Witchfire

I went into Witchfire expecting another roguelite with a gothic coat of paint slapped on top. What I got instead was something genuinely hard to categorize, and that is meant as a compliment. The Astronauts, the small studio behind The Vanishing of Ethan Carter, have spent the better part of a decade building a first-person shooter that pulls from soulslike design, extraction mechanics, and roguelite structure simultaneously, and the surprising thing is that all three strands hold together without constantly fighting each other. The core loop works like this: you drop into a cursed landscape as a Preyer, one of the Church's immortal witch hunters, and push as deep as you can before dying or escaping through a portal. Escaping is how you keep your loot. Dying means you drop your accumulated Volatile Witchfire, the experience currency that funds stat upgrades at the Ascension Shrine, plus any keys and special items at the spot where you fell. You can recover them on the next run, Dark Souls-style, which creates some genuinely tense moments when you are deciding whether to push further or cut your losses. The level layouts stay fixed between runs, but enemy and item placement shifts procedurally, which keeps the maps readable without making them stale. Combat is where the game earns its reputation. Gunplay is fast, physical, and satisfying in a way that a lot of genre crossbreeds fumble. You carry two standard weapons drawn from four range categories (close, medium, long, and demonic), and each weapon is elementally attuned to Water, Earth, Fire, or Air, which influences the Arcana perks available during that run. Landing a perfectly timed spell-plus-headshot combination feels genuinely great. The six starting classes, Butcher, Hunter, Slayer, Shadow, Saint, and the masochist-tier Penitent, give you different stat spreads and opening gear without locking you out of any equipment long-term. Respec options exist, so you are not punished for experimenting. The Slayer suits players who want to lean into spells and short-range pressure; the Shadow rewards patience and sniping from distance; the Saint gives the smoothest early-game ramp with early access to a Demonic Weapon and a Heavy Spell. The Gnosis progression system layers on top of all this, evolving the world itself as you reach milestones, unlocking a trader and pushing harder enemy variants into the mix. The rough edges are real and worth naming. The game is still in Early Access heading toward a full 1.0 release planned for Q4 2026, with a complete story being the primary addition still outstanding. Right now the narrative is fragments and atmosphere rather than a through-line, which is either fine or a dealbreaker depending on why you play games. The early hours can feel opaque: there are no quest markers, no hand-holding, and the Gnosis and Workshop Mirror systems take time to click. New players who pick the wrong class and run out of patience before the loop opens up will bounce hard. Performance on the other hand has been reported as surprisingly clean for Early Access, running smoothly even without the SSD that the developers strongly recommend. For the right player, specifically someone who likes their shooters punishing but fair, who finds extraction mechanics more interesting than frustrating, and who does not need a story to stay motivated through thirty or forty hours of runs, this is one of the more distinct action games released in recent memory. The 92 percent positive rating from over 15,000 reviews reflects a community that has watched the developer consistently respond to feedback, and update 0.9 already includes all biomes and enemies ahead of 1.0. The bones are exceptional. The full meal is coming.

Alex · Scout Team

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