The Knight Witch

The spell mechanic in this game is unique. Beside your base shooter, you can also cast one of the 3 currently equipped spells. Whenever you cast one, it is replaced with another random one from your deck. Meaning your 3 spell slots constantly change due to RNG in what they do and how much they cost all the while you are navigating bullet hell setting. So that's certainly a... choice... I applaud the devs trying something new but it falls flat on it's nose. I hated it despite giving it a chance to adapt to it. The metroidvania elements feel average at best (especially the map leaves a lot to be desired). Your moment is extremely sluggish and without a dash it all feels painful. Even once you acquire the dash it doesn't improve much because the game also ups the ante. Lack of fast travel means backtracking feels terrible too. I stopped playing it since it just wasn't fun, the RNG just adds frustration to the mix, and it was a stressful chore to make progress. For anyone interested in this game, ignore the fact it is a metroidvania. If you love bullet hell games AND you are ok with extra challenge of RNG spell system screwing you over constantly you might like this a lot. I can see how some people would love it but I couldn't stand it. On the other hand, if you are wanting to play this because it's a metroidvania like myself and can "put up" with bullet hell, give this one a skip. 4/10

Hello guys, this could be another great game if devs would listen to community. But sadly they decide they know better, hence the game inpopularity. lets start from the begining 1. No dash for couple hours into game, in this type of game? seriously? 2. Spell system is annoying and dont give you nor fun nor willingnes to use it. a) its random, and totaly unreliable. b) fly around during combat to harvest mana that is RANDOMLY drops from enemies. Why not allow to regenerate mana from damage is beyond me. 3. Backtracking is another horror game itself. Game have decent amount of secret rooms and abilitites you need to traverse them. Maps are very simplictic and dont allow you to put marks anywhere. and the most fun part, you dont get to fast travel between save points, you have to traverse whole levels to get to that pesky secret you saw in the begining of the game and get the ability to get to it just now. 4. Not so bad by itself, but with all things combined, your character hitbox feels like you are operating a tractor, not a human being, really i got hit by walls, enemies, explosions SO MANY times that were far from my character. Very frustraiting expirience, when i first saw the game i thought " wow! its looks incredible combat as well look cool, and FLYING ALL THE TIME! AWESOME!" 6 hours into the game and i almoust deleted it twice.

This is a tentative thumb down from me. As a metroidvania, The Knight Witch is competently made. A fair story, good music, gorgeous visuals, it's also pretty hard, though usually for the wrong reasons. It gets a lot of things right. However, it also gets some small, but very crucial things wrong. Movement speed is atrociously slow, with no dash other than a small teleport that is not quite satisfying to chain. This is fine in combat, not so much when you have to move through the entire game from one corner of the other, due to the rather unfortunate decision of forfeiting entirely the ability to fast travel. The spell card system, while novel at first, becomes increasingly annoying as the game progresses, giving you more and more spells to use, but not enough ways to manage your mana. This, coupled with the fact that the spells you get are randomly pulled from your deck means that you constantly have to steal a glance to the corner of your screen to figure what are your options, and if you even have the mana to use them. In a bullet hell, looking away from the bullets is the last thing I want to do. This would have been infinitely better if spells were based on cooldowns rather than mana, and their uses were fixed and bound to a specific key/input instead of a random assortment every rotation. I understand this is by design, but I find that design choice rather irksome, and has drastically reduced my enjoyment in the game. Another issue is enemy health. Most enemies tend to have more health than they should, slowing you down or forcing you to use your limited mana - which you will have to grind with basic shots on the next enemy, in order to keep the pace of the game at an acceptable level. The random card system once again proves to be a mistake, as in any other metroidvania you'd know to dispatch a quick enemy and move through to great satisfaction, but since you may not have anything you can use on hand, more often than not the moment is wasted as a lost opportunity. These three things alone are massive blemishes in what could have been a really good metroidvania, and something worth playing and replaying many times. I usually enjoy to complete these games to 100%, or 112% when the game allows, but I don't think I have it in me to suffer the very, very slow backtracking and exploration in this one. Edit: I managed to get through the slog of the mid-late game. Enabling the infinite mana cheat makes the challenge fights bearable, and by the end of the game you unlock mana regeneration, which makes the rest of the content actually, dare I say, fun without cheats. I had some good times in this game, but there was a lot of tedium inbetween, and simply puzzling design decisions - which is why I can't recommend it - but it always sucks to bash on an indie, and what's clearly a passion project with developers that really cared to bring a story together. I do hope, however, that the team learns from their mistakes and improves on their next projects.

I don't regret buying this game. Got it for 80% off and it's certainly worth that price. I wouldn't pay full price for this though. For a longer review, read on. About 4 hours in. It's alright so far. Fun little shmup. I don't mind the 3 card, random system as much as other reviewers. It's not difficult at all for me to navigate the enemies, bullets, and know which spell cards I could use at a given time. It would be a lot more fun if there were more mana available though since I find that I don't use the spell cards nearly as much as I would like due to lack of mana. There are these "cheats" you can activate that helps with that if you wanna play the game that way. My biggest gripe is traversal. As a metroidvania style system, there's a bunch of backtracking involved if you wanna go get items and other stuff in earlier areas after getting a new ability. You can't mark your map to remind yourself of where there were inaccessible things. You can't teleport between beacons or even teleport back to your "home" location. It's actually pretty annoying. One example: I had to go back to the first area of the game to rescue a dog. To do that, you have to go through like 10 rooms. After you get the dog, you go through the same 10 rooms just to go back to the "home" location. It's annoying enough to make me not want to recommend the game.

The Knight Witch feels like one of those games where there's a really good idea but the game itself wasn't flushed out well to match the idea. To it's credit, The mechanics are good. To me, the issue lies more with their quality of life for the game play experience and the bad difficulty balance decisions they made. Having a metroidvania that's also styled as a bullet hell with free movement (flying) is something I've never encountered before and it's honestly really fun. The downside is that it's harder to limit where the player can and cannot go in typical metroidvania exploring fashion aside from the typical dash. The other mechanics they have like the anvils and electro towers are good for their purpose of blocking secrets and progression off till later so all in all good design. Combat is also great, both as the player and the enemies. There's a good balance of enemy variety and also general power scaling as you go to different areas. The downside is that because of the bullet hell nature and enemy firing patterns there do feel like moments where it's impossible to dodge all the attacks but I'd give it a pass. As the player, there's an interesting split on whether you want to focus on your attacks or spells. Although part of me is annoyed they didn't incorporate that into the story. Meanwhile, there are many elements to this games design that makes it feel incredibly annoying to progress. For one, many of the boss fights are positioned such that you can't save and heal just before encountering them but instead you often have to go through several rooms, wasting time and sometimes losing health or mana. This often leads to you not facing the boss at your strongest (though I do feel ambushes serve as an exception). Among those rooms, many of them feel unnecessarily large and even empty. I imagine this is to try to have players spend more time in rooms despite having free movement. However, doing this just makes it feel like you're pacing back and forth instead of exploring. Finally, many of the boss fights don't feel well balanced and have what I would consider unfair mechanics. The biggest example of this is that in one of the boss fights the boss will constantly and randomly teleport. So there will be times where I just get hit by the boss that didn't project where it's going and there was nothing I could do to prevent it. The player also has a pretty low health pool and unlike most metroidvania's, you don't have much of a way to heal during or right after combat (unless you use cheats). Overall, I'm back and forth but I do think the creative mechanics and premise outweigh the tediousness and unbalance the game occasionally has. That being said I don't think it's worth 20$ so if you want to try playing a bullet hell metroidvania then I'd recommend buying it on sale like I did.

A lot of other commenters have the right of it- the game is fun to play and has some unique ideas but it feels like it's missing some minor tweaks that would take it from being a great game to a spectacular one. Give it a try for yourself!

This might seem a little spiteful, however It truly is one of my biggest pet peeves when a game will lock you out of content without ever explaining why. This game has a bunch of solid things going for it. Solid visuals, Music is fine. Story is fine. Its combat a unique blend of metroidvania and shmup mechanics. The basic gameplay is pretty solid. The special ability/magic/ card system leaves a little to be desired. You get a hand of cards (3) from a deck of cards (5 at first but goes up to 8) and they cost mana to use, and will randomly shuffle back into your hand to pull from. I wish I could opt out of being forced to use MORE cards when you level up your mage abilities as it seems harder to randomly get the cards I want. Exploration is decent. However the fact that you can get locked out of 100%ing the game and missing side quests etc is truly a frustrating thing especially when I had to go to dig through forums to understand why, and I can tell you many other people did the same thing as me. I didn't enjoy the game enough to want to go back through a second time so I'll just be leaving this one incomplete. I will change this to a thumbs up if they ever revisit this and allow you to replay ambush scenes and maybe put in an explanation of WHY I might need to (put a little node in ever ambush scene after you beat it allowing you to replay it. And on node, put like a star over it to let the player know if they successfully completed it and got the item) Its a super easy fix to relieve a ton of frustration.

Nice game! Good controls and satisfiyng feeling just from movement of the witch)

It's got the movement and maps like Ori and the Blind forest, but the combat is fast and makes you think kind of like Crosscode. Very very solid game so far, nice work!!!

Cool