Witchfire

I just bought Witchfire and, honestly, words cannot describe how ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ good it is. It absolutely nails the dark European atmosphere: ruined villages, forests, crumbling castles, abandoned churches, enormous decaying towers looming over the landscape—and then throws the Catholic Church into the middle of it, ostensibly as the “good guys”, albeit with moral and theological problems so profound that I suspect a substantial portion of the Vatican hierarchy may ultimately be going to Hell. The lore is fantastic. Witches are real. They’re immortal, or close enough to it, and humanity has apparently been fighting—and, on balance, losing—a war against them for centuries. They’ve conquered enormous stretches of the known world, exterminating or driving out the ordinary population and replacing conventional civilisation with armies of undead and supernatural horrors that can seemingly be resurrected or summoned again and again. The Church, despite having more men, better logistics and vastly greater conventional resources, has therefore encountered the awkward military problem that killing the enemy is considerably less useful when the enemy refuses to remain dead. Its solution is wonderfully Catholic in the most Trench Crusade imaginable sense: declare witchcraft an abomination before God, then quietly employ some defecting witches, steal their magic, take particularly appalling condemned sinners, kill them, resurrect them with Witchfire, make them effectively immortal, teach them to use witchcraft, hand them enormous ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ guns and send them back out to kill the bad witches. You play one of these men, a “Preyer”, who appears to be essentially an undead supernatural penal commando. Ordinary people are apparently terrified of Preyers and suspect that they might literally be demons; the priesthood, by contrast, seems remarkably relaxed about the whole thing. Presumably once you’ve watched the Pope personally authorise enough necromantic witch-powered murder machines, you stop asking difficult questions. And the brilliant part is that the gameplay actually reflects the lore. You venture into a Witch’s territory, kill the supernatural creatures animated by her Witchfire, steal that Witchfire, retreat to an apparently unassailable hermitage that she cannot reach, and use her stolen power to make yourself permanently stronger before going back out to do it again. From the Witch’s perspective, you must be absolutely ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ terrifying. She can kill you. You come back. She kills you again. You come back. Eventually you return carrying a shotgun and magical powers you acquired by eating her army. The combat is also, well, wow. It reminds me of Doom (2016), except I think I actually prefer it. It has the same wonderful sense of speed, aggression and enormous weapons making horrible things explode, without becoming the irritating puzzle-shooter that Doom Eternal occasionally became: No, idiot, you must kill THIS demon with THIS weapon while standing HERE, and by the way we’ve locked all the doors and turned this room into a multiplayer arena. Witchfire does almost the opposite. Combat is fast and tactical, the guns have tremendous heft, and enemies are dangerous enough that you genuinely have to think—but you decide how to fight them. Snipe them from a distance. Charge in with a shotgun. Freeze some enormous bastard with magic and then blast him in the face. Retreat behind cover. Run away entirely, regroup, and come back later with a larger gun and a grievance. It is challenging without confusing “challenging” with “making the player repeat the same boss fight 47 times until he has memorised the precise millisecond at which the enormous glowing bastard raises his left eyebrow.” Exploration is equally good. You’re not simply wandering around looking for Crafting Component (7/25). The reward is often simply discovering somewhere extraordinary: a wrecked galleon, a cave, an abandoned settlement, a ruined church, some vast decaying structure in the distance that makes you wonder what the hell happened here. The world constantly implies that you’re walking through the remains of a civilisation rather than a level designer’s obstacle course. And finally—and I cannot stress how revolutionary this apparently is in 2026—it is a single-player game. Actually single-player. Not “single-player” in the modern sense of technically you can play it alone, although we’ve designed absolutely everything around four teenagers shouting at one another through headsets. I mean single-player. If one of your children has a tantrum, the telephone rings, somebody comes to the door, or you suddenly discover that at 43 years old your bladder has betrayed you, Witchfire contains an extraordinary piece of cutting-edge technology: A ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ PAUSE BUTTON. You press Escape. The game stops. You go to the toilet. You come back. You press Escape again. THE GAME CONTINUES FROM WHERE YOU LEFT IT. I have absolutely no idea why so many developers apparently regard this technology as having been lost with the Library of Alexandria, but The Astronauts have somehow rediscovered it. Which brings me to my only reservation—and I see absolutely no reason to expect this to happen because the lore they’ve already written is superb: Please, please, please don’t ♥♥♥♥ up the story. Because barely anybody—from tiny indie developers to studios with budgets roughly equivalent to the GDP of Belgium—seems capable of writing one anymore. Take Assassin’s Creed Shadows. Great setting. Gorgeous world. Excellent gameplay. To be fair, even a strong opening act. And then? Dull as ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ dishwater. Characters I couldn’t bring myself to care about pursuing people I couldn’t remember for reasons I’d forgotten through a plot that felt as though everyone involved had collectively decided that the Sengoku period simply wasn’t inherently interesting enough. It is a story that I am reasonably confident could have been soundly thrashed by asking ChatGPT version 1: “Write me an Assassin’s Creed story set during the Sengoku period. There should probably be some assassins.” Witchfire already has everything it needs. The atmosphere is superb. The combat is superb. The progression is interesting. The world is mysterious without being incomprehensible. The lore is genuinely fascinating, and it understands the enormously underrated principle that not explaining absolutely ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ everything immediately makes me want to know more. So please don’t give the Preyer a wisecracking companion. Don’t reveal that the Witch is actually misunderstood and everyone just needed to sit down and discuss their feelings. Don’t spend forty minutes explaining that the Catholic Church is Bad, Actually, when you’ve already created the infinitely more interesting situation in which the Church may genuinely be humanity’s only hope while simultaneously committing heresies so spectacular that someone in Rome presumably has an entire filing cabinet labelled “DO NOT SHOW GOD.” Just tell the story this extraordinary world already deserves. Because if they land that? Witchfire might be something very special indeed.