Witchfinders (Tania Dreams)
Played on: 8th October
How I played it: Downloaded and ran on Opera
How long I spent: 50 minutes for 6 runs (including a perfect ending and a failure)
Witchfinders is a short puzzlebox Twine game which will probably take 10-20 minutes for your first run. You are a witch in Edinburgh in 1827, trying to help and heal your friends and neighbours without drawing the suspicions of the populace.
I enjoyed my time with Witchfinders – I’m saying that now because I’m about to front-load some complaints. Witchfinders makes a lot of work for itself early on with a bad first impression. The spelling and grammar of the opening paragraphs are awkward, but since the author tells us in the post-game About page that English isn’t their first language, that’s forgivable. (And actually, the standard of English is very good once you’re past the intro.)
More problematic is the text styling. The white Impact font on a black background becomes hard to read when the text is bolded, making the letters bleed into each other, and close to illegible when it changes colour to blue-on-black. I’ve checked this in a couple of browsers in case it’s an Opera issue, but Chrome and Edge look about the same. Also, given the association with terrible early-2010s Reddit memes, I think Impact is kind of an odd choice for a realist-fantasy historical fiction game. I’m trying not to harp on styling much this year, but it’s an immediate problem with Witchfinders.
Once the game starts properly, though, it’s very pleasing and playable. I like the way Witchfinders lays out what it calls its “house rules” – that is, what certain colours of text mean. This makes Witchfinders approachable as a puzzle game, and it builds trust that you won’t be whisked away to a game over because you clicked a link that looked like it would just expand some text. I know I just said the colours can be too hard to read, and they are, but associating the colours with mechanical effects is a good idea.
The core gameplay loop of Witchfinders is to explore a section of Edinburgh, talking to people and using magical means to help them with their problems. Say the wrong thing, or act too obviously witch-y, and someone will become suspicious of you (flagged up in grey text, in a way that’s reminiscent of the old Telltale “So-And-So will remember that” pop-ups) and you’ll gain a Witch Point; gain four Witch Points, and it’s game over, as you skip town before the Witchfinders can catch up with you. This adds some tension to navigating the puzzles, but it’s not so troublesome – it’s usually pretty obvious what the wrong thing to say is, and having four chances gives you plenty of room for error.
The NPCs are a subtle strength of Witchfinders. Their mixed reactions to you help the game to suggest the politics and traumas of witch-hunting. These NPCs are not always suspicious or hostile. Alexina seems to avoid asking any questions about how exactly you’ll help her husband’s cattle, and another NPC, approached in the right way, will prove to be fully on your side. The politics of witch-hunting are not delved into as they might be in a different kind of game, but they add a little intrigue to the setting. The author also gives themselves some leeway with a deliberately ahistorical setting – as they point out in the About page, the 19th century is well past the peak of witchcraft accusations in Scotland. This allows the game to be a little playful with the history and geography of Edinburgh. Again, it’s not a big thing, but it’s there and it’s appreciated.
The puzzles are generally reasonable and straightforward. They’re all of the format “get item A, do something witchy to it, give it to Person B”. The challenge is to put the puzzle solutions together while avoiding Witch Points in order to get a perfect score at the end of the game. I managed this and I just about enjoyed doing it. Unfortunately, there’s a lot of friction to it that I’m not sure is supposed to be there. For example, it’s not clear how to end the game until you’ve done it by accident. It seems to happen when you’ve helped the sick child after offering to help Alexina’s cattle, even if you haven’t helped the cattle yet. If you haven’t, the game’s ending suggests you were unable to figure out how to help the cattle. If you were planning to help the cattle after the child, the game cutting you off like this is surprising and a little galling.
There’s a bigger issue which I think is a design oversight – if it’s deliberate, it’s not a very kind design choice. You know how I said you can offer to help the cattle? You can also choose to end the conversation and miss that choice for the rest of the game, as you can with a couple of other NPCs. Problem is, if you do that you don’t trip the flag that the game’s ending needs, so you can’t end the game. You can lock off other puzzles like this, too, and get yourself completely stuck. My first run ended in a reset because I’d locked myself out in this way.
If this is accidental, there needs to be a little more attention paid to how the player can get stuck; if it’s deliberate, I think there should be more warning that this is part of the puzzle, because it’s not fun to be stuck on a puzzle and not be sure if there’s a solution you’re not seeing or if it’s just unsolvable now. The walkthrough also needs to be better – pretty much all it does is reiterate your objectives, making it frankly useless for getting yourself unstuck. Luckily Witchfinders is small enough that it’s quick to replay if you think you’ve broken something and you can pretty much brute-force the whole thing, but I might not have bothered if this had been a bigger game.
Despite this, I did work out Witchfinders, and I did get a perfect score at the end of the day, and I did enjoy putting together the whole solution. It was very pleasing to string everything together properly to get the perfect run, and not so frustrating to do once I worked out how I kept breaking the game. I think the idea for Witchfinders is fantastic, and the setting and structure are great, but this could be a much smoother game with some work on its presentation and with fewer one-shot chances for the player to progress.