Review: Tiny Witch (Nintendo Switch)
Set in a world crawling with monsters, Tiny Witch is a cute game that gives you a crucial yet often uncredited role in the dungeon-crawler landscape. You play as a witch that runs a little shop where you use simple recipes to create minions to populate the labyrinths run by various dungeon masters who make up your customers.
Tiny Witch doesn’t have much of a narrative. It begins with a character trapping you in the shop in a way that feels like it’s going to expand to a wider story—perhaps you have to buy your freedom with enough commercial success. But there doesn’t end up being much conflict. That character is a vehicle for the tutorial, for updates about the changes to the game as your progress, and for any tips you might need along the way.
The gameplay takes the form of running the shop, creating minions out of simple recipes consisting of two or three ingredients. You have one core material in your shop which you have to prepare using different methods that result in new ingredients. You then combine these to create the minions your customers need. As you progress through the game, you get different recipes that create different minions, but they stay relatively simple, and the processes by which you generate new materials remain fairly consistent.
The success of each day is dependent on how many sales you make. A tracker shows how close you are to your day’s target with each sale you make. Customers pay a set amount for each minion you sell, but will tip if you are quick to get them their order. You can chat with them to increase their patience if you’re running behind. But if you take too long, not only will you lose your sale, they will attack you, causing further delays to your other orders.
At the end of each day, you can buy items for your shop with the money you have earned. Some upgrades, like specific new types of cauldron and pestle, are required to make the new recipes for the next day, and you can’t progress without purchasing them. Others are optional and offer you a boost, making you faster or obstacles less effective or customers more generous or patient. It’s a nice touch, but the customisation options are largely functional. There isn’t a lot of scope for things like decoration, which would lean into the cosy feel of this game.
Each day represents a new level, with a higher target, more customers, and more challenges to face. Once you’ve completed a set number of days, you move to a new shop in one of four areas on the map. Each new area comes with new ingredients to use and new minions to make, reflecting the type of dungeons you might find in the mountains, for example, compared to the desert.
Tiny Witch is a genuinely fun game that feels like it doesn’t quite go far enough with what it’s trying to achieve. It’s cosy, but could offer more options to make your shop feel like your own. It offers a good balance of developing a rhythm and challenging yourself, but could offer more creative recipe options. The story established at the beginning helps set the scene, but doesn’t offer a lot of depth. It would be nice to see the character return with more of a personality even if it’s just through making the occasional comment about your progress. This is justifiable as the game isn’t particularly expensive, but it also feels like a little elevation could get it much closer to achieving its full potential.
