Good day my lovely deviants, and welcome yet again to Joyful Stick-where we review adult games, usually on Steam (though after this entry I’m open to suggestions). Miss the last review? You can read it here. Today we’re going to…
Today we’re going to review the absolute worst games I have ever reviewed in this series. There. I said it. I got it out of the way up top. Witch Halloween and Witch 2: Hell Adventure are so ridiculously bad, but not in a way that isn’t worth talking about. There’s something to be had here, some nugget of design philosophy and worth that perhaps budding devs in the field (for I know I’ve a few that read these reviews) can cast their eyes upon and gleam something from.
Let us begin.
An Aesthetic Of Era
Man. Newgrounds.
If you say you never spent at least a single friday surfing it in the early 2000s, you’re a fucking liar. Newgrounds has stood the test of increasingly puritanical times. Maybe you don’t like the content or the people there, but it’s shadow on the adult entertainment community looms massive. Tom Fulp has very brazenly proclaimed the site a safe haven for independent creatives for years. Horror, parodies, porn. It’s all there if you go looking. A game you played as a teenager is likely still searchable even after all this time.
Newgrounds has evolved with the times, but still holds fast to a certain kind of identity. There’s nowhere quite like it, but what sticks out in your brain when you think of it likely isn’t the NG of today. It’s the “old” NG that you gaze backwards at with nostalgia. So when someone drops the name, every memory of those friday nights spent surfing animations and playing poorly animated “dress up” games comes running back to the forefront of your mind. Oh, Slutty McSlutslut, I was a boy when we met-but you quickly made me a man.
The thing about Newgrounds wasn’t the “good” projects though. For every Alien Hominid there was a hundred Stickman fighters and countless entries in the Meet n’ Fuck series. So when a title dropped with style and art in a fucking adobe flash title of all things, you took notice. Animated sex scenes with voice acting was well worth waiting on my dial-up connection to load.
There was nothing quite like those really good NG sex games. Often when writing this series, I think back to those titles with the warmth we all feel for youth.
But memories like that have to remain there-in the distant past, heavily dusted with the distortion of what they meant. A NG title like that dropping today, even for free, wouldn’t be able to capture attention or care for long at all. It’s unlikely to happen, especially in an era where so many game engines are free or almost free after the price of plugins. I, quite seriously, couldn’t imagine getting charged for that kind of experience now.
But sure enough, I was. Roughly fifteen dollars and several hours of my time is what I paid. Here I now sit, booboo the fucking fool for my efforts. TownDarkTales, you win this round.
I mention NG very specifically because both Witch Halloween and Witch 2 have a very “Newgrounds early 2000s” era kind of feel, heavily borrowing from pop-culture edgelord metal interpretations of demons, hell, ghosts and more. Done right, tapping into this very narrow decade can work incredibly well. Sure, the 2000s lacked the enjoyable nuance of the 1990s, but hey! We had Numetal! Isn’t that fun?
But fucking it up is easy. Incredibly fucking easy. Fucking up a nostalgia tap for aesthetics is one of the easiest mistakes you can do. Those eras you love were never as good as you remember, you were just young and not embittered by the world yet. That’s all. The Witch Chronicle games absolutely nail the feeling, the looks, everything from that very niche pop culture cycle. They had actual potential to be great.
It all gets dashed upon the rocks the moment you begin to play.
“What The Literal Fuck Is A Narrative And Why Do I Need One?”
The Witch Chronicle series stars Chelsea, the descendent of some kind of vaguely alluded to relative who was into the occult. Chelsea also likes to dress super skimpy and has tattoos that would have looked right at home on a Hot Topic temporary henna ink set. This, quite frankly, was my first tip off as to what I was in for. Often in NSFW games, you can recognize a popular character right away. Sure, they might be based on a trop, but you know them even if you’d never admit it in popular conversation. Usually it’s character design, their voice actor, something. Chelsea isn’t memorable in any way whatsoever-she’s just there on screen in an outfit you’ve passed a hundred times at Spirit Halloween.
Chelsea in Witch Halloween gets a missive from the Assumed Spooky Adjacent Relative that she’s been left their house, which is totes full of ghosts and demons and shit. This set-up in vaguely horror related games always bugs the fuck out of me. Like, why would you go to the haunted house alone? Literally ever? Ethan did this same shit in Resident Evil 7 and I still haven’t forgiven him. She’s dropped off via a taxi driver as she dumps exposition. The player is then given control to…
Walk left and right. Occasionally, you get to hit the enter key.
That’s it.
That’s the entire game. You move her left and right as you meander through a beautifully drawn circular track of level. You’re going to pass the same tree several times before you realize you can pass into an area in the foreground or background via prompt. However, even being prompted to do so by hitting the Enter key doesn’t necessarily mean it will trigger. That’s right, folks! Seventy percent of the time the player doing a correct action will work a hundred percent of the time!
Along the way Chelsea picks up pieces of paper that are a diary(?) of her relative. They all detail multiple demons, ghosts and spirits that haunt the house and woods. Likewise, they mention an “Inquisitor” figure who will chase Chelsea down. This all sounds super exciting, until you realize the game literally boils down to Chelsea slowly moving away from the (occasionally appearing) Inquisitor while picking up items to offer denizens of the house and woods. I mean, if the player wants. You totally can just fuck them instead. Just uh, don’t expect a whole lot in variety. Chelsea’s ventures into poorly animated pre-canned moans and hip bumping largely deal with vaginal penetration, double penetration and oral. It’s nothing to write home about, though it all takes an abrupt left turn by tossing in an optional scene with a dog that I absolutely will not elaborate upon.
I can’t really tell you why Chelsea has to do literally any of this. There’s no guiding narrative as you go from room to room grabbing items, getting lost at the endlessly similar backgrounds and dull thud of Chelsea’s footsteps. Yet somehow, there’s four endings to this game. Fucking how and why.
Witch 2 sees our paper-doll heroine in hell, with a 12fps opening animation showing her getting fucked by multiple demons. She’s held captive by a miniature clown, who soon gets his head blown off. Our savior turns out to be another demon, who with their 13 magick bullets wants to spring Chels from the dark carnival she finds herself in. To do so, she’s got to…
Repeat the same left-right walking trail as she speaks with demons, gathers items and either fucks or trades them for more items. Oh, there’s some kind of “Inquisitor” like character from the first game as well. The sex scenes and back grounds here are slightly better overall, and there’s more guides for those rails you’re on. But in simple terms, it’s the same game mechanically and narratively. Complete with numetal thrash ripping through some scenes.
There’s DLC for Witch Halloween (including a christmas themed Krampus chapter), but it’s nothing worth mentioning. You can complete both in ten minutes, and they unlock a few extra scenes. That’s it.
Overall the Witch Chronicle series was overwhelmingly hetronormative and derivative of thousands of free titles that came before them, boring and uninspiring in such a way that I had to see when they came out. Witch Halloween came out last year. Witch 2 came out april of 2021. I was flabbergasted to find this out. Just how? Obvious effort with animation, voice acting and background arts had been made. Even if it wasn’t great, that takes work. Literal real-world hours of your life you will never, ever get back. Regardless of the price of your games, there comes the question of time invested versus profit for such ventures. What would motivate someone to proceed?
Of Effort And Style
I did some research into Town Dark Tales, the dev behind The Witch Chronicles. In total they’ve released four titles in a very limited amount of time (a little over a year), complete with DLC. All from Russia at that. Based on everything I was able to tell, there’s one person working on Town Dark’s stuff. They’ve an active Patreon as well.
Let me be perfectly fucking clear right here and now. Making stuff is very hard. It’s hard creating new content every single day. It’s hard planning projects. It’s even harder when you’re under pressure to complete things by a deadline, which is one of the reasons SH is a “it’s done when it’s done” kind of office. The fact that TDT’s dev is not only one person, but the artist, script writer, probably sound designer and programmer is absolutely fucking astounding to me regardless of the quality of their titles.
I did not like these games. That should be apparent at this point. But I can admire and support someone working very, very hard to try and carve a space for themselves. I can understand the amount of pressure, strain and difficulty that goes into making a project, even if it’s a flop. I have released more than my share in my time.
I see what Town Dark Tales is trying to do. It’s a shotgun approach to making porn that I myself have emulated thousands of times. And while I may not like their execution, I get it. I honestly wish them well in their endeavors, and look forward to the day I can review one of their releases positively.
But in the meantime?
There’s too much at the market, executed with teams that are just as small and of much higher quality. I can’t recommend either of these titles and it’s highly unlikely I’ll review the rest of their catalogue.
Pass.
-j