After Valheim, Enshrouded, and V Rising, you would think my cousins and I had spent enough time punching trees and arguing over where to build a house.
Apparently not. This time we get wands.
Witchspire is a game about witches, magic, building a home, and collecting creatures called familiars. It has a lot of what draws us to these games, with a lighter personality than the Viking wilderness or a vampire castle.
And yes, we’re still cutting down trees.
At least now we can do it with magic.
First, the actual game
Witchspire is an open-world crafting and exploration game in Early Access. You can play alone or online with friends, building a home called a Hearth while exploring, gathering materials, fighting creatures, and growing stronger.
You also collect familiars. Some come along to fight with you, while others can help around your home. So there’s the usual survival game loop of leaving the base to find things, bringing those things home, and using them to make better things that let you go farther.
A loop my cousin Jdog and I have apparently decided we will never get tired of.
Witchspire makes that routine its own through magic. Your axe and pickaxe are spells. Building involves floating around in an astral form. Your companions are strange little creatures instead of, well, my cousin.
Actually, he’s still there too.
Chopping trees, but make it magical
We have spent an unreasonable amount of our lives gathering wood in games.
Valheim taught us that trees can kill you. Enshrouded gave us an entire world to tear apart for building materials. Witchspire lets us throw magic at a tree and watch it come down.
I have to admit, I like this arrangement.
The gathering is still gathering. You need materials, and somebody has to go get them. But using spells gives the work a different feel. When so much of a game involves collecting resources, making those tools fun to use goes a long way.
It also makes sense for the world. If we’re going to play as witches, let us do the ordinary stuff like witches too. I don’t want a magic wand for combat and then a regular-ass axe for the next three hours.
The familiars are going to be a problem
I want the cute one.
I understand there are practical reasons to choose certain familiars. Some can help in a fight. Others can help with crafting at the Hearth. Those are all very good reasons to collect them.
But have you considered that one of them is cute?
This is exactly the kind of thing that sends us off course. We can have a perfectly reasonable plan to gather materials or make progress, then a creature shows up and suddenly the plan has been replaced by, “Wait, can we get that one?”
I like when games give us things to discover that aren’t tied to the next upgrade. A new familiar can be useful, sure, but it can also just be a little guy we want hanging around the house.
That is a perfectly valid contribution to the household.
Building a home for the coven
Building is a big part of why these games stick with us. The first base is usually functional. There are crafting stations, storage, and enough room to do what we need.
Then somebody gets an idea.
A little expansion becomes a larger room. The larger room needs to look better. Now the crafting stations have to move, and apparently we need a separate area for all the things we’ve collected. Before long, the house has become the evening’s activity.
Witchspire’s Hearth has room for that. It’s where we craft, store things, and put our familiars to work, but it’s also a chance to make a home that feels like ours. You can snap pieces into place or use freer placement, and the astral building mode lets you move around to get a better look at what you’re doing.
I like having that freedom, though placing things can still be fiddly. A building system can have all the pieces in the world, but if getting one object where you want it turns into a fight with the controls, the magic wears off pretty quickly.
And I would like to formally request that our storage stays organized this time.
I know. I laughed too.
One suggestion: give building some weight. Currently it is Hit B place, no sound, nothing. And it feels empty and not satisfying. For a cozy game I expect some SFX with building to let ya know you actually built it! DOPAMINE!
Combat: don’t let the cute art fool you
Witchspire looks welcoming, but that doesn’t mean everything in it wants to be our friend.
You can fight with wands or spellblades, dodge around attacks, and bring familiars along. There are different difficulty settings too, which is nice for a game that also wants you to spend time exploring and building. Sometimes we want a challenge. Sometimes we want to make progress without turning the evening into a repeated conversation about whose fault the last death was.
It was probably mine. Unless it was his.
Coming from V Rising, I wouldn’t expect the same kind of tightly focused boss-fight experience here. Witchspire spreads its attention across combat, gathering, building, and creature collecting. That gives us more to do when we’re not in the mood to throw ourselves at a difficult fight.
I like having a reason to head back home after an adventure that isn’t just “we died and need to repair everything.”
Though I’m sure that will remain a reason.
Exploring together
The best moments in these games are often the ones that happen between the objectives. We leave the house with a plan, find something off to the side, and decide to take a look. Then there’s a chest, or a puzzle, or a creature we haven’t seen before, and the original plan can wait.
Witchspire gives you plenty of reasons to poke around. Exploring can earn experience for the Luminaries skill tree, and the world has resources and discoveries scattered throughout it. That makes wandering feel like it’s contributing to progress, even when we’re nowhere near whatever we originally set out to do.
The world is colorful and easy to enjoy spending time in. But I do want more from it as development continues. There’s a difference between having a pretty place to run around and having a place that feels like things are happening in it.
More characters, more reasons to get invested in the story, and more surprises out in the world would go a long way. I don’t need another game dumping endless dialogue on us the second we log in. I do want to care about what we find when we go looking.
A good co-op game gives us time to talk
One of the things I’ve come to appreciate about playing these games with Jdog is that we don’t have to be doing something exciting every second.
We can be gathering materials, organizing the base, or figuring out what to build next. Sometimes we’re talking about the game. Sometimes the game is just giving us something to do while we catch up.
That’s a big part of why Valheim has meant so much to us over the years. It gave us a place to keep coming back to together.
Witchspire has the kind of slower moments that make room for that. You can have an objective without feeling like every minute has to be spent rushing toward it. There’s time to look around, work on the house, or stop because one of us found something we want the other to see.
And then, eventually, remember what we were supposed to be doing.
Maybe.
Early Access is still Early Access
Witchspire has a good foundation, but it’s still being developed. That means the world, the story, and some of the systems have room to improve.
The Luminaries tree can become harder to navigate as more options open up. Building has its awkward moments. Inventory and shared crafting conveniences are the kinds of things I hope continue to get attention, because small frustrations become a lot less small when you encounter them every time you come home with a full bag.
And I want the world to feel fuller. The art is lovely, but I’d like more characters and stories to give the places we explore a stronger sense of life.
None of this means the game needs to become something completely different. The foundation works. I just want the parts we interact with all the time to become smoother, and I want more reasons to keep heading out into the world.
As always with Early Access, buy it for what’s there now. Future updates are great, but they shouldn’t be the only reason you’re willing to play.
How does it compare to the games we keep coming back to?
Witchspire doesn’t have the same atmosphere as Valheim. It isn’t trying to make a boat trip feel like an expedition into the unknown. It also doesn’t have the same enormous building possibilities as Enshrouded or the particular satisfaction of overcoming a tough V Rising boss.
What it does have is a sense of playfulness that fits the way my cousin and I enjoy spending time together.
We can work on a home, head out looking for materials, and get distracted by a creature along the way. Magic gives the familiar crafting routine a different feel, and the familiars add something new to argue about when we get back.
We have enough serious decisions to make in life. I’m fine spending an evening discussing which magical creature deserves a spot near the crafting table.
Final thoughts
Witchspire has a lot going for it. The magic is woven into the things you do every day, the familiars give us something fun to collect, and the Hearth gives us a place to come back to and make our own.
It also has some growing to do. I want more life in the world, a story that gives us more reason to care, and continued work on the little frustrations that can slow down building and crafting.
But the part that matters to me is whether it gives my cousin and me a place we want to spend time together. Witchspire has that potential. It gives us enough to work toward while leaving room for the distractions that usually become the best part of the night.
Now we just need to keep the storage organized.
So that’s never happening.
