Witchfire: The Final Preview

ign.com:

You ever watch a black metal music video and think, “This is cool and all, but what if those guys screaming around a candlelit pentagram had mid-20th century guns?” Me neither, but I can’t help but think the team at The Astronauts did to get inspired for Witchfire, their single-player roguelike extraction shooter that feels like a gaslamp fantasy movie with Mercyful Fate as the soundtrack. Its mix of hot-handed running and gunning and more slow-paced exploration and investigation meld into something that is more of a dream to play than a nightmare. Though some balancing of what can feel like downright unfair difficulty is certainly in order, and some of the more obscure features could be made to feel less esoteric, I am firmly caught in the spell of this black magic banger.

Though it’s drenched in dark gothic drip, Witchfire is actually about the fight against the evil influence of powerful witches taking an alternative version of our world into its doomed clutches bit by bit. This world’s Vatican calls on you, an immortal warrior for the Pope called a preyer, to hunt and kill one of these witches – a task much easier said than done. The story sort of fizzles out after that. Everything you walk past or interact with is teeming with place and sometimes even lore, but it’s all piecemeal world building stuff that isn’t always intelligible. But it does a great job at setting the overall Roman Catholic x Van Helsing vibe.

I really fell in love with Witchfire’s combat once I found the right guns for me out of the dozen available. It hits just the right stride between DOOM and Destiny, with fast-paced shooting that rewards chain kills and evasiveness and spells that are both powerful odds-eveners and clever utility pieces that helped me get out some gnarly binds all the time. Clearing monster camps manifests arcana, which is a random boon that helps flavor your particular run in the same way the many popular roguelikes do these days. I found that some of these boons were