4/5 ★ – Cryophage's review of WitchHand.

It’s hard to find a game that completely captures your attention and steals hours of one’s time away without trying. Excellently designed games and personal favorites can surprisingly fail to create a completely immersive experience, regardless of their quality. However, sometimes a game only needs an intricately interconnected yet straightforward gameplay loop set against a charming and cartoonish aesthetic to grab one’s undivided attention. So anyways, I’ve lost several hours of my life to the strategy game Witchhand. Witchhand initially seems like a simplistic yet well-designed strategy game. One can choose from an- admittedly small- selection of unique witches, allocate their resources to craft familiars for multitasking, and so on. However, this game reveals its hand when one discovers how everything becomes interconnected. Nearly everything can be sold to obtain more currency used to explore locales, one resource can boast a variety of applications, and a familiar one trained for commerce could act as the difference between the player surviving an enemy onslaught or not. This interconnectivity combines with the other gameplay mechanics to expertly engage the player. Not only does one constantly unlock new spells at a rate they can control via how much they invest into specific buildings, but they also receive quests offering money and critically important resources in exchange for various items and tasks. The constant progression made throughout the game- produced via these two elements- develops a snowball effect that encourages one to keep playing and see what else they can encounter. However, this snowball effect can hurt the game due to its semi-rogue-like elements. The crux of Witchhand’s gameplay revolves around fending off waves of enemies until they craft a waypoint used to explore more locations. These waves can catch the player off-guard due to their intensity, causing them to die and indirectly forcing them to reset. This makes the player frequently contend with repetition- as they must unlock the same spells in a similar order again- and a slow start that quickly becomes tiring if one dies frequently. One will also find themselves borderline starving for one of the game’s resources: Reagents. As far as I’m aware, this scarce item only shows up in two ways: getting lucky through exploration and turning specific items- which can also only be obtained via exploration- into reagents. This becomes a problem when one needs reagents for important spells- such as summoning familiars, making more space for buildings, and healing- and cannot find them to literally save their life. It’s surprisingly easy to end up in a situation where one cannot defend themselves, as summoning familiars to fight off the invaders requires materials they don’t have. All in all, I give Witchhand an 8/10, and highly recommend it!