WitchSpring R Review

thesixthaxis.com:

When you think of mobile games, it’s hard not to picture your grandma playing 500 levels of Candy Crush or a virtual gambling simulator disguised as a pretty anime character collector. There are plenty of gems that break outside of those molds, though, and developer KIWIWALKS has been pumping them out for nearly 10 years now in the form of the WitchSpring series. What started as a cute, character-driven RPG series that lived on your phone has recently grown into a proper console game franchise. WitchSpring3 Re:Fine saw releases on Steam and the Nintendo Switch, and just last year a full remake of the very first game in the series dropped on Steam. That remake, WitchSpring R, is finally coming to consoles, and now even more people have an opportunity to experience one of the most charming RPGs I’ve ever played.

I hesitate to call WitchSpring R a JRPG, since it’s origins as a Korean-developed game leave it technically lacking in the J department. Despite that, though, the spirit and style of the game channels so much iconic JRPG energy. In particular, as a massive fan of the chill alchemy-focused Atelier series, I felt right at home diving into the adventures of bunny-eared witch Pieberry and her talking bird companion who goes by the unfortunate name of Black Joe.

Typically content with a life of solitude in her magic forest, Pieberry gains a newfound goal of discovery when she tastes her namesake for the first time – human-baked pie. So, on top of her usual routine of foraging for materials and fending off monsters and witch-hating humans, she sets out to explore the world beyond her home and see what other human inventions she can experience that are as good as pie.

I love a game with low-stakes, and WitchSpring R plays into that so perfectly. At first, the stakes are arguably a bit too low – it takes a while for the game’s writing to break out of the rhythm of just feeling like it’s dialogue purely for the purpose of gameplay tutorializing. That slow start eventually