Mika and The Witch's Mountain

Played on steamdeck: i recommend disabling the depth of field setting to reduce pixelated fuzz around objects and improve visuals. Otherwise, runs solid. I'm torn. If I could give this game a neutral rating, I would... and only because how much you get out of this game is highly dependent on audience. You wouldn't review a children's picture book and criticize it for lacking depth and length, right? And that is exactly what Mika is. I would recommend this for young children getting into gaming. I know my 3 year old niece loved it and sat with me telling me to fly and catch the wind and was wowed by the whole thing for awhile. This whole game is a bit of a slimmed down Zelda aesthetic meets Kiki's Delivery Service (and other Ghibli films). You have a cute cast, doing fetch quest style tasks on a broom, and exploring around and collecting things and doing some puzzles. The plot overall is a nice cozy morals story. The villian is cartoonishly bad. It's all very gentle and non-violent, too. But its short. To the point it feels like there could have been a lot more of the story to go and time spent with this cast. Aside from that, my main gripes are with some gameplay elements and issues: - Movement controls are annoying and imprecise. I got frustratwd repeating the jumps over and over because its not easy to aim or control your falls or I'd go sliding off the edges. With the speed increase of the last broom, I was even feeling motion sick from it. - Many elements are not well explained out and several times you are not given direction where the next main story thing is and have to explore til you stumble upon it. - There are some bugs that can reset progress back or even require a new game start to reset and try and trigger again. Not too many. The only one I personally ran into was that the wind dungeon reset its exterior orb and when I tried to enter do it, the 1st chamber door was still sealed. Anyways, like, if you really just want to have a chill time being a delivery witch or have a young kid interested in games, I'd recommend it on discount. =========================== If you do get it, a couple tips: Deliveries are not all as fragile as they make them out. If they have heart pips, just don't zero them out, otherwise you can even splat-fall with any of the other objects and just pick them back up fine. They can wet if they don't have the icon indicating not to get wet. Only the ones that trigger a countdown timer (frozen goods mostly) are time reliant, so no need to rush. For the frog achievement, use the fish bowls to gather them. After you get the last broom during the MSQ, your map menu gets a command to show how many of the collectables you have collected in each area.