Reviews

• gamedeal user

  Aug 8, 2023

  a very cute and fulfilling game. the story is straightforward and a little short, but i still enjoyed it. as the days progress your character learns new things and becomes a better person through trial and error. i was able to apply some of its lessons to real life - which was actually kinda helpful. who knew that games could teach you how to be more confident in yourself? anyway, customization is also pretty solid, as a trans person i felt accommodated for and enjoyed the option to use 2 different pronouns. though this game's tagged "dating sim," it tends to focus on relationships in general, not just the romantic aspect. all romance is optional and the game is still fulfilling if you choose to only have platonic relationships with the potential candidates. note that the main character is a fully realized person with their own personality, not a blank slate. i personally didn't mind this, but i thought it was good to include just in case people want to know before they purchase. gameplay is text and dialogue-heavy, which is normal for a visual novel. outside of selecting dialogue options, you mostly mix flowers and put them in different containers to give to people. the game doesn't really take advantage of its tarot card mechanic even though you can access it at your house during the day. if you want a complex alchemy system, i would suggest looking elsewhere because this game seems primarily focused on relaxation rather than puzzle-solving. overall i enjoyed this and would recommend it to visual novel fans or other people looking for a "cozy" experience.
• gamedeal user

  Jan 8, 2023

  I have mixed feelings about this game, I'm going to share my pros and cons and let you decide: Pros: - The art is stunning. I really love the potion designs in particular, they feel magical and colourful and vibrant. - Being able to customise the altar and having an in-game tarot spread option is awesome. - Gender diversity (though less so when it comes to character customisation options -> see cons) - Fleshed out dialogue (haaaa see also the cons) - A fairly straightforward game design with a lot of help/tutorials means it can be picked up pretty easily by anyone. Cons: - Lack of true gender diversity in character design. Very few masc character design options, especially in clothing and in the eye options. There are many femme clothing options, but really only three masc options, and one is kind of a genre joke (western). This is a *great* game for character design options if you lean towards femme or androgynous presenting characters. Otherwise, you'll be limited. Additionally frustrating realising the game gives you character designs like Jean, but no options to look like a character like Jean. Apparently witches can't be buff masc dudes. For me as a transmasc person that feels dysphoria around femme options, this was just offputting for a game that clearly prides itself in its diversity. And again, if you are femme/androgynous leaning in your character creation, I think you will feel well represented. - Almost all the characters are generally unlikeable, *including* your player character. Even if you try to avoid stealing from gardens, you will be forced to steal, for example. More than once. Which brings me to my second quibble: - You are given dialogue choices, but none of them actually matter unless you're romancing someone. Pick anything, it really doesn't seem to matter. Your character will still pick the same unlikeable, foolish option, or say things that seem directly contrary to what you picked. They will steal, lie, be falsely confident, careless, apathetic, and now that I'm 3.5 hours in, change for the better *only* a little, except that they just stole again and then secretly violated a customer's order because they felt like it. It's kind of gross and nonconsensual to change a customer's order just because you stole some ingredients and think 'what the heck.' That you still get paid for this? No wonder your gran gave up on you. - The dialogue can be *very* laboursome. I don't know how many '.....' '.....' '.....' '.....' followed by another 20 lines of dialogue I can handle, *per character*, almost every day. And you are generally required to talk to *every character every day* if you want to do a good job of completing the game. The dialogue is the weightiest part of the game, and I would never start a new game knowing I'd have no skip option just to bounce ahead to the questions. This feels like an area where the devs could have learned something from visual novel devs, and I hope this is fixed in the future. Like, if you love the dialogue, that's great! If you love every character equally, awesome! But if you don't, and actually mostly want to craft potions and harvest ingredients or only like *some* characters, this quickly becomes the most tedious part of the game. --- As someone who likes witchcraft, likes crafting, likes harvesting stuff, and likes daily tasks, (and likes pretty art!), and is queer and trans, i thought this would be right up my alley. But the cons are big enough to make this a 'play once and never again' game. So for future playability, it's sitting on a nil. I also kind of wish my player character, whose personality I cannot alter no matter what, goes to therapy and maybe takes a communication class, or just learns some basic manners or like...idk, human ethics? To me personally it doesn't read like 'playful' to get paid for messing with a customer's order after stealing something. And for anyone else who likes to play a 'good character' - you're not going to get these vibes from this person. Even as they improve, they're still stealing. Hopefully they own up to it at some point? Maybe they get to refund all the characters who they altered the orders of without their consent? I haven't completed the game yet, so maybe this gets better! I will complete the game, and anything I know I'll complete gets a rec, but that art is really the shining factor here carrying me through. I just want to collect the crystals and the recipes at this point. I kind of feel all these people who argue and quibble and stress and have no boundaries deserve each other.
• gamedeal user

  Jul 12, 2023

  I promised myself I would play at least 4 hours before writing a review so I'd have more time to see if my experience got better, but every time I hover over the title in my library I don't want to play this anymore, which I think is reason enough to write a review. While this is far from the worst game I've every played - the concept is intriguing and the art is gorgeous - there are a number of issues with this game that make it not very appealing to me. So here it goes. The Protagonist is not a player character. She's a fully realised person - a pretty unlikable one too. She's rude, petulant, stubborn, steals ingredients from what I assume are other people's gardens (and you can't NOT do it, regardless of the options you are given in-game - the end result is always the same), adds random ingredients to made-to-order spells without knowing what they do and then hands them out to paying customers who put their trust in her. I'm 100% sure the whole point is that she's going to change as the story progresses, but the way the dialogue options are set up doesn't make me want to stick around long enough to see it. There is no point to adding dialogue options if they don't change anything and don't let me shape the character into what I would like. The romance options (3 - male, female, non-binary) are very slim and none of the characters are interesting enough for me to care about romancing them as they feel like caricatures of archetypes/romance options we've seen all over the place. The two more interesting characters are not romanceable as they're married to each other. I understand the village is small, but by making it so small you're forcing everyone to go for what's available instead of making it an actual interesting journey for the player. On this note - I'm a cis woman so I didn't really have major issues finding options to customise my character to my liking (even though I would have liked more clothing options - or at least a mix-and-match option), but there is an astounding lack of customisation if you're anything but a cis woman. For a game that lets you choose your pronouns and strives to add diversity, I find this incredibly alienating towards its potential customers and community. The gameplay is incredibly repetitive and got to me very quickly. The only thing you do in a day is talk to people, at length, whether you want to or not. The dialogues are so repetitive, unimaginative, and boring that starting a new day feels more like a chore than something to be excited about; I normally have no problem with reading but the typos and flatness of the storylines made this such an underwhelming experience, I found myself just clicking through without absorbing anything. The gardening mechanic is what I found really refreshing and interesting, however it accounts for a minuscule part of your day, and it's very limited as well. You gather ingredients from the garden, water the plants, compost weeds (for what reason I don't know as you always have more than enough ingredients without needing to use the fertilizer) and that's it. Once you're done with this, you craft 3 spells, and then you have to slog through the talking. Considering there is not much to do, I would have hoped for the crafting to be more nuanced but it's just "this plant is this colour, this planet, this intent" without further information. There isn't really anything more to it, and whenever you add an ingredient at random (after stealing it from someone's garden) there isn't even anything added to the grimoire about it - no new plants or ingredients are added, no explanation as to why this plant does that, etc. I would recommend playing Strange Horticulture for a more immersive and fulfilling experience in this regard. There is a tarot deck but it doesn't really contribute anything to the day or playthrough. After the first couple of times I used it, I completely forgot it existed, and this hasn't made any difference whatsoever in my days, so I'm assuming it's just there to add something you can do - except you're not really doing anything with it. To be honest I don't care about investing more time in this game to find out whether the tarot deck serves an actual purpose. It's a shame, really. I jumped on this game so quickly when I saw it in the store, and forced myself to play it beyond the point of "returnability" because I desperately wanted to like it, but it just fell flat for me.
• gamedeal user

  Jan 3, 2023

  The art is gorgeous, the character customization is full of options (though it could maybe use more outfits, or even just a separation of tops and bottoms to mix and match), and the NPCs are quirky. The gameplay loop is simple, but that's not necessarily a bad thing -- it's primarily a visual novel, after all. It could be a very sweet, comfy game to play. There were some interesting, funny, and cute moments. But, honestly, I couldn't really enjoy my time playing. The main character is pretty unlikable, and dialogue options tend to feel rude or apathetic. Even once you've started "flirting" with the locals and "making friends," you're still kind of a jerk. And I don't like playing a jerk -- especially after you've been given all these customization options for your looks and pronouns, why are you stuck with this particular personality? There are even points when you're given an option, but regardless of what YOU as the player pick, your character does the opposite (NO, I said I don't want to pick these mysterious side-of-the-road flowers. The BIRD is saying don't pick these flowers. Why are you still picking these flowers? Why give us the option at all, if it doesn't matter?) There are plenty of games with dialogue options that don't matter, sure, but it's never any less annoying. I'd rather not have a dialogue option than have one that doesn't matter at all, especially in this type of game. When you're not clicking through dialogue, you're tending to your garden and making spells. The garden is pretty straight-forward and easy to handle; harvest your plants, pull weeds to make fertilizer, water your plants so they grow, repeat. Making the spells, however? Less straight-forward. Sure, the game automatically fills in the components you need to look for when you're checking out letters (which kinda makes the whole idea of the letters needing to be "figured out" at all kind of pointless, if it's just going to do it for you), but there's not a whole lot of direction or clue on what to do when you get to your potion table, and it's not super intuitive. "Match the symbols from the plants to your order, make sure you have the right base, click the cauldron." Some plants have a shape, color, and symbol. Some just have a color and symbol. Some of the colors in your book don't quite match the colors in the orders, for some reason. At first, I thought I needed to, idk, mix the colors of the plants to get the one I needed. I guess I was overthinking. I also -- along with many others, if you check the discussions or youtube videos -- assumed that once you have the plants on the table, you need to put them into the cauldron by clicking on them again. And there's no visual or audio cue of what happens when you click on them once they're on the table (hint: they're not going into the cauldron), so I'd pull stuff out of the ingredients chest, then click them to "put them in the cauldron," and click the cauldron and... nothing. There's no "you don't have the right ingredients" or "you need ingredients" warning. I thought it was broken, but nope, you're supposed to just leave the plants on the table. But the hint/tutorial for the ONE gameplay mechanic is not good. There's some weird buggy/quality-of-life stuff, too -- like if you click on your bed, cycle through all the dialogue, and then decide you're not ready to sleep, you gotta go through all that dialogue again when you are. Even with all that, once I finally found an answer to how the spell-making actually worked, and accepted the mc was just gonna be an unlikable caricature, I was starting to have some fun. But there was one (seemingly tiny) thing I couldn't fix that finally broke me. The proverbial straw on the camel's back: the dialogue-advancing click sound only plays on the right side of your headset/earphones. It was so grating, I actually played most of my time with my headset off my right ear so I didn't have to hear it. However, that was physically uncomfortable so I finally just stopped playing.
• gamedeal user

  Feb 1, 2023

  At first, I agreed with all the reviews saying the character you play is somewhat annoying and rude. But as the game progresses, the playable character learns and grows, which to me, makes the story more impactful. A little more variety in text options, character clothing, and playable character options (for example, actually not stealing the mushrooms) would benefit the game a lot, but overall I think it's very cute and worth the while.
• gamedeal user

  Oct 1, 2022

  I was really hoping to like this game but after playing it for an hour, it is not for me. It is very one way or the highway. Absolutely 0 freedom at all. I thought I would be able to make potions and stuff more in depth but this is more about the story i guess. It is a ton of text to read and you are unable to skip anything. Heaven forbid if you accidentally click on something twice and have to go through the dialog all over again. Love the art style though, its super cute.
• gamedeal user

  Oct 3, 2022

  So it is a toss up for me. Personally, I was expecting more witch gameplay. There wasn't a whole lot, I'll be honest. Crafting potions, incense, etc. was enjoyable but that's all you really did. Throw some flowers on a table and click a cauldron. At one point runes were mentioned but they don't really have you do much with them. It's just "Here are some options, pick one" and that's it. I feel like more could have been done to make the game feel more like "I'm playing a witch" rather than "I'm watching a witch". Lots of clicking, lots of dialog. It can get a bit mundane, and although I do like visual novels, when I bought this game that's not what I thought I was paying for. The story is cute, the characters are cute. I wish there was a bit "more" for the romance aspect (example being: More romance dialog, character options, drawings of scenes). Overall no one is boring. All the personalities are different and you find yourself relating to at least one person. The only negative thing I have to say is the PC is a bit one sided on personality. Yes, you have choices in which they answer, but overall they have a personality you don't really control. Then of course there are a few dialog errors. Grammar mistakes, punctuation... things of that sort. I found an issue when people were talking in long quantities. It would skip the conversation to the next part before they were done speaking which was odd but not detrimental... Overall nothing that isn't expected on a new release that can't easily be patched later. So... would I recommend this game? Yes, but probably only to people who enjoy visual novels. It's a lot of reading and not a lot of playing as a witch doing witch things.
• gamedeal user

  Jan 20, 2023

  This game was fun. Some pros, I liked the art style. The story line was pretty nice, and it was pretty comforting to tend to the garden and male potions. It was fun learning about the characters that surrounded the main character, and the pronoun choices were amazing. Now the cons... replaying the game isn't very appealing, and to get every achievement you have to replay it at least 6 times. This would be fine if there was a save system that wasn't simply continue, or if you can go into whatever day you wanted, but since there isn't... you have to restart the entire game. That's at least 6 times of the same thing over and over. It's a nice game once, maybe twice, but 6? Also, endless mode is confusing and you can't keep your witch from the regular game. :( For the first playthrough I highly recommend it, but after that? It's a struggle.
• gamedeal user

  Oct 22, 2022

  This game let me be a misanthropic goth with some artsy best friends, a pet crow, and a neurodivergent himbo that blushes every time I speak, what else could I ask for
• gamedeal user

  Oct 4, 2022

  The positive thing is that the game's art is really cute. The game is very gender neutral, so you can make your character however you like. On to the negatives. The customisation options are quite limited and unfortunately, if you are masculine presenting, the options for masculine appearing clothing are not many. The game is very 1 dimensional and there there is no freedom to do anything other than some dialogue options. Even the romance/flirt options are very obviously highlighted. I was bored out of my mind within the first week and didn't manage to reach the end. I do not recommend this game at the current price point.