You may remember, you may not, but when I played Witchspire’s early demo at the top of 2026, I was frankly disappointed. Not the sort of soul-flattening crushing disappointment that leads you to wish you’d never taken a look at a game in the first place, but the more familiar and subtle sort of disappointment where you feel a combination of “this is not ready for prime time” and “the ideas I was excited by are not developed enough.” So it was with some trepidation that I saw the game was planning its early access launch soon.
I am speaking to you now after having played the game’s early access build. And I can tell you… oh, it’s better. It’s so much better.
Seriously, not only is this the game I had hoped to find during the early demo, but it is also such a massive improvement in just a few months that it felt overwhelming at times. Every single thing that I had flagged as a problem has been refined and improved, and the game went from being a letdown to a real rush of fun.
For example, not only did starting the game now give me much more character creation options, but the game actually has revised its starting setup so that your initial choice of school matters more tangibly right away. Some schools start with a wand, some start with a blade, and you can see exactly what the differences are up-front. And just as helpfully, your choice of familiar is now something that happens after you start your tutorial, which explains numerous concepts to you.
Also, yes, you have a tutorial now! You even have a tutorial questline explaining what you are doing and why you should care right away, while giving you an idea of what your particular familiar does. The pathfinding issues from the demo? Gone, with your familiar much more likely to pop back to your side if it gets stuck. If you don’t know that you can craft stuff to mine now, the game will tell you – and it also has a number of places where you’re likely to get pickaxes to get you started, too, if you explore a little.
It’s all so much clearer. I no longer feel as if I’d be lost if I hadn’t played games like this. I feel like the game rewards me for familiarity; now it is gently guiding me to do the things I need.
More importantly, every element of the game has been cleaned up. Instead of making me feel as if I don’t know how to specialize in things or advance, the game clearly displays not just my level but what I get on leveling up – and since leveling up grants points that both go to combat and non-combat goals, it now grants more. There are, in fact, gates to prevent you from overspecializing too early, but it now feels both clearer and more guided while practically giving you a wider array of choices.
Another useful change is that your weapons and tools are more clearly bimodal, with a spell used with right-click while left-click remains the main method. It helps contribute even early to the sense that you aren’t just cutting trees; you’re a witch using a specialized spell to cut trees. You get proper tutorials for these things! You also get proper tutorials for doing things like assigning familiars to crafting stations and for gathering familiars in the first place, explaining “hey, these early enemies can become familiars, now you can assign one to this production structure to produce more quickly, this is a normal interaction.”
Some parts of the game are still a little bit janky. Some menu fonts still look like they’re placeholders or like the UI features haven’t been fully designed (which makes a certain amount of sense for early access), even if the actual UI is still legible and works. There was one part where I finished a quest and it updated to the next step with a voiceover, but there wasn’t actual quest tracking on-screen until I left the area altogether and it popped back up.
Perhaps most notable is the fact that the game clearly wants dodging and dashing to be a mechanic in combat, which I can get behind, but as it stands now the keybinding isn’t great, and it also isn’t particularly clear when to dodge. Don’t get me wrong, enemy attack animations are clear enough, but ranged attacks frequently have a degree of homing that make “when do I dodge” a serious question. The fact that I can’t double-tap a direction to dodge is also frustrating.
These are, however, the sort of things you expect to get refined and improved during early access. It’s reasonable to gripe about it, but it is hardly destructive to the experience. And, in fact, considering how all of my gripes from the demo have been taken into account, I think griping is a key to improvement here.
In fact, that element makes me feel the most positive about the game at this point. That might sound backwards, to be more excited about a game because it’s messy, but the reality is that Witchspire’s developers were no doubt clearly aware of their weaknesses when the demo hit and were collecting feedback. This is a clear picture of people taking action to improve the game in a fairly short span of time.
If you’re completely exhausted by survival sandboxes, of course, maybe this still will not charm you. You do not have to fight against a dozen gauges to keep things working here, but it is broadly a matter of going out, collecting materials to build your house, then building your house and moving on. That might not be enough for you!
But if the art style and the promise of simple but broadly fun combat with your witch familiar does sound charming to you, then at this point, I can safely say that Witchspire delivers. There’s a solid tutorial, much better and more thoughtful design, better guidance, and improvements to every part of the game that I thought was lacking before. I didn’t want to put this one down. I still don’t. I look forward to seeing it improve more over the course of early access, and I hope it find the audience it deeply deserves.
A lot of the time, I play early game builds that functionally go on to be the final build with a layer of polish on top. Here, I can see the amount of effort and care that has been put into the game from its early development state. That speaks to a studio that’s clearly committed to the game and working hard, and I think you should give it a look yourself.
And if you like big witch hats? Buddy, you are in for a time.
