Witchfire: The Final Preview

You ever watch a black metal music video and think, “This is cool and all, but what if those guys screaming around a candlelit pentagram had mid-20th century guns?” Me neither, but I can’t help but think the team at The Astronauts did to get inspired for Witchfire, their single-player roguelike extraction shooter that feels like a gaslamp fantasy movie with Mercyful Fate as the soundtrack. Its mix of hot-handed running and gunning and more slow-paced exploration and investigation meld into something that is more of a dream to play than a nightmare. Though some balancing of what can feel like downright unfair difficulty is certainly in order, and some of the more obscure features could be made to feel less esoteric, I am firmly caught in the spell of this black magic banger.

Though it’s drenched in dark gothic drip, Witchfire is actually about the fight against the evil influence of powerful witches taking an alternative version of our world into its doomed clutches bit by bit. This world’s Vatican calls on you, an immortal warrior for the Pope called a preyer, to hunt and kill one of these witches – a task much easier said than done. The story sort of fizzles out after that. Everything you walk past or interact with is teeming with place and sometimes even lore, but it’s all piecemeal world building stuff that isn’t always intelligible. But it does a great job at setting the overall Roman Catholic x Van Helsing vibe.

I really fell in love with Witchfire’s combat once I found the right guns for me out of the dozen available. It hits just the right stride between DOOM and Destiny, with fast-paced shooting that rewards chain kills and evasiveness and spells that are both powerful odds-eveners and clever utility pieces that helped me get out some gnarly binds all the time. Clearing monster camps manifests arcana, which is a random boon that helps flavor your particular run in the same way the many popular roguelikes do these days. I found that some of these boons were clearly more impactful than others, like ones that lowered my reload times or gave me bonus damage to enemies being afflicted by status elements. They are divided into specializations, and you can have a small effect on which specializations you can choose arcana from in a particular order, but it’s limited – not nearly on the level of the kind of God-boon manipulation in Hades, for example.

Besides having some truly satisfying sound design and clever artistic nods to real-world weapons, all of the guns feel pretty standard until you start unlocking special abilities by completing weapon-specific tasks like getting a certain amount of kills with it. Hunger, my go-to mid- to close-range heavy revolver, gained the ability to get empowered shots when I reloaded based on how many critical hits (i.e. weak point hits) I landed with the previous cylinder of rounds. Of the six or so I tried, each felt distinct and viable in their own right, but once I found this revolver and a shotgun that reloads when I hit a charged melee attack, I haven’t looked back.

Much of the meat of Witchfire is jumping into varied locations and finishing each map's main objective, like solving the mystery of the Wailing Tower or killing a gnarly boss in the Scarlet Coast. The map highlights other goodies like enemy camps that denote the difficulty of the monsters inside with increasingly more metal-looking skulls, or treasure chests and what they could hold should you want to trek towards them. These are usually your first guide for plotting any given trip out of the sanctum and into the fire, but these locales have plenty of things to find that won't be on the map – like walls that can be magically dissolved to reveal secret loot or passageways, or this nefarious spector that always seems to lead me into the waiting arms of something horrible.

I found that the time between dealing with sub-objectives is filled with navigating around and shooting up dozens of demonic denizens. As far as the regular footsoldiers of the witch go, you’ll be spending a lot of time clapping similar-looking baddies like various humanoid archers and cultists in rags, gunmen with long range and sharp aim, and knights who can turn into fireballs and leap long distances. This never really feels repetitive though, because these enemies get shuffled in with one another in dynamic groups that often require you to deal with lots of different types of threats at once. And these locations are filled with obstacles and verticality and very few corners that feel safe hunkering down in that you always have to be on the move or risk getting caught.

More difficult monster camps will increase the quantity and variety of enemies, and is where you’ll see the scariest stuff. I stumbled across a camp of the highest, most horned-skull difficulty a few times during my travels and saw not only upgraded elite versions of monsters that I knew, but some brand-new horrors that I didn’t, like fully armored grenadiers and some floating menagere that resembled a balloon that’s also a picnic basket. These were a true test of my gear, stats, and skills that I still have a hard time passing. Being able to actively choose to engage with these high-risk challenges makes Witchfire feel more fair than frightening, but there’s also a few features that feel like insult to injury, like a roving band of monsters spawned by the exit portal that will follow you around the map and hunt you, getting stronger as time passes. Yes, they do make sure you stay on track and active during any given expedition, but they barge onto the scene largely unannounced, often being a nuisance when I was trying to engage an enemy camp or one of the weird puzzles on the map. Though killing these special hellions guarantees an ammo drop, a resource that becomes more precious the longer you stay in a map, they never stop coming, and never produce arcana - meaning you could kill them forever and never get any stronger even though they are - and always feel like just one too many levers of discomfort.

The Gnosis level, my preyer’s general knowledge and insight as it comes to all things demonic, is the most obvious form of progression in Witchfire. It requires more relatively difficult tasks to be completed, like holding a large amount of currency at once, but when completed, higher Gnosis levels allowed me to unlock new access to rooms in my hideout, and also some previously locked or veiled doors in the available expeditions. The downside is that it raises the bar for all of the dangers you’ll find on expeditions. Suddenly, those floating demons I only saw in the most difficult of locations now show up more often in other locations as well. Traps change, more of the chests and items you find are cursed, the roving band of hunters includes more types of monsters, etc. It’s something I wish Witchfire made more obvious, because I certainly wish I knew this before I invested in my actual stats and gear.

All of the treasure hunting and monster shooting I did on any given map was being watched by the Witch. With every mistake I made, the calamity meter rose in the top left corner, and when it’s filled completely, some terrible fate befell me. This was usually in the form of several assassins coming to slay me as my sanity slowly drained, but my understanding is that that is one of a few fates. The reverse GTA star meter that punishes you for being bad adds some pressure to already dangerous circumstances, but in a way that can feel like the game is snowballing against you regressively. And what “mistakes” are feels hit and miss. Sometimes it's pretty clear: being caught in a trap, failing a puzzle, or being seen by specific enemies. Other times it's simply getting hit, assumptively also by specific sorts of enemies but when things get really hectic, it's unclear who I need to dodge in order to not make a bad situation worse

Whether I successfully extracted from the map via one of the many possible portals on it, or was brutally murdered while trying, I ended back at my cliffside HQ to restock and regroup. Here I can spend my volatile witchfire - this game’s “souls” - to improve my stats or buy items from the strange merchant who I guess is my roommate? I can spend the gold that I found in chests or by turning in random (probably cursed) baubles I found at a demonic mirror that I can direct to research weapons, spells, or other gear that it will produce at random while I’m out witch hunting. It’s still early in development and all of these things are expanding gradually, but the grind outside of fighting all of the available bosses and maxing your Gnosis, is pretty limited at this point.

But Witchfire has all the right ingredients in its cauldron for a genre-blending brew that is both unique and fun. Gunplay is an enchanting mix of kinetic cowboy guns and eldritch wizardry that really sings against the dangerous and plentiful soldiers of the ever-present Witch. Some of what it asks you to do is opaque and obtuse, both in a “fun to figure out” and a “frustrating lack of info that would have made a few hours of my game easier” kind of way. There’s hours of possessed chests to cleanse, secret passages to find, and bosses to conquer, and though the endgame grind looks rather unappealing off on the horizon, I have plenty still left on my list to see and do, and would be first in line for the next update Witchfire summons as the game continues on it Early Access journey.