The start of the year is always a bit barren in the world of indie gaming. Today, I’m looking at a little title from developer lightUP and publisher Ratalaika Games. Witch Rise is a cocktail of several old-school genres, but does the mix work?

“Witch Rise tells the tale of a sweet, innocent young girl who was turned into a piglet by the cruel Fallen Witch. Now, our heroine must embark on a quest to overcome the curse and change back into to her old self again. During your journey you’ll need to find the four magic staffs in order defeat the Fallen Witch, and thus recover your human body.”

Blending an early FPS like Wolfenstein 3D with an action/adventure such as The Legend of Zelda and yeah, throw in a little Metroid too, and you have the basics of what Witch Rise is. A game with some great ideas, but the low budget and low price may explain several of its shortcomings. Speaking (or writing) in very general terms, Witch Rise is a very interesting title. Much like Wolfenstein 3D, you run around a pixel art map, opening doors, collecting loot and killing enemies. The graphic-style is very The Legend of Zelda and with just a quick glance, you could be mistaken into thinking that someone has just put Zelda into a first-person perspective. Then there is a lot of exploration, backtracking and getting to previously inaccessible areas, a wee bit Metroid-like.

With the old-school gameplay comes a lot of old-school annoyances. The controls feel very stiff, the map can be confusing and difficult to navigate and there’s a very short playtime. You can 100% this is around 2 hours or less. There is some fun here with Witch Rise, but while playing, you just can’t help but think that things could’ve been so much better. If you are used to playing older games (I am), then you can get used to the stiff controls pretty quickly. Having played vanilla Wolfenstein 3D recently, this game felt very familiar. The map is split into many separate rooms, and they have a basic rectangular shape, but with various hazards and enemies. Each room will have one, or more doors on the walls, so you have a simple north, south, east and west navigation. While the basic compass-point navigation is simple, finding your way around is awkward as the map screen is tiny and lacks details. You have to keep bringing up the tiny map just to ensure that you are heading the right way as you go from room to room.

Combat can feel a little cumbersome and when you get hit, your character slightly spins, which disorientates you from a first-person view and throws you off your navigation… so you have to bring up the tiny map (again) to make sure that you’re heading the right way. There are multiple coloured keys to find that will open the corresponding coloured door. However, the lack of a detailed map means that it doesn’t tell you which coloured doors are where, and so you end up doing a lot of walking around the map, a lot of backtracking until you stumble on the right place to go. The basic idea of being able to put a waypoint down on the map and then your compass highlighting which way you need to go when in the rooms, would cut out the annoying navigation.

Priced at around £4 and available now on Steam and all of the consoles. Witch Rise is a nice idea and there is fun here, it’s just too annoying to be really enjoyable. But, its budget price still may entice you for a couple of hours. Witch Rise is the work of one dev and I always have a lot of respect for that, but this one needed a bit more polish to make it a worthwhile purchase.