Witch's Reign

Lucky me gets to write the first review for Witch's Reign. This is a very simplistic, bare bones top down "survival horror puzzle", whatever that's supposed to mean. What you really get is what seems like a mobile app where you can only see one square ahead, and in only one direction, so you need to move around an obscured grid/maze without getting eaten by baddies or falling in traps. This has been slapped together with Unity, the game engine that's been enabling mediocrity everywhere and giving Starbucks baristas delusions of grandeur since 2005. However, it's very unpolished, to the point I don't think this is an asset flip or a copy+paste of someone else's tutorial or game demo. Nor could I find it on app stores, although they have higher QA than Valve, so probably wouldn't permit this. So, I guess kudos to the developer for having a try. I think that's more likely the explanation, that someone wanted to make a game but didn't really know how, but put it on Steam anyway. I kind of wish Steam wasn't a dumping ground for half baked ideas, there's places like itch.io for that. On the other hand, benefit of the doubt erodes, as this was dumped very quickly into DailyIndieGame, known shovelware merchants. There's a completely insane $10 USD price tag... more than you can get Skyrim for. That's right, the developer seems to think this is worth more than Bioshock, Skyrim, or Far Cry 5. This is a world record attempt for most optimistic thinking ever. These are sure fire signs of a cash grab. Whatever the motivations, however, games must by judged by their own quality, and here, it's very, very low. Locked resolution and controls, bare minimum basic low poly style "art" (hey, at least it's not retro pixel crap, so that's immediately better than literally thousands of games on Steam), clunky, unpolished gameplay, and a general lack of "Fun" (being an important component of any game) are all lacking here. It's impossible to recommend this.

So first things first, this game is not worth the $10 price tag. That's a steep price for a game that is fairly short, at the time of this review. I got this game on sale for $3 and that is a pretty good price! This game is pretty good, it's got some solid puzzle ideas and I like the simple art design. It's a memory puzzle where you explore a dungeon of sorts and make sure you don't die to traps and monsters. You have a small line of sight due to a candle that can be blown out or lit again in order to trick the monsters onto the traps. It has a solid start, and I would love to see more of it. At the current time it's just about 16 (?) levels and it's meant to be replayed in a sort of "streak" system where you try to play through the whole game without dying. However, this has an issue where some of the levels are straight up trial-and-error. So haven't played a level in a while or first time playing a level? You will probably die. I wish there was some sort of warning to where the monsters are before you run into them. Honestly, these are minor issues overall, if you want a short good puzzle adventure, there are many worse games for sure! Just make sure to get it on sale, $10 is still a hard sell. Overall, recommend on sale!

played few levels, not that good don't care if other reviewers say it's good

It's stylish and imaginative, but it gets boring very quickly