Witchfire is a PVE guns and spells extraction shooter that I remember being somewhat interested in during Summer Games Fest 2022. It apparently has been in early access and available on the Epic Game store since last year, but being perfectly honest… a game might as well not exist for all the good launching on EGS does for me. I am not saying that Epic is a bad storefront, it is just a giant gap in my knowledge because I never go there unless I have some external reason… like someone broadcasting that some big game was being given away for free there. Witchfire released Monday before last on Steam and now it has visualization to the majority of the world. However, It still had not tripped my radar until my friend Ace shared this quote from a review.
Imagine the gunplay of Destiny. But none of the intense shame of playing Destiny.
I have so much love for the gameplay of Destiny, but I have zero love anymore for the way in which that game is released and the grind associated with the light level. I am also still super fucking bitter about losing content that I paid for because it was vaulted. So if a game can bring me the feels of Destiny, with a sweet Hexen with guns vibe I am probably on board with that. So I picked up the early access client on Steam for roughly $36 and gave it a go. This morning I am going to talk a bit about my early impressions.
In the game, you can set up multiple profiles, aka characters that have persistent progress between expeditions into the world. The first step in that process is choosing which “Preyer” you are going to be playing, which acts as your default loadout of weapons, spells, and stats. I am playing Butcher currently which is big life totals and running around with a fully automatic rifle… but nothing much else. Once you progress through gameplay you can I believe essentially unlock everything on a single character, but the Preyer sets your starting point and to some extent dictates how your early gameplay is going to progress.
From there you are dropped onto a foreboding-looking island in search of resources on an expedition, which is what the game calls its general mission map structure. Much of your progression path is focused on the acquisition of gold and a glowing red material known as Witchfire. You can get this by killing monsters or by harvesting it directly from nodes you can find in the world. The maps are all custom-built, but the spawns and objectives vary each time you set foot on it. This means you pretty quickly get a lay of the land and understand how to traverse the area effectively, but won’t actually know what dangers lay along your path.
One of the first things that you want to do upon landing on the Island of the Damned, is pop open your map. This will have various objectives marked as well as the most important items the portals that will return you to the base where you started. Witchfire is an extraction shooter, which means you want to collect as many resources as you feel like you can before making your way to a portal and exiting the level locking in your progress. If you die on the island, you lose ALL of the Witchfire that you have not spent on upgrades, not just the Witchfire that you earned in a single play session. This makes you carefully choose your engagements because it seems like the longer you stay on the map, the more likely monsters are to guard your portal out of the map.
I’ve seen this game compared to a soulslike a few times, but I feel like the depth of this comparison ends with the fact that monsters hit really freaking hard, you have very limited health pool and ability to heal yourself, and that the mobs themselves have deeply predictable attack patterns. If you are taking on a single monster it is pretty easy to avoid all of the attacks. However, if you get swarmed… it becomes MUCH harder to read all of the attacks and move out of the way of various things that can kill you. The bane of my existence is the snipers which will give you a muzzle flash/glint in your radar letting you know that they are about to fire upon you. This is pretty easy to deal with in singletons, but when you get four of them attacking you at once it is very hard to accurately dodge all of them.
Every so often upon killing a monster you will be given access to an Arcana power-up which will last for the course of the current expedition giving the game a bit of a Hades vibe. You can also fine White Raven Feathers scattered through the map in treasure chests which will allow you to unlock additional options during each unlock. I’ve seen a lot of very interesting options, like the ability to gain a random elemental damage type when you reload your weapon. I’ve also seen some boring options like just giving you more health or more stamina. These combined with the random nature of the spawns and objectives give each map a lot of replayability.
Again though your goal is to get a bunch of loot, and then duck out before the heat gets too much for you to handle. While this does not really factor in for the early maps, there is a GTA-style heat meter that shows up as “The Witch” starts to notice your presence. When this bar maxes out, it will summon some cataclysm event that seeks to kill you. I’ve not seen this, but I have heard of it and it sounds like bad news given how hard everything already hits for random goons. In the above exit screen, I killed 24 monsters and looted 10k Witchfire… which admittedly is only that high because I retrieved a pile of Witchfire off my corpse after I failed the run before. When you fail completely, you end up creating a pile on the map that represents some of what you dropped on death.
Pending you exit the level successfully you can spend your stockpile of Witchfire on upgrading your core stats at the Ascension shrine, craft additional healing potions, or unlock perks on the weapons you currently have. I did not have a screenshot of this because apparently, you cannot access the weapon upgrade UI unless you have a pending upgrade. However the game has something akin to the Masterwork weapon system from Destiny, which is probably why it draws that comparison. Weapons each have three tiers of “masterworking, ” each giving the weapon some sort of intrinsic perk. You unlock the next one by defeating a certain number of baddies or performing other actions while on the expeditions.
Starting at level seven, you get access to the research system which will unlock new gear for you to equip on your character. Instead of being tied to Witchfire, this one is tied to gold which largely comes from looting treasure chests or very rarely dropping from tougher enemies. I was hoping this would allow me to research specifically named weapons, but apparently, it gives you a random unlock from a broad family of equipment. To start out I am researching a Close Ranged Weapon and a Medium Ranged Weapon, and I believe this progresses as you complete a number of expeditions because it does not appear to be tied to real-world time.
All in all the game is pretty fun. I dig the hunt for treasure and kill the baddies aspect while slowly powering up your character over time. I am starting to get better about looking for plants to harvest and witchfire clusters to gather while in the map, while also keeping an eye out for individual treasure chests. I’ve not made it very far into the game and I am assuming there are other maps that will unlock as I progress my character. If you are interested in Destiny-style movement and gunplay combined with magic powers, interesting gun design, and Hades-style rogue-lite powerups it might be worth a gander. I will warn you… the game can be punishingly hard at times which seems to reward a careful gameplay style rather than running into a nest of monsters guns blazing. There is a lot of cover that you can use to bait enemies out into the open for you to kill them more safely.
Anyways! Thought I would talk about it this morning in case anyone else out there would be interested. They released a few more updated trailers when the game went into Steam early access. The game world is gorgeous so I can see myself playing this on the side when I am in the mood for its blend if tropes.
