There is a big wide world of survival games available these days, whether you prefer a gritty and realistic take, a fantasy setting like Enshrouded, mythological ones with Valheim, or Palworld because it has Pokémon-like creatures in it. It means that there’s no shortage of games waiting for you to chop down trees and refine materials – two of the most uninteresting tasks in a game – which is why any game that can make that more engaging is worth checking out. Enter Witchspire.
Witchspire is another survival game, sure, but this time it’s magical. I don’t mean a bit of magic here and there, but a constant stream of magic. Literally everything you do is magic, from attacking enemies with wands and spellblades, to chopping down trees with summoned sickles, or mining using ethereal pickaxes. You use magic to do everything short of magicking away your number twos, which speeds a lot of the boring stuff up. That, to me, is the key to being a more interesting survival game at this point.
The other big draw here is the fact that you get a lot of little companions to run around with. You can capture most of the enemies you fight, as long as their soul decides to linger, and each of them can not only be levelled up, but they can also have different rarities, give passive buffs, and help you out at your base by cutting down trees, speeding up crafting, and more.
It’s not like that’s all that Witchspire is doing right. Despite being in Early Access, this game is absurdly pretty. The magical aesthetic is just incredibly easy on the eyes, with even the enemies being kind of cute to look at, despite their attempts to end your life. While you are sort of set loose in this beautiful world, you are given tasks fairly consistently to push you forwards into different areas and tasks.
Your main goal, to begin with, is to find other people. You’ve awoken from a dream about being chosen, and that’s nice and all, but everyone else is gone. You find traces of them here and there in the form of magical diaries, but not much else. It makes for a fun little mystery, and while it’s not reinventing storytelling, it’s enough to justify running about and building up a base or two.
It all comes together to make a highly-enjoyable single-player experience, but you can play in co-op too. This is an easy way to elevate a lot of games, but there is sadly something a little bit lacking, in my opinion. While you can fairly easily hop into a game with a friend, the character you use is entirely tied to that world, not to your own account. It means that you’re unable to use it otherwise, and on top of that, the chests you can find only give loot to whoever opens them, giving this adorable co-op experience a weird competitive spike. These issues can certainly be overcome as the game gets updated, and I’d like for them to at least take inspiration from Pokémon Pokopia, where co-op player inventories can be accessed and reclaimed by the host from a central cache. Otherwise your gaming sessions will forever end with co-op buddies spewing their items all over the floor.
Despite that bugbear, Witchspire is an enjoyable and incredibly pretty survival game that’s doing a lot of cool stuff. The ability to fly around on a broom, for example, makes for some fantastic exploration, but so does the ability to unlock multiple jumps, your cool teleport dash, and some clever geometry too. This is definitely one worth keeping an eye on, and if you like the vibe, then getting in early could be a great shout too.
