It’s awful when you have a clown on your team, isn’t it? I spent most of this morning fighting alongside two of the worst players I have ever encountered. We were at the bottom of a hill and the horde was descending. Again and again my team-mates proved unable to thin the ranks. The simplest things were beyond them. Again and again we were overwhelmed. And the worst thing? Those other two players were both me.
WiccaDeveloper:Autoexec GamesPublisher:Autoexec GamesPlatform: Played on PCAvailability: Coming to PC “soon”
Echos! One of the great tricks of Wicca is the ability to rewind time and then fight alongside an echo of yourself. At heart, Wicca’s a tower defence game, even if it never truly feels like one. Step back enough though, and there it is: creeps move along a path and you have to wear them down before they get to the end of it. Summoning echoes is one of the most thrilling ways of doing this. You wade in, take a bunch out, and before you’re overwhelmed you jab a button and rewind, then you record another echo, taking out more of the baddies before you’re almost overwhelmed again. Then repeat.
In the end there will be a bunch of you against a bunch of them. Much fairer odds. Just one brilliant idea in a game that’s full of them. The sheer nervy pleasure of it!
TIMEMELTERS – Old trailer (when it was called Wicca) Watch on YouTube
I have been waiting for Wicca for, oh, about a decade. Astonishingly it’s been nine years since Sang-Froid: Tales of Werewolves came out on Steam. I had just bought my first decent PC, and this odd Quebecois game about two lumberjacks fighting off beasts in the frozen Canadian winter absolutely encapsulated everything I was realising I loved about PC games. Here was a game that was thoroughly weird and thoroughly wyrd. Nobody had been constrained by focus testing or worrying about how the box art was going to go down or what the key pillars were. You had a farm and a month leading up to Christmas. By day you earned money and bought traps. By night you stitched together a plan to tackle the invaders and then you headed out into the snow to keep your plan on track. It was a personal game, transporting, a doorway to a world and a history I didn’t know anything about. And to play it was to engage in something willful and elbowy and difficult to master. It’s still one of the most rewarding games I have ever played. It rides very high in my personal top ten.