Garden of Witches Early Access Impressions
Garden of Witches is a whimsical, spooky action roguelite from Team Tapas.
Garden of Witches. Team Tapas
Garden of Witches is a roguelite action‑RPG from Korean indie studio Team Tapas that is now on Steam Early Access. You progress through a series of story chapters with gameplay reminiscent of Hades, the game that has informed the design of so many games in the genre that came after it.
From Steam:
Garden of Witches is a roguelike action game in which you have to round up a coven of unruly witches in order to halt the collapse of their garden home. Enhance your arsenal of spells, and conquer each stage and boss with a new build every time, finding your own unique path to survival as you learn to read patterns and time your actions with perfection. Failure is not just permitted, but recommended! The more you repeat, the stronger and farther you’ll get! An emotional tale filled with strategic choices and non-stop action awaits you in the world of witches!
Garden of Witches. Team Tapas
Each chapter of the game is about organizing the next tea party, the ritual key to preventing the witches’ home’s collapse. You control Sil, a sewing witch who wields a giant pair of scissors, as she struggles to corral the witches in her coven to get them to hold the tea party on time. Of course, it turns out the only way to do this is to fight them. The narrative is a bit thin, but the game has strong themes of friendship, community, empathy, and responsibility that I hope will get explored more deeply as the game evolves in Early Access.
Garden of Witches is strongly inspired by Hades. Randomized skill trees over a playthrough, metaprogression with incremental upgrades after death, and branching dungeons where players choose a path based on upcoming rewards. Combat is also similar, with melee, upgradable special attacks, and status effect bonuses.
Garden of Witches. Team Tapas
Each chapter introduces a new aspect of the game’s combat systems, an interesting approach to teaching the player how it all works together. However, it’s detrimental in practice because the game isn’t that lengthy, and it takes too long to get to elementary features such as new weapons. A better approach might be to push that all into a prologue or the first chapter so that the rest of the game feels more meaty. Playing the first couple of chapters, it feels like there isn’t much to the game, and by the time I had the full picture, the game was nearly over.
I also hope that the game adds more variety to its enemies and biomes to explore what could be richer combat more fully. Changing up the boss encounters for each chapter isn’t enough. In general, the amount of content feels shallow, but that may be partly due to the systems progression I mentioned. I wasn’t motivated to keep playing once the story was over, either. Team Tapas has committed to various updates ahead of the full release at the end of the year, so I expect many of these issues to be alleviated.
Garden of Witches. Team Tapas
There’s a lot to like in Garden of Witches. Cute and creepy art, interesting combat systems, and a unique story. However, I might recommend waiting until the next big update this summer before checking the game out, when it will likely be beefier.
Garden of Witches is available now on Steam in Early Access.
Played on: Steam Deck
