The Witch Girls

I left a spoiler-free review on the competition's website, so I thought I'd give my thoughts on more specific moments. For anyone wondering if they should play, this is a great and eerie coming-of-age tale from the perspective of a teenage girl, and it captures that tone wonderfully.

But that's part of why I wished we got to see more of this weird magic at work. The points where we get to see the protagonist struggle and squirm to deal with this weird, gross magic that's seeping into her life are so strong, and have such a unique, cool voice, I'm left wanting more of it.

This game is very very cool, I'd be very interested in seeing more of your work, especially if you have any longer projects of a similar style.

The witch girls are a clique of girls at school who can supposedly perform magic. You and your friend Morag have decided to turn to them for help. You want boyfriends. But they tell you: "We don't do love magic."

As if that's going to stop you.

Taking matters into your own hands, you and Morag recreate this spell to create perfect boyfriends. (Be careful what you wish for.)

Gameplay
The gameplay experience is based on how you cast the boyfriend-creating spell. Failure to do it correctly produces… unexpected results. The spell determines which of the three gameplay paths you take, while the specific ending you reach is determined by decisions made later in the game.

The game keeps track of every possible route/path on a page that is made accessible after your first playthrough. Here, you can skip the intro and start after the spell has been cast, allowing you to dive right into the story. This feature was incredibly helpful for replays.

Story
Generally, the game is about agency, longing for independence, and realizing that the grass is often greener on the other side of the fence. It also serves as a demonstration of the dangers of a 13-year-old girl having unrestricted access to magic.

There was a freedom in it, in asking for what you wanted, without the mediation of parents or schools or big sisters. Magic might not have gotten you results, but it got you something better: power, or the idea of it, at least.

That is, until you do get results.

Creating a perfect boyfriend as planned can be considered as the game’s “generic route.” It leans slightly towards slice-of-life rather than horror because it feels more introspective. I do, however, agree with the game calling it the (Spoiler - click to show)“Zombie Route.”

Ultimately, though, this is a horror game. There are other routes.

Let’s say we do a poor job with casting the spell. What could possibly go wrong?

So, there you go. The Witch Girls can take you in some unexpected directions.

Characters
PC
The protagonist is unnamed and has a surface-level backstory which allows the player to step into her shoes without being distracted by characterization. And yet, the whole fiasco of fabricated boyfriends is still an opportunity for character development.

Like everyone, she judges her peers, and these judgments are mixed in with what she knows about her world. A common theme is how she views herself as separate from those girls, only to reevaluate what “those girls” even means, and whether she might actually be one of them. This is usually referring to sex but can overlap with other things.

You weren’t like those chavvy girls who slept with their fourth-year boyfriends and got pregnant. You were better than them.

There’s a tug-of-war between her passing judgement and her also wanting to partake in the exact things she judges. It becomes an on-going journey of self-discovery.

NPCs
I was hoping that we would get to learn a little more about the witch girls we first meet, especially since one of them is Morag’s sister. Shortly after they refuse to help us, they give up witchcraft altogether, freeing up the hut they used as a meeting space. I wonder how they learned not to mess with love magic.

(In that regard, I like how there’s an unofficial passing of the mantle with most of the endings. (Spoiler - click to show)The protagonist and Morag like to hang out in the witch girls’ hut, and whenever someone comes to them for assistance they say, “We don’t do love magic.” Clever way of bringing things full circle.)

Visuals
The game’s appearance is both simple and memorable. It uses a light blue background with black text in a basic but fun font. Most scenes have a small black-and-white picture in the upper left-hand corner that adds atmosphere without being distracting. The picture of the pencils with the smiley-face erasers resonated with me.

Final thoughts
The Witch Girls was a lot of fun. The protagonist is giddy with what magic can achieve for her, and this excitement is felt by the player as well. Horror and humor are equally intertwined, and the author captures a sense of nostalgia by name-dropping music, clothing brands, and pop culture.

My only complaint is how the original witch girls are glossed over. What’s their story? Just a little more explanation would have provided dimension instead of them being shoved aside. Are we just mirror reflections of them, if only a bit younger (and cooler, of course)?

That aside, The Witch Girls excels in every department. Play it, and you’ll learn why it’s best to steer clear from love magic.

Even counting games I’ve tested, I’m only about a third of the way into the Comp, so there’s a long way to go – but I will be shocked if, at any point between now and mid-October, any game makes me mutter “what the fuck” under my breath half as many times as The Witch Girls.

This is a compliment! We’re dealing here with a choice-based horror game that uses its supernatural elements to lend a visceral sort of terror to the story of a pair of young Scottish teenage girls grappling with their budding sexuality. A risk of this kind of story is that the magic stuff can be too cleanly allegorical, too direct a stand-in for the real-world analogues, which makes everything feel schematic; another risk is that the supernatural elements get too convoluted and the plot gets too melodramatic, leaving the raw emotion that’s the real engine here behind and replacing it with genial pulp nonsense. Witch Girls neatly swims between this Scylla and Charybdis, with truly horrible horrors whose links to the traumas routinely inflicted on pubescent girls are never at all obfuscated, but which are too uniquely loathsome to be waved away as mere puffs of metaphor. Like, try this on for size:

"As the river rushed by, he shuffled towards you on the sand, then pulled you closer.

"Your first kiss tasted of ash. Of death and decay and nothing. You’d summoned him into this world, yet when your lips met his, you felt nothing for him. He didn’t like you. He didn’t ask you out because he thought you were cool. You’d grown him from rotted lemon juice."

Yes, per the blurb what our witchlings get up to is performing a love spell, but you’re forced to scavenge the ritual’s ingredients from the back of the pantry or the Avon stockpile of a vicious piano teacher; understandably, depending on your choices there’s scope for things to go very wrong.

The weird zombie boyfriend is just medium-wrong, for reference – it gets worse:

"It was grotesque. One milky eye floated in a sea of aspic. The creature had been washed ashore by the low tide, and foam and specs of wet sand clung to its translucent, lumpy body.

"Morag scooped it up. You started—didn’t jellyfish sting? But she cradled it against her green school jumper with no pain.

"She stroked a chewed-down fingernail above the eye, against what might have been its brow.

"‘It’s our,’ she laughed, ‘lover.’"

(I have a lot of text from this game saved into my notes, but I’ll try to keep this review from just turning into a copy-paste of all the bits that made me squirm, since we’ll be here a while).

The prose is perfect even when it’s just describing a beach or a record shop, but it’s at its best when effortlessly braiding together sex and horror: the protagonist is thirteen, equally entranced and repulsed by the prospect of a boyfriend, wanting the social credit and sense of maturity but ignorant and ambivalent at best about what you would do with one – or what one would do with you. The story can go a lot of dark places, with significant branching based on your decisions, but Witch Girls avoids coming off as misery porn because of a crucial choice: the protagonist is always in control. I played through to reach all the endings (in a nice touch, after your first time finishing, you unlock a list of possible resolutions and an interactive flowchart that makes reaching the others simple), and there’s never one where you’re only a victim: you can say no to anything at any time, meaning that there’s a queasy complicity to whatever awful deeds you commit or consent to (or “consent to” – Witch Girls is under no illusions that that’s a simple concept, especially given the social strictures of rural Scotland).

It also helps that all the different ways the story can play out are in dialogue with each other. You can conjure up a perfect homunculus who instantly charms your parents into letting him sleep over every night, or you can get the aforementioned lump up jelly, and you can go along with their respective importunations because you want what they can offer – status at school, proof to yourself that you’re grown-up, even a child – or you can unmake them with oft-terrifying violence. But they all revolve around the dilemma of identifying what you want. It makes for an authentically confused portrait of adolescence, because no one understands you, not your parents, not the various inhumans who are your only potential romantic partners, not the best friend you don’t realize actually seems to be using you, and certainly not yourself. That’s more horrifying than anything in Witch Girls (OK, except maybe for the (Spoiler - click to show)hairy tooth bit).