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Witch Strandings review: a cursed, but magical Strand-likeNature nurture
Nature nurture
In the 100 or so hours I’ve spent playingDeath Strandingin the last couple of years, I’ve often wondered about the state of Sam Bridges' limbs. Specifically, the strain they must be under carrying those preposterously high columns of metal cased packages up and down the slopes of post-apocalyptic America. If I were in his hiking boots, I’m not sure all the reinforced skeletons in the world would help me reach the same kind of porter-ing skills as he does gambolling about the place, at least not based on how sore and tired my dinky little wrists are after a couple of hours of playing Strange Scaffold’s new Strand-type game,Witch Strandings. Yes, that’s right. Someone other than Hideo Kojima has made a so-called Strand-like, and it’s quite possibly the strangest game you’ll play all year.
In fairness, I probably just need to get myself a newer, smoother mouse mat that doesn’t have a raised, fabric trim to constantly rub against my arm. That might sound like a workman blaming her tools, but the fact is, Witch Strandings is a surprisingly physical game that goes all in on the act of swiping, pushing and moving your mouse around to navigate its cursed forest of tiled squares. As you may have read in myinterview with studio head Xalavier Nelson Jrlast month, Witch Strandings cannot be played with a keyboard or controller. You will occasionally press G to stuff an item you find on the forest floor into your single-slot pouch (once you acquire it, that is), but that’s all. Everything else is controlled entirely through your mouse, from movement to carrying objects and depositing them at their intended location.
Witch Strandings | Announcement Trailer [4K]Watch on YouTube
Witch Strandings | Announcement Trailer [4K]
I should mention, you don’t have to help these animals if you don’t want to. Heck, you can even put them out of their misery altogether if you wish – and that extends to the witch herself. You don’thaveto save this forest at all. Sure, you’ll have to apply the same drag and drop techniques to the forest’s cloying miasmic forces in order to find its hermitic witch, blotting out grid squares with clutches of haunted mycelium and gnarled staffs to pierce through its deadly sea of hex and quicksand tiles, but what you choose to do with your forest is ultimately up to you.
For my part, I enjoyed the game’s playful tension between hopeless despair and cautious optimism. At first glance, it does an amazing job to make you feel out of your depth. Its intense purple colour scheme, throbbing pink hex zones and menacing black tendrils that wrap ominously around the edge of your screen all point to a doomed lost cause, as does its strange and abrasive top-down interface.
It’s worth sticking around in the forest once you’ve actually dealt with the witch, too. Like Death Stranding’s residents, Witch Strandings' animal folk still need someone to take care of them every day, letting you continually add to your ever-growing point score, but their demeanour and local surroundings also change in tangible, noticeable ways. You start to see the effect your handiwork has had on them more clearly, and the completionist icon-clearer in me does want to see what a completely clean, hex-free forest looks like. So I think I’ll be sticking around a little while longer in this strange, haunted woodland. My wrist might not thank me for it, but I’m sure a soft blanket will cure my aching bones.
