“Prepare to get lost in the hand-crafted world of Witchspire: a co-op open world witch adventure where you and your friends have been chosen to save corruption from spreading through the world. Grow your powers, explore a vast world and form bonds with the creatures around you.” – Steam Description

---

Witchspire is an early access open world survival crafter with elements of creature collecting and action roleplay. You can play the game as a solo experience or with your coven!

You’re the chosen one.

You’re a witch and you have special magical tools for collecting resources. Don’t expect to be doing the hard labour of swinging an axe, here we cast spells to do the work for us. Expect lots of potion making, tome crafting, and flying around on your broom to explore for necessary upgrades to your base and character items.

Every good witch needs a place to keep a fire under the cauldron and store their tomes and crystals. There is a decent build mode with further customization perks you can unlock as you level your character. Astral Projecting to build is both a quality of life experience and an appropriately spell binding one! Level up your Hearth base and character as you journey to find clues about your missing academy classmates and hopefully save them.

Graphics:  

A mix of cartoony and whimsically charming. It has an aesthetic akin to what illustrated fairy tale books achieved when I was a child. The game is filled with gorgeous environments that feel grounded in their belonging to the world and are interconnected appropriately. The character creator is a little limiting but the desired witchy aesthetic is beautifully executed. Big hats, boots and flowy fabrics with the adorable and anime cutesy style for the faces is exactly what I was expecting and hoping for.

The familiars are all unique and yet they maintain a consistent aesthetic even when they differ so much from creature to creature. You can tell that in spite of their differences, they do belong in the same world. There aren’t any items or elements of the game that look jarring or out of place. The auroras in the sky and the lighting set the right atmosphere as the time changes or while you explore making it feel as magical as it should.

Gameplay:

In terms of survival, Witchspire doesn’t offer much in terms meters needing management. There aren’t many negative impacts for being wet, cold or too hot. There is no hunger meter. Cooking and consuming foods are for buffs only. The only real punishing factor at present is whether you set your inventory to drop on death or not. For some, that might be enough or too little.

You can fully customize the level of difficulty you want from the game by adjusting things like inventory on death settings and growth rates. If you’ve played Palworld, the settings for your world/saves are similar to that. The typical survival crafting while exploring gameplay loop hits just right. It’s a lot of fun to experiment with different weapons and abilities from the skill tree in Luminaries- which are amazingly extensive.

At the start of the game, when choosing your familiar, the text for the familiars only seems to be there for lore reasons and not for difficulty level in raising the familiar. I think it would be nice to see different growth rates for creatures that fit with their lore. It helps make the player feel more rewarded when making milestones with their familiar as they level.

I’m always a bit skeptical with “Open World ” games as there are far too many that sell a huge map with nothing of real substance in it and poor connection between areas. Here though, there is always a reason for a part of the map existing and nothing felt like a filler area. Everything connected and flowed really well when I was exploring.

There is a lack of guidance or proper tool tip explanation for some of the progression on items or abilities. You will probably find yourself having to guess your way through a lot without the game explicitly handing you an answer. If you’re new to survival crafting, this might stunt your progression a little. If you’re the type that needs a definitive on how a mechanic works, this may also frustrate you.

Building isn’t all that necessary, but it does help with making you feel you have a place in the world. Even your basic starting log cabin will have you feeling right at home in the game world. The build mode includes astral projection which allows for easier placement. I adore that there is a witchy way to have a better camera angle for item placement as a lot of games that have free building tend to suffer from some awkward movement tech required to get nicer item placement. I’m a witch and building should be as easy as wiggling my nose or pointing my finger – and it absolutely is!

Sound:

The music is relaxing and exciting as it needs to be. The soundtrack isn’t what I’d seek out and listen to outside of playing the game, but it does a good job of keeping me in the right mood for when I’m playing. The voice acting really sold me on the characters. Some sound perfectly analytical while others are more playful and energetic. Either way, they match up nicely to the personalities and character models. Even the dialogue that your player character speaks is a lot of fun and you can tell the voice actors had a fun time delivering all the puns.

Controls:

The controls are straight forward, and can be customized rather nicely. Having toggles available for things like sprinting is always nice. The inventory navigation is far from ideal but the exploring, battling, and building feel good. The real detractor for this one is that the game looks and feels like it should be played cozily with a controller, but at the time of this review, controller play isn’t fully supported. Hopefully this is something we get with further updates because it’s the one thing holding it back from being both more accessible and cozy.

Story: