• Rating: 7/10
• Year played: 2022
• Completion level: 100%
• Time played: 13 hours

I really love the aesthetic of this game, it's 100% my style and I was very excited to jump in and live out my dream of being a cranky old forest witch. And in that aspect, this game definitely succeeds. The premise is that you are a witch, and wake up one day in your forest hut with your brain foggy and memories missing. A talking goat shows up and informs you that you'd made a deal with him to retrieve twelve evil souls in exchange for saving a life. He points you in the direction of the first few souls, and off you go.

The game is split into three acts, each one tasking you with getting four of the souls you need. There are a number of areas, each with people and animals with problems that need solving, and after doing enough of them it'll eventually lead you to encountering the evil creature whose soul you need to bring back to the goat. You accomplish all of this by gathering ingredients and crafting them into things to be used in increasingly complex spells. Eventually, one of the spells will end up with you defeating the creature and locking their soul into an object.

The gameplay loop doesn't change much over the course of the story. Each of the three acts plays out almost exactly the same, just with different characters and new ingredients to gather. Many of the ingredients come from creatures that you need to craft some other item first to defeat, and this continues on for long chains of gathering ingredients to get other ingredients. For some of the more complex spells, it might go ten or more layers deep of items required to get other items. As a concept I don't really mind this "chain crafting" thing too much honestly. I enjoy grindy games, and for me there's some kind of zen to be found in going around methodically checking off boxes. However, that zen was often interrupted by dealing with a frustrating UI.

For a game based entirely around its crafting menu, this one really needed some major usability improvements. Probably my biggest complaint is that you can only craft one item at a time, even though you frequently need multiples. You need to keep spamming the button to craft more, but every craft action makes you wait several seconds for some audio to play, and even after the audio clip finishes, it freezes your UI for a few more seconds for no clear reason before you can interact with anything again. I don't know if this was a loading issue or what caused the delay. I did play it on the steam deck, but didn't have any other performance problems in other parts of the game.

My other big complaint is that interacting with the huge crafting menu with a controller is tedious and frequently buggy. In particular there was some weird bug in the inventory where moving up or down a row would also shift your cursor left 3 spaces (even when using the d-pad to be sure I wasn't accidentally giving a diagonal input). I had similar bugs in the crafting UI. It made navigation frustrating, so I often switched to touch or mouse controls for crafting. So, the UI experience was frustrating but I'm willing to chalk up to this game being not fully optimized for the steam deck (which I knew going in).

Despite the frustrations I still enjoyed the game overall. The characters are well designed and all have interesting and funny storylines (with the exception of a somewhat abrupt ending), plus the atmosphere and scenery design is excellent and really nails the look and feel they were going for. I wish there had been a bit more polish on the crafting mechanics, but it's an enjoyable and relaxing little title that will hit the spot if you're in the mood for some laid back collecting and crafting.