Garden of Witches Is a Storybook Roguelike With a Cozy Face and a Dark Heart

The run structure is classic action roguelike, tuned for readability and momentum. You move through rooms clearing enemies, picking up passive buffs and skill upgrades along the way, and cap each stage with a boss. The 1.0 release rebuilt the build system around four pillars, your Scissors, Spells, Imprints, and Relics, and layered in new mechanics like Charge, Combo, and Channeling, so assembling a run is a matter of stacking those pieces into something that snowballs. The dice-reroll on your starting spells adds a welcome dose of agency to the randomness, letting you steer toward a build rather than simply accept what you are dealt.

The scissors are the signature, and they set the rhythm. Landing consecutive hits builds toward guaranteed critical strikes, which encourages an aggressive, stay-in-the-fight cadence, and the invincibility dash is your pressure valve for weaving through boss patterns. Spells provide the range and the spectacle, from thrown cat dolls to fireballs to sweeping area slashes and counters, and the interplay between reliable melee and flashier magic is where the moment-to-moment satisfaction lives. When a build comes together, the loop has a real snap to it.

The bosses are the best idea in the game, because the bosses are the witches. Rather than playable characters or collectible allies, Sil's wayward sisters appear as distinct boss encounters, each with her own personality, transformations, and attack patterns, and rounding them up for the Tea Party is woven directly into the roguelike loop. It gives the fights narrative weight that most roguelikes cannot match, turning each stage's climax into a character beat as much as a mechanical test, and it is the clearest sign of a studio that thought about why you are fighting, not just how.

Meta-progression is handled through Sil's diary, where you spend the spoils of failed runs on permanent stat upgrades, mostly to attack power. It is the familiar roguelike safety net, letting persistent players gradually brute-force past a wall that pure skill has not yet cleared, and it keeps the difficulty welcoming rather than punishing. Combined with the 1.0 additions of default keyboard-and-mouse support and Japanese voice acting through the fifth chapter, it is a package that feels polished and considerate rather than raw.

The honest weaknesses are two. First, the melee can feel less satisfying than the magic, with some players finding the scissors the weaker half of the combat next to the flashier, more impactful spells, though the 1.0 overhaul reworked these systems and softened the earlier complaints. Second, and more simply, it is short: the story runs in the region of a handful of hours, and there is not a great deal to do outside the roguelike runs themselves, so players who want a sprawling content buffet or a lot of downtime interaction between fights will find it lean. What is here is very good. There is just not an enormous amount of it.

The presentation is the headline, and it deserves to be. Garden of Witches is hand-drawn in a storybook, illustrated style, all dreamlike backdrops and expressive character portraits, and it is consistently singled out as the game's high point for good reason. The dark-fairy-tale tone lets the art swing between genuinely cozy and quietly unsettling, often in the same room, and the witches themselves are the showcase, each redesigned into a memorable monstrous form for her boss fight. It is a small game that looks like a labor of love, and that care is visible in every frame.

The soundtrack matches it and then some. A cozy, jazz-leaning score sets the between-fights mood and then ramps up smartly when combat begins, and like the art it is one of the things players reach for first when they explain why they like the game. Together the audio and visual identity do a lot of the work of making a mechanically familiar roguelike feel like its own distinct place, and they are the strongest argument for the game beyond the loop itself.

As a piece of craft, Garden of Witches is the confident work of a studio that knew exactly what it wanted to feel like. Team Tapas built a roguelike that is legible and satisfying to play and wrapped it in presentation well above its weight class, and the priorities show: this is a game that spent its resources on charm, character, and mood, and it is richer for it. The result punches above a budget indie's expected reach on style alone.