Witching Stone
The Summer of Demos : Day Thirty
Witching Stone is a roguelike where -- wait, wait! I know you have a Balatro run to be getting back to but this one's worth your attention. Here, you clear lines of stones to use your spells and can affix badges to augment them.
In battle you draw paths between stones to use your spells. So long as you connect the stones in the order the spell specifies it doesn't matter which other stones are in the path. Unlike other puzzlers like Panel De Pon or Puzzles & Dragons there's no penalty for taking your time as combat is turn-based and entirely at your own pace. You cannot choose your targets in combat, with attacks always hitting the leftmost foe, so reserving some spells for a later turn is wise.
Between battles, you travel around a map looking for trouble and shopkeepers. The enemy icons work on a traffic light system, so you can quickly tell if you want to take a different path. You can go anywhere on the map as you please, with no path choices locking you out of others. A thorough Act One run takes around 20 minutes but you can beeline for the boss if you want to.
Most of the game has a pixelated art style but the character creation screen shows character art by Sam Miller of the playable characters Gwen, Ceridwen (unlockable) and Aerfen (not in the demo). Honestly, the high definition art feels incongruous inside of the game but are good box art representations of the characters.
So many puzzlers demand fast reactions as garbage pushes you out of the screen if you take too long deciding your move so I appreciated Witching Stone’s slower pace. The game caught my eye during The Infinite Review's E3 2024 video and I look forward to playing through all three acts with all the characters when the game launches later this year.
In a word : bewitching.
Witching Stone is an upcoming puzzler RPG developed and published by Alexander Taylor for PC via Itch and Steam for late 2024. All images used copyright of Alexander Taylor unless otherwise stated.
Thanks for your patience with this article. I've been travelling and it turns out that writing and getting images on this phone isn't that easy. Also, I locked myself out of Substack so enjoy this article two weeks after it was originally written. I’m back!