The Witch Girls

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).