The Gaming Cavern

Casual deckbuilding games are my thing. If you know me, then it’s a no-brainer. But when I say that WitchHand has blown my mind, I 100% mean it. Imagine the perfect situation for you to kick back, relax, and accidentally dump a few too many hours into a game after a long day of work. Well, Jon Neilsen has created that situation with the addicting gameplay that WitchHand has to offer through all the chill music, relaxing vibes, awesome graphics, and most importantly, the intense combat difficulty that absolutely makes you want to rip your hair out. Perfect, and I really do mean perfect.

If I Were A Witch, I’d Fight That Fate Too

Imagine this: Every morning, you wake up, take a bite of some delicious snack you cooked up in your Cauldron the night before, and you set off to explore, mine, build, and play with your pets. Sounds serene, doesn’t it? It is… Well, it is for a while. When you first hop in-game, you’re met with an excellent tutorial that tells you everything you need to know in order to fight the fate that the wicked Council of the Ninth has bestowed upon you. I’m really not a fan of the Council, but we can get into that a bit later.

Everything’s cute, sweet, innocent, and totally casual. But obviously, that can’t last long, right? After a couple of days, you catch a little glimpse of what the Ninth looks like after you’ve been there for a while and the Council decides they’re really not happy about it. Enemies start to spawn, attacking in groups of three or more on the evening of every tenth night, and let me tell you; it only gets harder. A little enemy here and there isn’t too bad. Every once in a while they pop up after an exploration, or an enemy Faerie town spawns. No big deal. But when the New Moon hits and you’ve got a whole Void Portal worth of enemies, things get a bit hectic, and I am absolutely living for it.

Every so often, you’ll get letters from back home in the First Realm from your family, who for the record, are just as unhappy with the Council of the Ninth Realm. The story gets increasingly intense as the letters come, telling of the fate that the Council told of you. Naturally, you need to save the world, which means the Void is bad and you’re the one who needs to get rid of it. Otherwise, your home back in the First Realm could just cease to exist. After some time, your family starts to realize that the Void attacks on some of the other realms have slowed, and some have even stopped altogether. But another moon cycle into your time in the Ninth Realm, and your presence will definitely be noticed.

Chaos, Cute Pets, and Rapidly Producing Towns

If you’ve ever played deck-based citybuilders like Stacklands before, then you might have an idea of what WitchHand is all about. You stack cards together to build up and fill the Ninth Realm with towns, Familiars, buildings, resources, and more. The style is quite interesting, as it runs on a day-by-day timeline. By the end of each day, any enemies left within the Ninth will deal damage to you, and by the tenth day of every month, a Void Portal will appear and spew enemies that you must defeat.

The process seems pretty simple, but let me tell you, as soon as you really dive into the gameplay and get some hands-on experience, you might get a bit frazzled, to say the least. However, with the help of some cute little critters called Familiars, you can take a bit of the stress off yourself while you assign them to mine Crystals, head out on explorations, and more. Without Familiars, you’d quickly fall to the chaos that ensues after a couple of in-game WitchHand weeks. You can even train your Familiars to be great at certain tasks, like befriending Fae cities, or even taking on your own responsibilities as a new Witch Apprentice.

As cool and interesting as Familiars are, they pale in comparison to the intriguing town-building mechanic that WitchHand offers. Not only do you build a simple town, but you build several towns, all sources from Beacons that can become home to various different cards that really create the enticing, fast-paced environment that we all love. Er, well, that I love, at least.

WitchHand Review

Overall, WitchHand impressed me in quite a few ways. I found myself diving in and spending hours on end trying to defeat the Void and training my little Familiars to help out around the Ninth. The graphics are bright and easy to look at. The story is enticing, even though there’s little story in the actual gameplay. The music that plays behind your gameplay is casual and rather relaxing, which is definitely something a game this intense needs to balance everything out, and the gameplay itself is phenomenal. Bottom Line: You really should check out WitchHand and experience all the fun and excitement the Ninth Realm has to offer.

WitchHand review copy given by publisher and reviewed on PC.