Witch Hazel

⠀

cute simple game, pretty quick play but enjoyable design :]

A nice looking game with very little substance. What is easily the strong suit of this game is its art and animations. The soft painterly artstyle with bright pastel colours is very charming and easy on the eyes. Additionally there was clearly effort put into the cute and entertaining animations. The singular song too is quite pleasant and fits the game nicely. However this is unfortunately all of the praise I can give. To start getting to the four corners of the square is a bit awkward as you have to figure out which key to press by yourself since it is not straightforward. It might have been better to incorporate the movement into the point&click gameplay instead or let the character wander freely altogether. Then there is no real challenge, you don’t exactly get any hints in the game as to how the plants need to be arranged to trigger their special effect. Yet practically all of these can be spotted in the trailer! Plus you can brute-force the solution anyways by filling every slot with the same type of plant and just repeating that strategy for each of the four plant types. Also the time limit barely reaches ten minutes in playtime and the game can easily be completed in one playthrough, so it is extremely short. While there is a small narrative backdrop to the game, the main focus is clearly on the gameplay which falls short due to all of these issues big and small. This is really more of a proof of concept rather than a full-fledged game and so I sadly cannot give it a recommendation. There is clearly effort put into this game and it is not without its merits, but to reach its full potential it would need some more room and time to grow.

Baştan çıkarıcı derecede rahatlatıcı, cadı temalı bir bahçe simülasyonu. Büyülü bahçenize bakmanın neşesine ve tuhaflığına dalın. Güçlerinizi geliştirin, büyülü bitkiler yetiştirin ve hatta belki de kendi cadı hayvan arkadaşınızı bulun.

no settings in the main menu, only after starting a new game. can't get an a+ for this now. if you can put your own names there, why not the how to play (as in, these are the non-rebindable controls) and options, stuff that's actually useful? and speaking of, why is the credits in 4:3 with black bars on the side? anyway, separate volumes and windowed mode, wasd for movement, space to water, left click to interact (i.e. harvest). arrows don't work, bad news for non-qwerty people, and the girl walks from corner to corner, which is a bit weird. could easily stop halfway and reach two plots. could also easily move faster. would need hotkeys and mouse wheel to select seeds from the hotbar and mouse should work for movement as well, plus middle click to water. there, 100% mousable and I don't even have a degree in gamedev. nor do these guys, hopefully. time's constantly ticking, plant seeds, water, wait a bit, harvest, repeat. no goals in sight but I made some cool gigaplants that exploded all over the place. I was hoping it'd happen with all the different seeds, megatree and whatnot, or combining them would result in different mutant plants, but sadly no. there's some stuff in the trailer I didn't experience, so I must've missed something. some gentle guidance, a notebook or something would've been good, as what little gameplay there is is too tedious to experiment or go through again. watering takes care of all 4 plots in an area, if only it had some magical upgrades to plant and harvest more than one at a time. but sadly no. and once the 3 in-game days pass, you get a tally of your plants and a sticker for hidden stuff found, the end. kudos to the artists, it looks really nice and animated well. the music matches the tone, one for daytime, another for the night. too bad the rest of the team weren't as good at coming up with an actual game and making sure it works properly. anybody involved with this project (teachers too) might want to skim this here guide I put together a while ago: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3329695276

A game with no goal/purpose is not a game. Teach your students some game design. This is pathetic. Only good thing about this is art.

I absolutely adore this game, the little detailed indicators showing that you're unlocking a secret function is awesome. The art is cute and I love the FILIPINO representation. Shout out LOLA!!! Also love the animation of Hazel planting seeds. This game is whimsical and fun.

Cute and well made, although, pretty superficial. It is a great startpoint but can't be just what it is. Maybe should go deeper in the story, add more gameplay features, idk, just saying... Wish the best to you, dev(s)!