After Eight Years, A Look Into Witchfire’s Early Access
James Winspear
|
Given Witchfire’s religious overtones, it seems appropriate to start with a bit of a confession: I didn’t really know anything about the game when I booted it up. It was a title that had been in my peripheral vision for many years. Occasionally popping up in hopeful ‘upcoming shooters of 20XX’ videos. But details were exceedingly sparse on the ground beyond a few trailers. Honestly, I’d pretty much written it off as another sorry victim of development hell, never to see the light of day. So, imagine my surprise when the game finally dropped without a hint of fanfare. Imagine my still greater surprise when I saw that it was dropping in Early Access after eight years. Exclusively on the Epic Games Store, of all things. Maybe this time next decade, we’ll finally have a full release.
I jest. Odd as it is to have waited so long, the videogame industry is an odd place. I’m always glad to have an excuse to blast gribbly monsters. I’d been running on a boomer shooter high for some time. So when I finally got my controller to work with the Epic Games Launcher. Pro tip: you have to open the game through Steam. I was prepared to start getting Medieval on some mindless undead ass.
A short slideshow sets the stage. It’s feudal Europe, demons are attacking, and you’re a mute, skull-mask-wearing badass anointed by the Pope to root out witches. Alright, let’s rock. Then, the game began, and something weird started happening. I jumped through a portal, crucifix-studded revolver in hand, and walked through an abandoned hamlet in search of something to shoot at. It wasn’t long until I spotted a couple of zombie peasants.
Also Read: The Best Horror Games Of 2023
“Here we go,” thought I, and let fly a round into the nearest foe’s head. Strangely, his cranium didn’t automatically explode in a shower of gore. Damn, these deadites are tougher than I thought. Oh, and now more have appeared. Ouch, I’ve just been stabbed. Hey, that hurt. I check my health bar—wow, that really hurt. With some difficulty, I managed to dispatch the lot of them and carried on. Aware that none of the rotting buggers had been polite enough to drop a health potion. Oh well, maybe it’s just that I’m rusty after playing shooters where your average running speed is that of the land speed record. I’m sure it’ll get easier.
It didn’t. In fact, I soon got the gnawing sense that the combat had a rhythm I hadn’t fathomed and that I didn’t understand much of anything beyond point-and-shoot. What’s all this stuff I’m picking up? How do I heal? Wow, I need to rely on this dodge button a lot more than I thought. Then the game started really kicking my ass. Kicking it and not stopping. At some point, after dying for the dozenth time to a lowly bowman, the penny dropped. I was playing a Soulslike. An honest-to-God, FPS Soulslike.
Also Read: 10 Indie Horror PC Games To Play This Holiday Season
Mixing shooters with Soulslikes is something that’s only been attempted successfully once before, with Gunfire Games’ Remnant series. (Okay, two, technically, if you include Bloodborne, but you’re hardly the Doom Marine there, and I’m trying to make a point with this). Even in the Remnant series, things are more Souls-lite than Soulslike, barring its emphasis on challenging boss battles. So I could start to see why a game that combined the two—traditionally fast-paced, long-range combat on the one hand and slow, methodical melee brawls on the other—might have taken eight years to get off the ground. And you know what? It works. I’m not sure if I love it for its innovation or hate it for busting my balls, but I can tell you for sure that it got my interest.
Risk-reward is at the heart of Witchfire, both in the moment-to-moment gunplay and the wider gameplay loop. The maps of which there are two at present, with more to come in future updates. are fixed, but virtually everything within them is randomly placed each time you enter, from enemy locations to ammo pickups to treasures. Your ultimate aim is to defeat each map’s boss but to do so, you will need to collect the titular Witchfire, the game’s currency, to upgrade your character. Being a Soulslike, the main way of getting this witchfire is by killing enemies. As ever with these things, the question becomes: do you push forward for greater rewards or consolidate what you’ve got and beat a retreat home? So far, so Soulsian.
Also Read: The Best Horror Kills of 2023
Where things get really interesting is the combat. You have to unlearn a lot of your shooter reflexes here. You’re not Barry Bulletsponge; your enemies aren’t cannon fodder for your power fantasy. Putting lead down range plays a distinct second fiddle to avoid damage. After taking a few broadswords to the gut, you’ll come to appreciate the need to learn enemy patterns religiously. Killing foes without getting hit grants you extra stamina, an absolute lifeline if you’re going to survive for any length of time.
You lose your mojo—and stamina bonus—if you let even a single attack land, which will more often than not lead to a fuck-up cascade that’ll swiftly result in game over. Sure, there’s an equivalent of an Estus flask, but you’ll want to use it sparingly, as the aim is to extend each run through the map for as long as you can. There’s precious witchfire to collect, but there are also buffs like extra damage or faster magic recovery that you collect after you defeat a group of foes.
Also Read: ‘World of Horror’ Review: A Stunning Tribute To Junji Ito
If you manage to string enough buffs together, you can become a true powerhouse and will be able to take on even greater threats or even the map’s boss. The twist is these buffs only last for that given run. Die or exit the map, and they’re all gone. Decisions, decisions. And that’s not even to start talking about some of the wildcards the game throws at you later, like roaming bosses, challenge icons, and cataclysm events (aka ‘you’re screwed’ moments).
While Witchfire’s gameplay is fundamentally solid, there’s still a lot of balancing. If your playthrough was anything like mine, you’ll quickly learn that the shotgun and submachine gun are by far and away the most useful firearms on offer. Other weapons—the auto-pistol and sniper rifle especially—require some major tweaking. The former desperately needs buffing, while the latter restricts your vision so much when aiming down the scope that you’re liable to get blindsided. The enemy lineup must also be adjusted on the other side of the iron sights. It’s not so much the design of each foe as the numbers they appear in that’s the issue, particularly the ranged ones. And man, those fucking musketeers! I swear about half of all my deaths could be attributed to those flintlock-sporting douchebags.
Also Read: Bringing Alan Wake To Life With Game Director Kyle Rowley
The strangest element of Witchfire’s mechanics that needs work is its leveling-up system. In standard Soulsbornes, leveling up is the proverbial pick used to chip away at each wall you come across. You might die a dozen times in one area, but if you manage to save enough souls (or blood echoes or whatever), it gets just that little bit easier each time. But in Witchfire, the game scales with you, unlocking new enemies, environmental hazards, and dangerous world events as you upgrade.
The perverse result is that there’s not much incentive to progress, at least after you’ve unlocked all the useful bits, like being able to research new weapons and spells. There’s nothing else to spend your witchfire on. So there’s a danger of falling into a rut in the difficulty curve, where you can’t master what the game’s currently throwing at you, but leveling up will only make things harder. The partial answer to this, I suspect, will be a proper shop where you can purchase powerful items or make incremental improvements to your gun’s stats.
Regarding the visuals, I’m in two minds about things. Witchfire looks gorgeous, and I often find myself appreciating the quiet beauty of its natural landscapes during moments of downtime. But it’s also a generic kind of gorgeous, and one that I got a bit dulled to as the hours wore on.
Also Read: 10 Horror Movies You May Have Missed in 2023
At the end of the day, there’s only so much you can do with trees, bushes, and rocky outcrops. This is a problem for a game like Witchfire and one that I don’t think enough Soulslikes appreciate. In a genre where try, die, and try again is the name of the game, having a unique aesthetic with some eye-catching scenery helps prevent a sense of repetition, especially when you’re trudging through the area you just died in for the umpteenth time. While Witchfire certainly looks pretty, there’s nothing like the kind of gothic madness you’d get in Dark Souls III or Bloodborne.
This taps into my wider criticism, which is Witchfire’s lack of a distinct identity outside its combat loop. The big glowing weak spot here is the story or lack thereof. After the intro, you’re plopped onto the game’s hub world and left to your own devices. There aren’t any cutscenes, NPCs, or even findable lore documents to add depth or context to the world. While Witchfire has plenty of mechanical nuances, narratively, you’re basically just wandering around an open-ended combat arena. I’m guessing the game will expand on this as it develops.
Given that it’s coming from the folks who developed The Vanishing of Ethan Carter, my expectations are high. I hope they’ll also remember to include at least a bit of humor here to offer a bit of a reprieve to Witchfire’s otherwise po-faced, grimdark tone. Give us something like Patches from Dark Souls or Elden Ring’s Iron Fist Alexander.
Also Read: The 10 Best Horror TV Shows Of 2023
As a last point on the story, it’d also be remiss of me not to call out the somewhat questionable theme. I’m totally down for killing demons as a Blasphemous-esque masked protagonist. However, it still comes across as iffy when the game tells me I’m a Catholic church-appointed inquisitor hunting down witches. Given the real people who suffered and died horribly during actual historical witch hunts, it’s more than a bit dodgy to uncritically make you the protagonist of such a narrative. But again, given that the story is literally a couple of intro slides at this point, the devs could easily change this.
After nearly a decade of development, Witchfire‘s creators have finally proved that it’s possible to merge the FPS and Soulslike genres in an unholy ballet of bullets and baddies. The combat is tense, the enemies ruthless, and the environments pretty. There’s work to be done expanding the story and getting the balance right, which is why Early Access exists. If you’re a fan of either genre or just need an excuse to slay demons, this is one game to check out. Just watch out for the damn archers.
Categorized:Editorials Horror Gaming
