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Beat Witch review, December 21, 2023Beat Witch is a parser game that takes place in a world where some girls, at puberty, suddenly turn into Beat Witches, a sort of energy vampire for whom music takes the place of garlic or holy water. The PC is one of these witches—the well-meaning “reluctant monster” type, who tries not to kill when she feeds—and her goal in the game is to take down another witch, one who has no such compunctions.
The game is fairly linear, not just in the sense that it lacks plot branching, but in the sense that it doesn’t often let you wander and poke around. There’s generally one specific command the game wants you to type at any given time and it won’t recognize much else, other than examining things. And even going that far off-script can be risky; sometimes if you don’t do the thing the game wants you to do immediately, you die.
When you type the right thing, the next bit of the story will be delivered to you in a large multi-paragraph chunk of text. Even on my gaming laptop, which has a large screen by laptop standards, this was almost always more than one screen’s worth of text, and sometimes more than two screens, so I was constantly scrolling back, trying to find where the new text started. This was a bit of a hassle, and to be honest, if I’d been playing on a smaller screen I don’t know if I would have had the patience to make it to the end.
I have to admit that as the game went on, I wondered more and more why the author had chosen to make it a parser game. It isn’t really taking advantage of the strengths of the medium (the sense of space, the object manipulation) or doing anything that hypertext couldn’t do, and I think I would have had a much smoother reading experience had it been a choice-based/hypertext game. The constant back-scrolling was frustrating and undermined the sense of propulsive forward motion that Beat Witch seems to be going for. Besides, if I’m going to be discouraged from interacting with the environment, I’d prefer to just get rid of the illusion that I can do so. It’s distracting to be constantly wondering if maybe this time there might be something interesting off the beaten path. I’d rather be put on some visible rails and know for a fact I can’t deviate from them. (Plus, the game’s recurring problems with unlisted exits couldn’t have existed in a choice-based game, but that at least is relatively easily fixed.)
In a work without much gameplay, the writing has to do most of the heavy lifting; Beat Witch has mixed success on this front. It has an atmospheric depiction of a mostly-abandoned city and some effectively gross horror imagery, and the loosely-sketched worldbuilding was intriguing. The emotional beats, however, didn’t quite land for me; you get too much of the PC’s backstory and motivation in a single infodump, and it feels a little inorganic. I would have loved to get that information parceled out over the first half of the game via the PC’s own memory so that her brother’s recording didn’t have to cover so much ground. I also feel it would have worked better for me if I had actually seen some of her idyllic childhood before everything went wrong. I think that would have made finding out what happened to her more immediately, viscerally painful, which then would have made the ending more satisfying.
There’s some interesting stuff in Beat Witch, but in the end it felt to me like a story that was constantly fighting against its format, and between that and the uneven handling of the main emotional arc, I was never as fully immersed as I wanted to be.