The problem with being a Pocket Witch, aside from needing a stepladder to reach your cauldron, is that people will pick you up and chuck you into dungeons. An evil sorcerer has spotted the diminutive hag and scooped her up, tossing her into thirty dungeons full of enemies, perilous jumps and spikes.
It is, of course, the backdrop for a platformer. More specifically, Pocket Witch is a precision platformer, and it wants you to be on your A-Game if you want to have any chance of progressing. This isn’t one of those cheapo platforming games where you put down a few quid, get a near-immediate 1000G and then whistle off into the sunset. This is a punishing, exacting little game that will demand you earn your way.
For a member of the supernatural community, Pocket Witch has precious few special abilities. You’d hope that she could turn the enemies into frogs at the least. But alas she starts with a jump and, well, that’s it. Over the course of the game she does gain a double-jump and a dash move, triggered with RB, but that’s the limits of her capability. We can see why the evil sorcerer found it so easy to nab her.
So, each level starts with you tucked into a corner of the game screen, and your aim is to reach an exit that signifies the end of the level. Simple as, really. Except of course it’s not, as the platforming is dialled up to roughly the eights and nines out of ten in terms of difficulty. It might not tickle the chin of Super Meat Boy, but it gets close.
Platforms are thin and precarious, demanding that you land on them near-perfectly. Enemies sometimes sit on those very same platforms, and you have no means of defeating them, so you’re jumping away as soon as you land. Gaps between platforms are stretched the furthest they can go, and often they’re coated in spikes so that you have to double-jump at very precise points in your arc. It’s all a bit mean.
Death is about as common as pixels in Pocket Witch. We’d hazard a guess that we died ten times a level, on average, and we didn’t die for the first ten levels. That shows you how steeply the difficulty carve ramps. To be fair to Pocket Witch, death is handled quite well: there’s almost zero time delay between getting impaled on spikes and then starting afresh. It’s as fast as a whippet.
Still, Pocket Witch’s joys are definitely subjective. Particularly on the latter levels, when you’re not only traversing difficult levels, but you are backtracking through them (mainly because you are hunting for keys to bring to doors), then the difficulty gets onerous. Die and the key is dropped and you need to do it all again.
We will admit to not being fans. We have a strong opinion on challenge: it has to be fair, and it has to reward. If those two pieces aren’t in place, then we tend to either rage-quit or find our attention turning to something else. Pocket Witch is certainly fair – the jumping controls are precise, so we have no qualms there – but it’s not rewarding. Succeeding in reaching the far-corner of a level is often met with a shrug and being told to do it all again, carrying a key with you. Levels are very similar to each other, so we felt like we were in some kind of Moebius loop; and there’s virtually no unlocks, collectibles, scores or upgrades to chase. It’s a conveyor belt with a big furnace at the end with ‘Pain’ written across the top.
There is going to be someone that Pocket Witch appeals to. Precision platformer addicts exist, we’ve met a few of them, and we get the feeling that there will be enough crumbs of enjoyment here to gather together and enjoy. It’s not even at the peak of difficulty, which increases the number of players who might like it. But it’s a desperately one-sided deal. You have to put in a lot of effort to get not-very-much back.
Which is Pocket Witch’s second big failing. It’s not got a single element that we haven’t played elsewhere. We’re going to pull on our Granddad costume and say “if we had a penny for every platformer that offered a double-jump and dash, then we’d be rather rich indeed”. Because it’s all Pocket Witch has in its ingredients pouch. We found ourselves completing levels, eagerly waiting to see what new trinket Pocket Witch might throw at us, and then slumping back into our seat once we got just another level, but with an extra screen attached (oooh!) or more than one colour of key (ooooooh!). It’s hard to find meat on them bones.
Pocket Witch is remarkably cheap at £4.19. But even in that price range, there’s a surprising amount of competition, with indie platformers that try on the charm, throw in some gimmicks or toss in a cute cat main character.
This is where Pocket Witch falters, as it comes to the table and empties its pockets; only a single, dull coin with ‘Difficulty’ stamped on tumbles out. If you like your platforming fiendish then pull on a witch’s hat and go for it. But if you’re looking for anything else – newness, fun, a sense of reward – then Pocket Witch can’t offer it. On occasion, we even wanted to push Pocket Witch into the oven.
You can buy Pocket Witch from the Xbox Store
