Witch Strandings review

I had no idea what a ‘strand game’ was before playing Witch Strandings, and even now I’m not entirely sure. There’s little in the form of striking visuals or grand set pieces, no wonderfully designed creatures or striking vistas. The gameplay is restricted to simply moving a mouse across a screen and clicking on the occasional item, and in terms of a story, it rarely stretches beyond a few lines of dialogue. However, despite its minimalistic approach, there’s something remarkable about it. 

Witch Strandings is captivating. It manages to make you care about this once beautiful forest now corrupted by a witch and her darkness. As a strand of light gliding across a grid of seldom colour and detail, you must find the souls lost in the darkness, using whatever you can to help save them and build the connection with the grand tree sat at the heart of it. Although there is little in the way of detail, plenty of environmental dangers litter your way.

As you use your mouse to glide across the tiles, you’ll come across various obstacles that will need a specific item to help you cross. For example, you may be slowed down by quicksand, poisoned vines, or deadly hexes. If you touch these squares, your life will be drained and you’ll lose any health you have. By using glimmering stones or other particular objects, these pathways can be cleared or travelled across safely, allowing you to escape to the other side.

While Witch Strandings can be confusing at first, the map isn’t ridiculously large. There are no directions, or a way to look at where you are or where you are heading. It can be frustrating at first, given the lack of detail other than different coloured blocks and the nuances in their design. As you continue to explore, there’re changes in the fantastic musical score that help you to remember where you are, and across the forest, there’re various structures that can be rebuilt to act as fast travel points.

The main focus is to help save various souls within the forest who may have fallen sick, become thirsty or hungry, are injured, or their minds have been affected by the witch. There’re many different items scattered across the map that can help cure them, such as blankets, fruit, and elixirs. Eventually, you’ll unlock the option to store an item without having to keep the left button on the mouse held in. This becomes such a useful tool, as much of the map needs to be travelled across with a particular item. When you’re trying to rid the map of purple and pink hexes as well as carrying some meat to a nearby soul, these option helps make the process much simpler.

There is an element of item management, but the fast travel system helps make it a simpler affair. If you need to feed Roger the bunny (not his real name), you can leave some fruit by the decrepit ship before finding a safe way to get back to him, then returning to pick up the food and getting there safely. With saving souls one of the main points of Witch Strandings, I did become frustrated when I couldn’t remember where they were. It’s not a particularly long game, but getting back to one of them with the right item can take longer than it needs to.

The way the narrative has been built with seldom text is a testament to Strange Scaffold’s storytelling. You never ‘see’ exactly what is being detailed, but knowing there are abandoned silos and shipwrecks, sweeping rivers and dilapidated buildings makes the world of Witch Strandings feel fuller than it appears to be to the naked eye. It’s a unique experience, albeit simple in premise, but I was able to enjoy it for what it was without any huge obstacles to overcome.

Witch Strandings is a chilled out experience, taking such a fundamental idea and turning it into something special. The music and atmosphere created exceed anything I expected before stepping in, especially as the visuals aren’t what the focus is here. Bringing life back to a once thriving forest, saving lost souls and giving them hope, and ridding an evil to bring light back to a civilisation can been related to in a big way, especially with how many problems there are within the world right now.