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Cottagecore fans, this one’s for you.
Witchy Life Story is a visual novel packed full of sweet characters, magical charms, and cozy rituals. Coming from Sundew Studios, it has already been around on Steam for a while, and it’s now available on Switch.
The story puts you in the pointed shoes of a witch who has been sent away from their illustrious family to a town named Flora. Your grandmother usually runs Flora’s Harvest Festival Ritual, but this time, it’s down to you and your raven familiar, Ramsey. You get given a cottage to live in and are introduced to the townsfolk one by one. They don’t initially seem to be keen on having a witch around, but it’s clear that you’ve got the ability to befriend them or even start a relationship with them if you choose. This may seem tricky, considering the main character is quite unlikeable.
The game then follows your witch during the lead-up to the Harvest Festival, answering letters from townsfolk and making them spells to help them out. You’ll need to gather ingredients, manage your garden, and deliver your spells.
The art style is comforting and the character creation screen offers some welcome inclusive options. You can choose various pronouns, body types, body hair, and much more, alongside some gorgeous aesthetic choices, although the presentation options are heavily skewed towards feminine and androgynous people.
Some immediate issues did flare up for us during our first playthrough. The cursor that you use to navigate the game can be a little clunky and the touchscreen is unreliable, too. The gameplay loop is meditative, although it may get repetitive quickly for folk who don’t enjoy visual novels. There’s a lot of reading (with no skip option) and the gameplay is quite simple, with no ways to really make the wrong decisions. You can’t make a spell wrong, for example, and the choices that you make during conversations don’t seem to make much of a difference either, despite the options for multiple endings. You do also end up being forced into making certain choices that you may dislike, such as stealing ingredients from someone’s garden.
While the game is relaxing and beautiful to look at, we did unfortunately run into some significant issues that upset our calm. On the second in-game day, the game repeatedly crashed when we tried to enter the garden instead of the altar. It worked fine once we went in the designated linear direction, but this was worrying and quite frustrating initially. There were also other issues, too, including typos, grammatical mistakes, and visual quirks. None of these were game-breaking, but they did take away from the immersion.
Despite these problems, the overall game was still fun. It was rather short, with our playthrough taking us just over the two-and-a-half-hour mark, so the issues didn’t have time to grate on us. If you want to see all the endings, you’ll either need to rely on auto-saves or replay the entire game. If you’re a fan of visual novels and witchy games specifically, though, the gorgeous art and meditative gameplay loop are sure to outshine the issues we’ve highlighted. For the right people, this game will be enchanting.