Wytchwood

Wytchwood casts you as the old witch of the woods, which is already a better premise than most RPGs managed this decade. You are not the chosen hero. You are the creature the heroes warn each other about, and the game leans into that framing with a surprisingly sharp sense of humour and a genuinely eerie storybook aesthetic. The world is built from gothic fables and folk horror, rendered in a hand-drawn silhouette style that looks like an illustrated grimoire come to life. It is a crafting adventure at heart, so if you arrived expecting stat sheets and levelling curves, recalibrate now. The core loop is collecting ingredients scattered across a strange, segmented countryside and brewing them into spells and tools that let you interact with the world further. Mushrooms, bones, cursed trinkets, stolen shadows - the ingredient list has personality, and the recipes feel thematically consistent rather than arbitrary. You are constantly working toward something, which keeps the loop from going stale through the early and mid sections. The crafting never reaches the mechanical depth of a survival game, but that is not the point. The point is atmosphere and the satisfaction of assembling something appropriately witchy. Where Wytchwood earns its goodwill is in the writing. Each chapter centres on a fable-adjacent story, usually involving a morally suspect cast of humans doing very human things like greed, jealousy, and small-town cruelty. Your job as the witch is to observe, gather what you need, and ultimately pass judgement. The choices you make in those judgement moments are not always binary good-evil toggles - some of them are genuinely uncomfortable in ways that feel earned rather than edgy. The game does not have BG3-tier reactivity, and your decisions rarely echo across the whole world, but within each chapter the writing rewards attention. The characters are archetypes, yes, but handled with enough wit that archetypes feel like the point rather than a limitation. The downsides are real and worth knowing. Wytchwood is short - most players finish in six to nine hours - and the back half does show some pacing fatigue as ingredient-fetching starts to feel like the filler quests I have zero patience for. The crafting system, charming as it is, does not evolve much mechanically. There is no combat, no build to theorise over past hour two, and no meaningful character progression in the RPG sense. If you come to this as an RPG, you will leave mildly confused. It sits more honestly in the adventure-puzzle space with strong narrative seasoning. The Metacritic score of 78 feels accurate - this is a well-executed small game, not a genre-defining one. Wytchwood is for players who want a cosy-but-dark palate cleanser between heavier titles, who appreciate hand-crafted worldbuilding over systems depth, and who have always wanted to be the witch in the fairy tale rather than the knight. It is also quietly good for players newer to the genre who want narrative-led adventure without the overhead of a 100-hour CRPG. The 93% Steam approval rating from nearly five thousand reviews suggests Alientrap found exactly the audience this was made for.

Monika · Scout Team

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