Wytchwood Review: Mysterious Craft-Driven Story Telling

Wytchwood is a delightful, narrative-driven crafting game developed by Alientrap and published by Whitethorn Digital for PC and consoles. Wytchwood combines dark fairytale tropes with witty dialogue to create memorable characters and charming questlines. Excellent gameplay mixed with unique 2D illustrative graphics make exploring the world of Wytchwood a creepy but engrossing experience.

The adventure in Wytchwood starts in a magical hut tucked away on a failing farmstead familiar to sim game enthusiasts. The main character, an elderly witch with a cauldron for a head, wakes to the invasion of a goat in her home. After discovering she has been asleep for some time, and that the goat visiting her property is possessed by a demon determined to hold the witch accountable for an unfulfilled contract, she must set out to uncover the details missing from her memory. This includes unraveling the story behind a young woman in a magically induced coma in the temple by her farm. To fulfill the contract and find her missing memories, the Witch must collect the souls of those who wrong the sleeping woman, and return them to the possessed goat as quickly as possible.

The world of Wytchwood is similar to survival titles like The Flame In The Flood, with the Witch possessing a grimoire crafting book that slowly fills with recipes for potions and reagents as she surveys creatures, flora, fauna, and objects found in each map. Without the need for a crafting table, items can be made quickly in any location, allowing fast access to needed items for puzzles and quests while exploring. While there are no obvious weapons in Wytchwood, players do have a small inventory of tools needed for collecting certain raw ingredients. Shears can be used to cut tough grasses or animal fur, while an axe is used to hack into stumps and logs. Sometimes, tools are combined with certain potions and concoctions to defeat enemies like mean dogs or insects.

While not an open-world, Wytchwood does include multiple unique maps to visit and explore, each possessing a unique biome. While locations like the forest are fairly tame, with most hostile mobs easy to spot, other areas like the swamp are riddled with powerful monsters that will need to be handled with craftable items. Each biome contains unique crafting ingredients as well, requiring players to prepare carefully before tackling a questline, to ensure they have the required crafting components before entering a more difficult location that may not have what they need. For those who do run out of certain ingredients, however, backtracking isn’t terrible thanks to an item that teleports players back to a dimensional gate room filled with portals to different maps. Locations are also interconnected via pathways, which allows quick transport between locations when doing large quantities of crafting.

Quests in Wytchwood have been balanced nicely. While they do require a good deal of item fetching, this has been broken up with excellent NPC dialogue and engaging challenges. Most quests require players to obtain a quick list of ingredients or complex crafting, depending on who the quest is for. This makes quick tasks fairly easy to accomplish, but plot-intensive quests are more fulfilling, creating a sense of achievement and satisfaction when wrapping a narrative. Storylines in progress are also easy to follow thanks to an on-screen to-do list that can be toggled from within the player’s inventory menu. This negates the need to constantly open menus for reminders on ingredient lists, and aids in seamless exploration.

The only setback currently present in Wytchwood is the usefulness of the Witch’s home hut. While the player returns to deliver souls to the possessed goat, there aren’t many other reasons to go home during the narrative. This seems like a waste of a primary location for the game. To improve on this, additional crafting recipes could be added that requires a stationary crafting table similar to Valheim’s, or players could potentially use the cauldron over the fire to create snacks and concoctions. A storage system for crafted goods could also be useful, allowing players to stock up on traps, snares, and powders needed for certain objectives.

While less carefree than simulation titles like Animal Crossing or Stardew Valley, the casual pacing and nonchalant nature of the main character make Wytchwood a great pick for relaxing exploration-style games. It is also a great choice for those who enjoy crafting and survival games, but prefer to have questlines to follow instead of self-governed gameplay. While the 2D art style is fun and reminiscent of storybook illustrations, this game is likely not the best pick for younger players due to questlines dealing with horror elements, as well as graphic depictions of animal death when using traps and lures. However, fans of twisted fairytales and creepy magical plotlines will likely find Wytchwood an enjoyable and spine-tingling experience.

Wytchwood is out now for PC via Steam and for Nintendo Switch, PlayStation, and Xbox. A PC Steam code was provided to Screen Rant for the purpose of this review.

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