The Button Witch

A lovely, whimsical adventure game with tons of puzzles to solve! The spell-casting system for environmental puzzles is a nice addition to the standard point-and-click, inventory + logic type puzzles. This game is cute as a button and I enjoyed the 10 hours I spent working through the puzzles and getting the best ending. My only real complaint is that the magic system is a little bit clunky at times -- if you use the keyboard to move around (which I found more comfortable in this particular game) then you have to move from the arrow keys to the mouse to cast spells. There were also a couple times when targeting with a spell was a bit finicky, but most of the time, it worked well. Definitely recommended to those who enjoy cute games, point-and-click adventures, and puzzle games in general! It should be more well known. It's right up my alley and I found it entirely by accident!

To be honest, I'm not sure I even knew what I was backing on Kickstarter with this one, but turns out it was basically a point-and-click adventure game made with RPG Maker systems? It was a whimsical, fun game. You play as a cute witch, which is always a good thing, picking up and combining items, exploring a magical mansion with your puzzle-solving expertise. It did have some puzzles with kind of poor presentation, but not quite the moon logic of some of the 90's adventures. Most of the time, the built-in hint system was enough when I didn't catch on, but I did have to reference a walkthrough to find a few solutions. So aside from those issues, which are basically a genre staple, it's a solid little game. Definitely impressive for something made by a team of two, and worth giving a try. There are multiple endings, but I've only seen the "best" ending so far. Oh, and there are in-game achievements, but no Steam achievements, in case that matters.

What a delight! I purchased The Button Witch purely for the graphics, and anticipated a standard point-and-click, puzzler, but a tiered puzzle system (that is one layer of spells usage, one layer of usual type game puzzles), and pretty darling world building has made this game a rad experience. Awesome game to be snowed in with over the weekend.

A cute pixel art game with heavy point and click adventure elements. The puzzles are pretty tricky and definitely not a walk in the park. Recommended for people who like to work their way through problems until they finally become clear with a few extra clues!

Edit: As of v.1.07 quite a few bugs, both small and large have been squashed, and I can now say that I do recommend it, with the caveat that people who are deaf or have hearing problems may want to skip it due to a puzzle requiring sounds if you don't want to use a walkthrough or attempt to bruteforce it. Added a few notes on things that I was able to confirm have been fixed. The original review below is in regards to v.1.06 of the game. Review: The game sounds great on paper, and while I enjoyed a lot of it, [strike]there are still more things going wrong for it sadly.[/strike] there's a couple of things to note in the bad stuff section. Good things: - Story - while somewhat basic and at times trying too hard to be funny without getting there, is good. Young witch needs to apprentice with master sorcerer who for some reason has loads and loads and loads of puzzles in his mansion that she needs to solve. - Graphics - are cute! Insanely so. Most of the things in the game seem to be hand-made as well, which is really nice. - Puzzles - some actually requiring thought, even if there are a few too many math-y puzzles. While I enjoy them, I understand that far from everyone does. Bad things: - Spelling errors and weird sentence structures at times. For example: at one point you're told a person CAN walk, which is sad, because they can't get to the other side of the garden... it's supposed to be CAN'T. There are a few of these sprinkled throughout the game. [strike]- Bugs are mostly graphical ones thankfully, sadly there's _a lot_ of them. In the first 10 minutes I had found 4 different ones. Think my favourite one was where the game put my head through a lamppost for some very grim imagery.[/strike] [b]Most if not all fixed as of v.1.07 from what I could tell.[/b] - There's also at least one softlock and a few other minor bugs that were annoying, but at least the minor ones weren't game breaking. [b](Potentially fixed in v.1.07, didn't have a save nearby to test.)[/b] - The other thing that lowers the score a bit is accessibility. One of the puzzles requires you to replay the same music that's being played. While you can hear the music on the same screen as you have to play it, that still makes it near impossible for anyone that's hard of hearing or deaf to actually finish the game. - And on the topic of accessibility, you more or less need to use keyboard + mouse to play the game. It is possible to rebind controller mappings, possibly requiring separate software to help, but you wouldn't be able to aim spells, as those are based on where the mouse pointer is, instead of moving a square or something around the screen to target things. Sounds like a minor thing, but it actually makes it more annoying to play. [strike]Final notes: If bugs are fixed and some puzzles tweaked a bit, this would easily become a recommandation, but I sadly can't recommend it as is.[/strike]

To be honest I didn't expect a lot of this game. The reason was that it just doesn't look as polished/beautiful as other indie games I love. Don't get me wrong: I don't mean the artworks. I mean the character models and so on. Now, the truth is the game is great/better than expected. It doesn't compete with my favorite games but made fun from the beginning. I love that you need some logical thinking and have to understand sequences of numbers for some puzzles. Furthermore, you really need to observe the environment and the rooms you visit to solve most puzzles. And especially the hint button was often useful if you missed something or lost track. So I'd say if you are into puzzle games, you can give it a try. Thus, my recommendation.

Really fun magic game. Support indie! I participated in the Kickstarter for this game. It’s much better than I imagined! Puzzles logically make sense.