Witch Strandings is presented as a kind of Death Strandings. Assuming the role of “point of light”, you must help lift the curse of a witch from a dark and mysterious forest by cutting paths through the forest to reach the isolated animals, before handing these animals a series of supplies to cure both them and the forest. great.
It’s great to see developers looking to craft Hideo Kojima’s most unusual game, but beyond a broad structural similarity, Witch Strandings doesn’t look much like Death Stranding. Instead, it looks more like Wilmot’s Warehouse without the warehouse, an overly simple tile-handling game that doesn’t really give you a chance to evolve into something interesting.
Seen from a top-down perspective, Witch Strandings’ “forest” is built entirely of colored tiles, resembling the bathroom floor of a nightclub specializing in UV parties. Tiles of different colors represent different types of terrain, including benign tiles like mud and moss, along with more dangerous tiles like water and “poisonous thorns.” The most dangerous of all are the “hexagonal” tiles, which if deviated from, will deplete your health faster than a hemlock smoothie.
Witch jams. Credit: Strange Scaffold.
Every day of the game involves looking for ways to navigate this forest, passing your share of light through the gaps of dangers with elegant mouse movements. Scattered around the surroundings are items that can help you get through. For example, the “haunted mycelium” can be removed from the ground and placed on other tiles, creating a purple jelly pool that will remove the hexagon from the surrounding tiles as long as the mycelium is in place. By placing multiple mycelium deposits, you can establish narrow paths through the game’s throbbing hexagonal barriers. It’s a bit like Moses separating the Red Sea, only you use mushrooms instead of the power of God.
As you explore, you will periodically come across animals with colorful names, all of which need your help. You may come across a hungry loved one, a thirsty bear, or even a squirrel named Chad Shakespeare who is “disturbed,” probably because his name is “Chad Shakespeare”. These negative state effects can be undone by delivering a suitable item to this animal, which will not only make the creature feel better, but will also bring you one step closer to relieving the curse.
By the way, you can also choose to kill these animals if you wish, by handing them a different item that is in a specific area of the forest. You may be wondering why someone wants to kill cute forest creatures. But I admit that I have been tempted on several occasions, because some of them are – and I will use the technical term here – fucking needs. The needs of the animals are randomly assigned with each passing day, which has the effect of making them seem totally arbitrary. There was a bear that I found to be constantly hungry, even though it lived in a forest of abundant trees. Choose them yourself, Winnie-the-Pooh! I don’t feed you by hand like a Roman emperor.
Witch jams. Credit: Strange Scaffold.
For a game with such a simple presentation, Witch Strandings creates a surprisingly temperate atmosphere. Areas such as the Flooded Bend, which is subject to perpetual rain, accurately convey the feeling of stepping on a forest on a humid autumn day. Then there are more sinister areas like the Killing Fields, where the soil fills with dried bodies as you go deeper into its deteriorated landscape. These bodies are just sketches of pixels of rolled skeletons, but nonetheless, there is a powerful sense of foreboding in place.
The construction of the world is favored with quality writing, which adds fragments of background history to every element, character, and ruined structure you find. Pastoral descriptions are particularly strong, conveying the age and ruinous beauty of both the forest and the civilization on which it has apparently grown. Below that, however, is an underground stream of irreverent madness that is less welcome. Not because it’s not fun, but because Witch Strandings is such a compact experience that it really has no room for this duality of tone.
This leads to the broader problem with Witch Strandings, namely that the game is too mechanically rudimentary for this idea of bringing a forest back to life to be satisfactory. Neither moving nor interacting with the world are especially immersive or attractive, which means that transporting food through the forest like the Deliveroo animal has no sense of weight or importance. Death Stranding was a game about creating memorable trips through its complex hiking simulation and its rich layers of systems that allow you to establish elaborate logistics networks. It was how Kojima Productions executed this concept that made it fun and engaging, not the concept itself.
Witch jams. Credit: Strange Scaffold.
There is also a clear lack of challenge in handling game chips. You only need to establish narrow paths through dangerous areas once, and it never evolves beyond the basic “X affects Y” interaction. All progression is achieved by making deliveries, which quickly become repetitive because Witch Strandings has no way of making your travels amazing, varied, or dynamic.
Here there is potential to create a more complicated puzzle game, with combinations of increasingly elaborate tiles to defeat different types of evil magic that affect the forest, leading to a transformative effect on the environment. Maybe one type of token decreases one curse, but aggravates another, forcing you to think carefully about where and how to place it. That’s not to say Witch Strandings should do that. It’s just a suggestion rather than a proper mechanical hook.
Witch Strandings is not a total failure. His minimalism experiment manages to create a temperate forest atmosphere from a few precious parts. However, mechanically, it takes on too big a goal and, in its oversimplification, loses the essence of what made Kojima’s game attractive. I’m sorry, Chad Shakespeare, but from now on you’ll have to fend for yourself. I have just become your pastoral postman.
Witch Strandings will be released on July 7 for PC.
The verdict
Witch Strandings is a daring experiment to build a barebones version of the central loop of Death Stranding. Bold, but ultimately useless.
Pros
- Well written
- Advanced platform
Cons
- Tonally inconsistent
- Oversimplified systems
- It does not make the most of its potential