay pretty much just boils down to collecting materials. Each quest requires a certain item, and those items are crafted using base items spread around the world. It’s not too grindy and doesn’t feel too tedious though certain quests do feel like they drag on for longer than you’d like. For example, I had to create items that require potted water. I could only find one source of water in one area so I had to backtrack there multiple times just to grab enough. It didn’t take more than a few minutes each time but it was starting to feel a bit repetitive.

Even though the mechanics are relatively simple, the colorful cast of characters and charming narrative carry the game. You meet strange and outlandish characters, such as a young boy who befriends frogs and eats bugs (but claims the bugs are for the frogs), a young woman in love with a bard who cannot sing, and so forth. The individual encounters combined with the overall mystery of what happened to the witch drive the narrative and game forward and managed to carry me along in the momentum.

Overall, Wytchwood felt like a pretty engaging game. The colorful world and overall feeling of mystery combined with the simple gameplay was enough to keep me engaged with the game.