First impressions of Witchfire
I played a couple hours of Witchfire and really enjoyed it!
It has pretty fantastic Gun Feel (I am not an expert on this) and a stun system which rewards the player for dashing directly at their enemies. I love a combat system with a unique, meaty hook. The dashing-to-reveal-weak-spots mechanic in Witchfire affects your decision-making strongly enough that it does remind me of the strong effects that Bloodborne's combat design had on my playstyle in that game. Witchfire is good at getting me, a loser, to commit and be violent. I like that!
The game is a solo extraction "roguelike" shooter across several set maps. You go in to one of these levels, then try to get out alive. The arrangement of traps and challenges in the level changes periodically - I believe leveling up triggers a rearrangement of challenges, but I'm not sure what else. Dying leaves your stuff behind; if you live, you get to go to the hub and spend various currencies on upgrades and unlocks.
I am also a big fan of its hub level. The hub is a morose, drafty castle filled with extremely witchy-churchy stuff... there are locked doors sealed with ominous phrases like "YOU MUST HAVE GNOSIS II TO UNDERSTAND THESE SYMBOLS" and stuff like that. Whatever the hell "Gnosis II" means is not explained until you have started to unlock some of the doors.
I really like that! It's just resistant enough to encourage you to poke at it, but not too opaque to start unravelling some fun secrets within an hour or two. In general, this philosophy is true across the game - it will put on a mysterious face, but it's actually quite forgiving and generous.
After achieving "Gnosis I" through a couple quite-friendly quest objectives (they encouraged me to explore rather than to do anything particularly wise, or difficult) I was also pleased to see the world get more complex and strange. There are a lot of good, weird little things in the world that unveil kind of layer-by-layer - additional types of enemies or challenges or traps added. As soon as I hit "Gnosis I", my next trip into the world introduced me to two or three new types of challenges almost immediately. The game is doing a good job, so far, of opening its difficulty up to me in a way I can handle.
Highly recommend checking it out! I haven't gotten too far in the game yet, but I bought it because I watched a friend get attacked by a flying sailing ship in this game. It crashed into the ground (?) near him and he freaked the fuck out and started shouting "oh shit!!!"
I thought to myself: I want to play a game that freaks me out that bad, right now!! So I did!