Witch stocks in recent times have massively improved. Typically depicted as gross, green-skinned crones, nowadays you can find them portrayed as anime waifus with cottage-core vibes, cool attire, and just having a witchin’ good time. Witchspire is a game that has all of the above, letting you create and play as your own anime witch (or wizard if you’d prefer).
Developed by Envar Games and published by Envar Publishing, Witchspire is an adventure survival game where you play as an apprentice witch. You can even play with friends and create your own coven. The game bears a lot of similarities with other titles like Palworld and V-Rising, with a cute artstyle reminiscent of Genshin Impact, but with plenty of elements that stand on their own, plus with great music to boot!
Bear in mind, the game is still in early access, so what I say here may change in its final release.
A review key was provided by Envar Studio.
Schools, Spells, & Familiars
The game begins with character creation, whereby you design your character and chose their respective school of magic. As the game is still in early access, much of the character design options are not fully implemented, with things like hair, facial designs, and available voices still clearly limited. However, despite these restrictions, there’s still a sufficient amount of choices to make your character look really good! Though, I’d wish they’d give us the option to remove hats in order to fully see our hairstyle.
The last step in character creation is choosing your school of magic. There are 6 to choose from, each with their own unique playstyle. Choosing a school also determines your starting weapon: the spellblade or the wand, which you can swap later. Spellblades are like lightsabers, though their colour and spells differ depending on your school of magic. Wands work similarly, but have a different look when casting spells. For me, I went with the Foreteller school, which are described as being divination savants. Then, I swapped over to a wand after the tutorial.
Plus, what are witches without familiars? You can choose your familiar in the tutorial segment, with each familiar having their own respective moveset. Likewise, these familiars can also level up alongside you. I chose the dragon, as it fit the dark colours of the school of magic I chose (yes, I’m pretty basic). Each level up grants you points you can spend in your Luminary to increase your familiar’s stats, as well as unlock their starting spells. Speaking of which…
Another major aspect of the game is the Luminary, which somewhat remind me of the constellations in Skyrim. Functioning as your skill tree, each skill branches into another, with some locked behind other skills. For example, Sanguine (life-steal) requires increasing your max health and crit-rate; two separate branches, but both of which lead to Sanguine.
However, I’m rather disappointed with the lack of school identity. It was weird to play with a friend and see that although he chose another school, I was able to use the same spells as he did. Still, perhaps this might be because we’re still early in the game, and school-specific spells might come later. I do hope the devs make this more apparent in the full release, as I would like to see more distinct differences between the schools of magic.
An example of how this could possibly work is, the Wildroots witches and wizards could be better at gathering flora and fauna for crafting or cooking. Some schools could be focused on damage dealing, others healing or buffing. Understandably, for solo players, this might make the game tougher, so it’s just food for thought.
Home Is Where The Hearth Is
It’d be silly of a survival game to not have base crafting! Crafting in the game is a simple task, while gathering is the tedious part. Crafting, like in most survival games, is the first thing you’re tasked with, with the trusty crafting table/workbench being the very first thing you craft. To craft, simply press the assigned button, then select the item you want and place it down. Don’t like where it’s at? Destroy it and place it somewhere else.
While crafting, you’ll turn into an astral projection, flying around to find the best spots to place your item. This makes things easier for you to move around to build your home. I honestly like it as it helps to speed the crafting process up. It’s also more convenient as you don’t have to scale anything to reach high places as well.
Verdict
While it is still in early access, Witchspire certainly has all the necessary elements to be an amazing multiplayer survival game. When it’s finally released in full, I’m sure it’ll be a blast to play. The schools of magic certainly needs some exclusivity, as otherwise, choosing one during character creation would feel pointless. However, as we have a long way to go before full release, maybe it’ll be implemented then. Till then, I’m definitely looking forward to its final form!
Witchspire is out now for PC in Early Access via Steam.
Keep up to date with Witchspire by signing up to the official newsletter, joining the Discord, or following on Instagram, Facebook, Bluesky, and TikTok.
