The Switch is becoming quite a home for visual novels and adventures, and Witchy Life Story is among them. While it’s a brief breath of fresh air, it also might not be for everyone due to some issues.
Witchy Life Story is essentially a coming of age story. Your avatar, whose appearance and initial identity you customize, is the black sheep of a respectable magical family. After certain experiments and actions, their grandmother sent them to Flora to help the village with a festival to boost their fruitfulness and prosperity. By acting as the small town’s witch for about two weeks, you’ll assist villagers with their needs and hopefully make this year’s harvest festival better than previous ones. Three characters can be dated, some can be befriended, and you’ll essentially make choices that influence the course of the story. (Even if some seem to net the same response no matter what you say.)
The key point here is the player’s avatar themselves. While you do customize their appearance and pronouns, they are a very defined character. It felt like no matter which dialogue options I selected, the person seemed very full of themselves, arrogant, and committed to pushing boundaries. Some might find this refreshing, given the passive nature of player characters in some visual novels. However, it also might be somewhat off-putting, since so much agency is taken away from you for certain responses and actions.
The real issue I noticed with Witchy Life Story is that it’s quite a repetitive game. A part of it involves making potions, charms, and incense for members of the community. Rather than being a genuinely challenging puzzle, it’s more… something to do to cement the fact your character is a capital-W Witch. It’s atmospheric, but may get to feel like it’s in the way after a while.
Just know going in that in addition to the game being a little repetitive, that the Switch version of Witchy Life Story isn’t always perfect. I held off on writing my impressions, in the hopes that there’d be some sort of update that would fix some UI issues and script issues. But know that this isn’t optimized for the system, meaning you need to control a mouse cursor essentially to properly handle things, and you will see misspelled words and some awkward phrasing. It also isn't compatible with elements like taking screenshots of videos.
For someone who wants to spend an afternoon making a custom character, then following that flawed witch as they learn life lessons and help a community, Witchy Life Story isn’t bad. It is a little awkward that such a brief game is so repetitive, but if someone wants a short adventure, it’s fine.
Witchy Life Story is available now the Nintendo Switch, Xbox Series X, and PC.
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