The smaller stories are much, much better. It has good reasoning for keeping the body mysterious, but it means you’re often stopping mid-quest to wonder why you’re bothering, and the answer is often ‘because it’s the only way to progress’. You’re meant to care about waking a body in your backyard, but Wytchwood doesn’t give you enough to be all that bothered. It’s not perfect in this area: the overriding objective is a faulty one. The world often reacts to your crafting and fetching in imaginative ways. And there’s a dark sense of humour running through it like rock.
The deviants you are killing are hulking, grotesque versions of woodland animals, and they have fairy-tale-like stories to make them larger than life. This is a beautiful game, in much the same way that Knights & Bikes and Wild at Heart are beautiful, with 2D cutouts dancing on a semi-3D world. It stops the feelings of grind and repetition that you often get in MMOs or large-scale RPGs.īut the main way that Wytchwood files off its own edges is it’s overwhelming character. Bewitching crafting adventure Wytchwood comes to brew on PS4 & PS5 this Fall. You can pop to the right region, do one action, and you are now fully stocked. The first is that you rarely need more than one of each item. Wytchwood understands this, and does a couple of things to mitigate it. You would be perfectly justified to put down the pad when Wytchwood asks you for the same far-flung item that you have gained five times before (looking at you, ghost skull). It’s a yawning void of picking up items, trapping creatures and combining other items. Sometimes, and it’s not a rare occurrence, Wytchwood’s beautiful wrapping peels back and you see that it’s made of the same interactions, over and over again. It’s the gaping chasm that Wytchwood tries to build a bridge over. You can contact the author at or on Twitter.
He has expanded his involvement in the gaming community by producing content on his own YouTube channel and Twitch channel dedicated to gaming Let's Plays and tutorials. After years of supporting the site, he was brought on in 2010 as a junior analyst, working his way up to lead analyst in 2012.