Title: Cooking Witch
Genre: Action, Casual, Indie
Developer: VaragtP
Publisher: VaragtP
Release Date: May 18, 2017
In Cooking Witch you are a witch flying to a party in the woods, abducting the children and cooking and eating them. That’s how Steam bills this one man indie game and it’s a pretty apt description. It also completely describes this single screen game. Well, I can add a little to that description by saying that Cooking Witch is so ugly looking that it will give you serious headaches while playing. Yeah, this is going to be one of those sorts of review.
A lot of time indie games come through our email and we simply can’t get to them all because of time, but for whatever reason I decided to install this one as the screenshots looked pretty wild. Come to find out what I thought was wild, was actually just a developer who doesn’t understand the idea what sorts of colors compliment each other. Cooking Witch is the sort of game that happens when a unicorn stays out far too late and takes one too many Yeager shots.
Looking at the game, Cooking Witch is about as simple as they come. You play as a pixelated witch and fly around the screen on your broomstick snatching up kids. You take these kids back to your enormous cooking cauldron for you magic soup. And, well, that’s about it for the gameplay section of this review. Okay, so you totally earn various powerups the more missions you complete, but the game never really changes.
Missions really only add to the amount of kids captured or “Daddy’s” knocked out. I know that sounds like some kink thing, but Daddy’s are just adults with shotguns that work to drop you out of the sky. If all this sounds a little like Choplifter you’re not far off. The only thing is that the original Choplifter does it a bit better on pretty much every level. That’s not to say that Cooking Witch doesn’t work, it just doesn’t offer anything new or worthwhile.
What is more strange than anything is how poorly Cooking Witch sometimes runs. There are forum posts on how to tweak the quality settings on a game that wouldn’t even stress the original Nintendo Entertainment System. Whenever you pick up kids (awkward thing to type out) the game slows down to a crawl when you get near your cauldron. I blame this on the giant cauldron not fitting into the overall game as it looks like a 3D model spewing all sorts of effects. I also have no idea what the witch is. Look at the screenshot above and tell me what that thing looks like.
There are also no real physics in the game, only the illusion of it. You can pull a child across the map and it will shift how you might imagine, but as soon as you let go all momentum stops amd they will fall straight down wherever you are, like a pair of concrete shoes in the Hudson. You also are on a time limit so games are going to pass pretty quickly, and you can expect to play dozens of matches to unlock upgrades for the same stage.
Cooking Witch might only be $1.99 on Steam, but there are dozens upon dozens of free mobile games that look and play better than this one. It’s not terrible game, just very amateurish. I think an understanding of color clashing would have really done wonders for this little indie title. It might make for a few minutes of fun, but it’s a hard pass on Steam, a platform where you can find lots of quality titles for that price during any given sale.
Final Score:
2/5
// Promoted Stories
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