Review: Witchy Life Story is a rambling visual novel that should have been a magical experience, but wasn’t

Witchy Life Story seemed right up my alley. I love games that allow me to play with potions aspects. So, being able to brew all kinds of different incenses, oils, and such with plants from my own garden seemed to be a winning combination.

Unfortunately, what I hoped would be a fun time filling orders and discovering new potions turned into a massive chore of listening to dialogue.

Witchy Life Story Gameplay and Controls

Witchy Life Story is a visual novel about a spoiled brat of a witch who is sent to help the village of Flora at her Gran’s behest. Coming only with your crow familiar, Ramsey, you’re meant to help the villagers as they get ready for the festival happening in two weeks.

Mysteriously, the witch that used to live in Flora is gone, for reasons we’re never told, and you take up residence in her old home. You’re given everything you need, including a garden out back where you can take cuttings and maintain the plants. 

The most fun you’ll have is creating spells for the townsfolk. Every morning, letters will be left in your mailbox with requests from the villagers, asking for help with one problem or another. With the use of your grimoire and their requests, you’re able to tailor-make spells using your plant ingredients to create potions, incense, charms, and oils.

Here’s where things get tedious. Not only do you have to deliver your potions to the villagers, but you need to check up on them the next day. This means that every single day, you have to engage in endless lines of dialogue with each person. It’s fine at first, but when you realize that 90% of gameplay is just clicking a button, it gets taxing. I gave up around day 9 or 10 and just started spamming the button. 

Other than the potion making, the only other redeeming feature is the character creation. When it came to being able to pick your features, I felt like there was a ton of representation from black hairstyles to hijabs, body types, and even the ability to choose body hair. 

I always appreciate when you’re given the option to choose pronouns and this game went even further than the standard “they/them” options and let you choose “she/they” as well.

Choices made for romanceable characters were pretty solid with your standard male, non-binary, and female options. I, also, appreciate that they included a black representation in the options. (Niesha was my favorite, but I’ll talk more about why I couldn’t romance her in the cons.)

Art and Sound

The art is the best part of this game, hands down. I love the softer lines that make everything look hand-drawn. Additionally, I loved the character creation, even if I felt the styles didn’t quite fit what I would have liked. 

The garden was lovely and I adored seeing all the care put into making the potions all different colors and shapes.

As for the music… I’m sad to say that it felt very generic and didn’t really fit the game for me. I ended up turning it off because it was too distracting for the focus I needed to read all the dialogue. 

Coziness and Cons

The cozy factor in this game rests purely on the laurels of the potion’s making portion which is scarce at best. One could argue that it being a visual novel is enough for it to have some amount of cozy, but when the dialogue drolls on and on, it’s less cozy and more boring.

As for cons, there are quite a few, unfortunately. Starting with the least offensive, the typos are something that I don’t normally nitpick, but there are more than a few that pop up in this game. Witchy Life Story would have done well with having an editor look through it.

That’s easy to overlook, honestly. But, what isn’t as easy to look past is the fact that there is a bug in this game or worse, a way to thoroughly screw yourself over without knowing. Ramsey is supposed to bring you shiny gemstones every so often. Honestly, it was so infrequent, that I don’t know if it was meant to be every other day or not. But, unfortunately, he never brought me a Citrine. 

I don’t know if it’s triggered on one specific day and, if you don’t get it that day, you’ve locked yourself out. But, I call bullshit on that front. Since there are several days that Ramsey brings you nothing, there should never have been a reason for you to be blocked out of receiving a certain stone.

And it’s not a localized bug. Looking online, it seems that others have had this problem with other gemstones. Curiously, it’s only gemstones that are related to romanceable characters. Some people were missing Jonas’ stone, others were missing Devin’s, and I was missing Niesha’s. Without this stone, you can not move forward with that storyline. You’ve played through HOURS of dialogue to be told at the end that you have to basically play again to fix it. That’s unacceptable.

The last con is a personal preference. I hated the attitude of the main character. I can appreciate picking a character trait, but some of the dialog options were just downright uncomfortable. Of the three options, you were rarely given a softer way of phrasing something. So, you just had to decide which bitchy way you were going to respond to something.

It did seem to get a little better, but the narrative was deadset on you not having much character growth. You were meant to be belligerent and overconfident. As a player, I didn’t care for that point of view. 

And honestly, it’s not just your character that has attitude problems. Flora is a town of unhappy people. For a game that forces you to interact with every character every day, it’s a miserable experience.

Verdict

If you’re getting to the verdict and thinking that it sounds like I just don’t like visual novels, that’s simply not true. A lot of visual novels suffer from trying to make the game longer by adding in unneeded dialogue and that’s where this game failed – among the other reasons I mentioned.

Visual novels need to tell a damn good story and they need to do it in an engaging way. You can’t just force the player to interact with every villager repeatedly and expect that to be enough.

All this to say, I don’t recommend playing Witchy Life Story. I had high hopes for it since it has potions and witchy vibes with a charming art style. But, man, was this one a letdown, especially when a bug kept me from being able to finish the game the way that I wanted to.

If you want to check it out, you can. Witchy Life Story is available on Steam for $19.99. If you want to check out a visual novel we do recommend, then you can check out our review of Universe for Sale or The Murder of Sonic the Hedgehog.

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