Witchspire Brings New Life To The Survival Genre

Let’s play a game. I’m going to try and guess how the first hour of the last survival game you played was.

You probably woke up in an unknown place. In walkable distance there were loose branches, small rocks, perhaps some grass. To stay safe or to get cozy, you were told to create a base, which required you to craft some tools. For these you obviously need a workbench which can thankfully be build using the aforementioned sticks and stones.

From the most pre-historic settings to the most futuristic, this initial blueprint often remains the same. If you’ve played more than a few survival games, their starting hours begin to blur together, except for the special ones that go the extra mile to immerse you in their world, like Witchspire.

In the Early Access survival game developed and published by Envar Games, you play as a Hogwarts-ish wizard, flying broom and all. You collect familiaras that can assist in your menial tasks like you do in Palworld, but you also need to mine rocks and chop wood. Unlike in most games in the genre, though, you don’t hit trees with an axe or rocks with a pickaxe. After all, your a wizard [Harry!].

Your sickle is magical. You throw spirit apparitions of it that chop trees by themselves. For minerals, just throw a couple spirit pickaxes at each rock and you’ll be done. This alone helps bring new life to tasks that are so ubiquitous in the survival genre they inevitably feel like chores. Envar Games didn’t stop here, though.

As you progress through Witchspire, you unlock new versions of your tools. Not only do these allow you to farm better materials, they also change the farming mechanic itself. For example, once you unlock the Spirit Logging Sickle, you’ll go to chop a tree and the sick apparitions will start orbitting around your character instead of flying where you were aiming. Throw a few in a row and run into a wood area and you’ll become a tornado chopping every tree unlucky enough to be in your deadly radius.

This might seem like a minor detail in a game that has a lot more to offer, but it really isn’t. Unless you play a survival game that also veers toward automation, you’ll likely be farming resources even during the final stages of the game. Even if those resources, get progressively more valuable, that only increases the reward you get for farming them, it doesn’t improve the act of farming in itself.

With this seemingly minor change Envar Games shows that the studio respects my time and that even menial tasks should remain engaging and fresh. Furthermore, it also ensured that Witchspire stays consistent with this wizardry fantasy. You wouldn’t manually chop a tree or hit a rock if you do it with a swish of a wand, would you?

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Witchspire is now available in Early Access and already has enough content to keep you engaged for 20 or so hours. You can play it solo or in co-op. Now that its release discount is over, it costs 22,99€, which is a completely fair price for fans of the genre and/or the wizard fantasy.