The Witch

Adapted from an IFCOMP23 Review

It is with a head hung heavy in shame I must confess to you, dear reader, that I have hit another milestone in my short reviewer's life. This one is somewhat ignominious. For the first time as a comp reviewer/judge I did not persevere past an hour and a quarter playtime of a long game. As with many other prior failures, I had cause to reflect on larger issues and learn a bit about myself in the experience.

Witch wants to be an old school parser. REALLY old school, like dawn of IF old school. These formative IF works were notoriously opaque and cruel, the gameplay PRESUMED innumerable restarts and experimentation to make progress. They were also necessarily spare - they were often operating within hard storage limits so wit was applied where room was available. Mostly it was a tight, shallow “only what’s necessary” implementation. If assessed on a ‘unique text/hour’ metric, the numbers would be shockingly low. They would complicate progress with things like inventory limits, need for food, water and sleep. Quiet, unwinnable states were commonplace. Instant death with no reasonable foreshadowing. Hey, they were busy inventing the form, cut them some slack!

The net effect of early state-of-the-art was to make the puzzles punishingly hard, deeply trial-and-error, extremely time sinky, so many restarts, and triumphant once finally beaten. At some point, people started questioning, 'was the triumph really all THAT great, compared to the chore needed to achieve it?' The consensus answer seems to be ‘no,’ but it is true that it was a very specific pleasure that is hard to come by these days.

I have fallen into the trap of over-explaining what this community is well aware of.

Witch doesn’t initially present itself as that. It presents itself as a flawed, incomplete implementation. The game is rife with “You see Z; >EXAMINE Z; You can’t see any such thing.” RIFE with it. At first it I attributed it to “unimplemented nouns, amirite?” Parser IF is riddled with this, it comes with the territory, you pretty much have to have some forgiveness to engage at all. But it is one thing when scenic elements that have no gameplay function are missing. It is quite another when a key puzzle is undermined by it.

“You see a (Spoiler - click to show)magic tree.” >X (Spoiler - click to show)TREE. “You can’t see any such thing.” >(Spoiler - click to show)CLIMB TREE. “You can’t see any such thing.” To later learn via walkthrough that you need to (Spoiler - click to show)>UP. A key puzzle requires you to engage with an object, but refuses to acknowledge its existence! The player can be forgiven never thinking to try this, even through Herculean trial-and-error.

The game is crammed with this kind of thing. Later, the one complicated puzzle I solved refused to acknowledge I had solved it because I did it out of order. And treated me to bafflingly contradictory state messages until I spammed things into the right order. I did endure for an hour and a quarter, wandering around collecting things, performing teeth-grittingly unrewarding inventory management. I eventually got to a point where I needed to consult the walkthrough.

And there, dear reader, is where my resolve abandoned me.

On the first few pages of the walkthrough I realized: 1) there were two puzzles (including the above) I would never have solved on my own, requiring me to detect where the game was actively deceiving me; 2) solving the above case leads to a throwback trial-and-error maze which, classic yes, but good riddance; 3) another puzzle I would only have solved through belligerent spamming then BEEN INFURIATED by the solution; and 4) that I had put myself into not one but two unwinnable states, with no hint that I had done so.

Dear reader, I had until that moment considered myself made of sterner stuff. It was not rage that undid me, it was stunned incomprehension.

Now the framing story for this is similarly old-school. Occasionally playful generic fantasy with unapologetic anachronisms among the setting. But even back in the day that was a super thin framing device, unique when it started, exhausting its novelty very quickly. Nothing is done to burnish the tropes here: no unique twists, no knowing asides, no innovative variations. Even when flashes of wit present themselves, the game quickly abandons them. I had a sinking feeling when up front this sequence played out:

>I
You're carrying:
a plain flagon (which is closed)
a headache
regret

>X REGRET
Are you familiar with the term "intangible"?

Yes, amusing in its inclusion, but why abandon the bit so perfunctorily? Absent compelling story or bouying humor, the gameplay bounced me hard. I am of the camp that all history does not need to be repeated, some is best left in the past. While I am amused by 80’s hairstyles, I will never purchase a feathering comb. It’s fine that it’s of its time. I was tempted to rate it Unplayable, but was it really THAT much more unplayable than early IF?

I kind of respect the author’s effort here in one sense. In this day and age to develop a game of this size (36 pages of walkthrough!) committed to this style of gameplay… it is an old saw to “make the art you want to see in the world.” I hope it finds its not-me audience.

Also, thankfully, at least the Elves here aren’t racist.

Played: 10/11/23
Playtime: 1.25hrs, seems got to two unwinnable states, score 10/150, declined to restart
Artistic/Technical ratings: Bouncy, Intrusively buggy gameplay
Would Play After Comp?: No, my nostalgia only reaches so far


Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless