Witchaven

I went in hoping for a lost gem in the vein of Heretic or Hexen, and what I found instead was something considerably rougher, more stubborn, and oddly fascinating. Witchaven is a first-person melee slasher built on an early version of the Build engine, the same technology that would later power Duke Nukem 3D, though you would never know it from looking at the two side by side. The premise is straightforward: knight Grondoval arrives on the forbidding Isle of Char armed with little more than a dagger, and must fight through twenty-five levels of dungeon to reach the evil witch Illwhyrin before she tears open a dimensional barrier and floods the world with demonic hordes. The story is pure sword-and-sorcery pretext, adapted loosely from a 1992 tabletop supplement, and it does its job without pretending to be more. What sets Witchaven apart from its contemporaries is the almost stubborn commitment to close-quarters combat. Where Heretic let you pelt enemies from across a room, here the bow and spell scrolls are treated as rationed supplements to a melee-heavy arsenal of eleven weapons: bare fists, dagger, short sword, morning star, broadsword, battle axe, throwing axes, pike axe, longsword, halberd, and the coveted Magical Sword hiding somewhere deep in the later levels. Weapons degrade and break mid-fight, which forces you to scavenge constantly and adds a genuine tension the genre rarely attempted. The RPG layer is thin but present: killing enemies banks experience points across nine levels, and hitting new thresholds unlocks higher-tier spellcasting and increases your health pool. Spells like Freeze, Fireball, Fly, and the crowd-pleasing Nuke require minimum experience ranks to cast, so there is at least a skeletal sense of build progression. Potions scattered across levels grant temporary invisibility, strength boosts, and healing. None of this depth approaches a real RPG, but for 1995 it was genuinely novel scaffolding on top of a Doom-era framework. The problems are real and plentiful. Hit detection has always been the game's most notorious flaw, with collision feeling loose enough that you occasionally pass through enemies mid-swing rather than connecting. Level design leans heavily abstract, the kind of featureless corridor labyrinth that tells you nothing about the world it supposedly inhabits. Some levels lock progression behind specific finite spell scrolls, which is the kind of design decision that makes me want to close the application entirely. There is a known bug on level five involving a brass key that can strand you without an Unlock Door scroll, so save often and broadly. The Enhanced build included in the re-release, which bundles in the community EGwhaven patch, remaps controls to feel closer to a modern FPS and fixes the most severe framerate-dependent logic failures, so play that version rather than the original retail executable. Who is this for? Retro-shooter enthusiasts who have already finished Blood, Heretic, and Chasm: The Rift and want to trace the full lineage of the boomer-shooter era will find Witchaven genuinely interesting as a historical artifact. It is one of the very first games built on the Build engine, predating Duke Nukem 3D by a full year, and that context makes its roughness more legible. Players expecting the writing to reward re-reads, choices to matter, or any real narrative payoff will leave disappointed. There are no branching paths, no memorable characters beyond Illwhyrin as a vague recurring threat, and the enemy variety is shallow enough that a grimacing clay goblin will be your primary social interaction across most of the runtime. If the phrase "deeply flawed but historically significant" makes you curious rather than cautious, Witchaven earns its afternoon.

Monika · Scout Team

RPGs

Be the first to comment on Witchaven.