So, this is a video game. Not a game I generally find interesting, but since I have a long summer vacation, I decided to try something different and this was it. The actual reason was that since I’m traveling quite a bit during the summer and I don’t want to bring along a mouse, I wanted a game you could play without one.

Note that this game is not officially in early access, but it’s obviously not ready either. They seem to have a strategy of finishing the game by releasing free DLCs. Also, this is a South Korean game, which means that in some cases the language is a bit awkward, but you kind of learn to live with it.

To me, this feels a like Kiki’s Delivery Service meets your generic School of Magic hidden in the background. We have a young witch (she’s sixteen) called Ellie, who is on her way to a witch school, but takes the opportunity to get out of the train to figure out what a mysterious light in forest is. She finds an empty witch’s house and since the train is supposed to take a lot of time to be repaired, she decides to stay there for the night. Except that in the morning, she finds that the train is gone. So, she stays behind to help rebuild the village that has been destroyed by a mysterious plant.

You explore, rebuild step by step, make friends with the returning villagers, learn to make potions and candies (which are basically diluted potions, except that they don’t have much use in the game except that you can sell them – and you need them occasionally in various quests) from the materials she collects in the woods, learn to fish, befriend cats, expands her new house, figures out the mystery of the previous occupant, and gathers materials for the museum at her school. She also needs to find a master witch and maintain her lies about who she is and why she’s there (although that’s resolved). There’s so much to do. Which can be overwhelming. However, there isn’t really any pressure and each of these is brought in one at a time, so that you have time to learn them before you need to be doing the next things.. You can mess up making potions or candies, but you can always get more materials or (in some cases) you’ll just get your materials back.

Part of this is your encyclopedia. When you learn things, you record them in it. It’s actually quite well designed. The images are very cute (a word that applies to quite a few things in the game), and it gives you hints on how to approach various lifeforms. Sadly, the UI is kind of horrible and going through all the lifeforms is very slow.

The villagers are all very wholesome (except one kid who I kind of hate and avoid – who lives alone, because his parents are away and apparently couldn’t take his antics). You help them deal with their pretty trivial problems, but it’s a community you kind of like. Some of them are humans, but they are mostly various animals (and a dragon). Ellie is just a very helpful person and will do anything they want. Mostly the quests you need to do for them are just finding stuff they need. You know, pretty basic fetch quest stuff, except that you don’t really need to fight anything ever (although sometimes you do kill animals).

Sometimes the quests feel like they are deliberately wasting the players time, because they wanted to push the game time. Which is weird considering that you can generally choose how much time you want to expend. You can just disregard the main quest as much as you like and just gather materials to make potions to master that part of the game.

There are other problems here as well. Some of the animals have interesting ideas about how the material they provide is gathered, but they just made it too hard. Some things are very luck based and that can make them frustrating (they definitely need to do something about some of these things).

Third, sometimes they seem to forget what they are doing. For example, there’s a quest where you need to fix a thing. I had just done a crafting tutorial, so I assumed I needed to use my crafting station to do the repairs, but not so. So, I assumed the people in the village who explained this to me or do crafts would help, but no. In the end you need to go and interact with the thing you need to bring the repaired item to. That just felt stupid.

All in all, a pretty fun game. Not really very hard, there’s no real stakes here, and I don’t think most people will want to do all the sidestuff here (although my nightmare of a house is kind of a fun project – it has a weirdly Backrooms kind of feel). Still, quite worth it at less than 20 euros considering that I’ve now played about 100 hours.