PC Critic Reviews

Witch Strandings is a simple yet fascinating game that manages to build a world and make you care about it with little detail at all.

An elegantly simple adventure that proves this new genre has legs.

Witch Strandings is a game that some players will truly appreciate. There's something truly distinctive about it, and there's really nothing else quite like it available. As such, those who can get on board with its strangeness will come away with something that lasts long in the memory.

Witch Strandings is an intriguing experiment that underdelivers on complexity but excels in atmospheric emulation and simple gameplay. I cannot help but want more from Witch Strandings, and I hope that Strange Scaffold continues to build on this experiment.

Taking after fairy tales, Witch Strandings manages to tell a predictable story in unpredictable ways. It can often be painful to play but the experience is one I won't forget soon. Witch Strandings is a game I'm glad exists, even if I'm not sure I enjoyed it all that much.

"Will leave you wanting more at every turn," says Witch Strandings' Steam blurb; that's accurate, but not quite in the way intended. [Issue#375, p.121]

Witch Strandings is a bold experiment to build a barebones version of Death Stranding’s core loop. Bold, but ultimately futile.

Witch Strandings is a game that really wanted to emphasize the importance of connections as well as nurturing the relationships between characters, but the control scheme made it hard for me to really get into it. While there were story details to be found around the world, it felt like there wasn’t enough guidance to help a player get the ball rolling. I understand that exploration should be the driving force but something like this could really use a guiding hand for the first few minutes outside of the tutorial to help bring the player along.

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.