Witchfire Preview

Witchfire is a roguelike FPS developed by The Astronauts (The Vanishing of Ethan Carter) and has just released its first iteration of Early Access.

Witchfire's story is very simple: you play as a "Prayer", an essentially immortal witch-hunter tasked with saving the kingdom. In its current state it doesn't go much deeper than that, but it works well for setting up the main plot points and the world. The story isn't going to be the prime driving force for this game. In a similar fashion to most roguelikes, the gameplay loop is what's going to keep you coming back. This consists of going on expeditions into the world — with six maps planned for the full release — and defeating the witch's main familiars, and presumably the witch herself further down the line. Each map is a relatively large open space, with randomly located events dotted around each run.

Throughout these expeditions, you will find treasure and volatile witchfire — essentially XP — and you will either escape with your loot or fight the boss. Volatile witchfire can be spent on upgrading a multitude of different stats, from health to stamina and a few others. However, this is a double-edged sword, as levelling up your stats also increases the power of the witch, adding new traps, enemies, and events to the maps. To combat this, you have access to Research, which allows you to unlock a wide amount of new items. These consist of new weapons and spells, items to upgrade your weapons, and more, that progress slowly as you spend time within the world. Guns and spells also level up, except in their case, you have to complete specific challenges with each one. These upgrades unlock specific abilities, which really emphasise the strengths of weapons; for example, the hand cannon abilities highly emphasise accuracy and critical hits, while the shotgun plays into pure damage skills.

Combat is one of the leading aspects of this game, and it feels incredible; guns are punchy and sound fantastic without all seeming overdone. You are able to carry two different weapons alongside a demonic weapon — a special, highly powered weapon, of which only one exists currently — along with two different spells. This allows for some very fun gameplay, being able to have different weapons and spells for unique situations. Spells mainly provide utility, such as the Shockwave, which stuns enemies in front of you, or the Iron Cross, which shocks all nearby enemies and keeps them locked into place. This feels great to get used to, being able to combo spells and weapons into a very nice and satisfying system. There is also a stamina system, which powers both your dodges and your sprinting. Killing enemies without taking damage sequentially increases the amount of stamina you have up to double. When you max this out, you go into focus; while in focus, whenever you dodge, you can see a soul sigil, a weak spot on enemies which instantly stuns the associated enemy when shot. Taking damage, however, will instantly reduce your stamina to its base amount, making damage feel incredibly punishing. In my time with the game, I did find the balancing on the stamina system and the volatile witchfire system to be a little annoying but not game-ruining.

Visually, the whole game is beautiful, with a relatively simple but effective visual style. There were some minor performance issues in my playtime but nothing game-ruining; I did have a couple of moments where the game softlocked, but no hard crashes. The soundscape is a little disappointing in its current state but not atrocious, as much of the music feels somewhat uninspired.

Witchfire is an interesting take on the roguelike genre, with satisfying gunplay and incredibly unique meta-progression.