Video Game Review: Trigger Witch

Trigger Witch

Developer: Rainbite

Publisher: Eastasiasoft

Twin-Stick Shooter

Trigger Witch is a game that delights in the concept of deceptive appearances. Its trailer opens with what appears to be your standard technicolor fantasy realm, complete with mysterious portals which “change the world of magic forever” and rainbow crystal growths, only to do a hard turn when the main character blasts some cutesy walking onions into red mist with a pair of Uzis. I will admit that when I first saw the trailer I was, while interested, expecting something kind of edgy and cynical out of the game. However, once I started playing I quickly came to realize that the layer of blood and guts is also deceptive, for under it beats a heart with a surprising degree of genuine warmth and compassion.

Trigger Witch is set in Evertonia, a world where magic in the traditional sense has largely died out in the centuries following the opening of the “Ordnance Rift” which started spitting out firearms. The main character, Collette, is a young witch who comes of age right at the start of the game and receives her first gun of her very own. A short tutorial dungeon is flavored as her final exam before becoming a fully-fledged gunslinger, at which time she is immediately thrown into an adventure full of mystery and incredible bloodshed.

The game world itself is somewhat reminiscent of older 2D Zelda titles, such as Oracle of Seasons or Link to the Past, only rather than hack-and-slash gameplay, it’s a twin-stick shooter. There are screens chock-full of oddly adorable but nonetheless deadly creatures to fight through, secret chests with upgrades and magic gems to find, and the occasional dungeon to crawl through. It’s not that big, all things considered, but that’s fine since the only method of overworld quick travel will only ever take you back to your house at the center of the map, and it’s nice to have a game world that can be traversed quickly once you get the layout down. Though the dungeons have the occasional puzzle in them, they’re all fairly simple, and the main focus of the gameplay is absolutely the shooting. Fortunately, the gunplay is extremely satisfying, especially for a twin-stick shooter, with a good variety of weapons and a reload mechanic that requires switching between them periodically that helps keep the player on their toes.

There are nine guns to unlock over the course of the game, including the starting revolver, and while they don’t all feel the most distinct from each other there’s enough variation that even the more similar ones don’t feel like padding. Each also has four attributes that can be unlocked using collectible parts – damage, fire rate, ammo capacity, and reload speed – and then upgraded with the currency dropped by enemies. Despite how simple the upgrade system is (it’s literally just clicking buttons next to bars) it’s oddly satisfying to make the numbers go up, and I found myself going out of my way to get things fully upgraded as quickly as I could. You never have to scrounge for ammo either, as reloads are unlimited, which keeps the pace going at a nice little clip (pun intended).

The story focuses heavily on Collette’s relationships with her mother and two childhood friends, and though these relationships are not without conflict (it’d be an awfully boring story if they were) they’re still very sweet and you can tell the characters genuinely care about each other even when they fight. As I noted before, I found this very surprising given the violent nature of the game on a whole, but it’s a welcome surprise. There are also frequent moments of humor sprinkled throughout, and when the game tries to be funny it usually hits the mark. Even the endgame twist of the villain/final boss was hilarious, despite that I was able to guess what it was going to be a little before the actual reveal. If the charm of the story and world puts you too at odds with the gore, there’s an option to turn that off and replace it with confetti, though I personally didn’t use that option for long because I found that it confused the already colorful graphics too much for my liking.

Also, the central town has little animals you can pet like turtles and bunnies. It’s adorable.

Despite how fun the game is on the whole, it did have a couple of minor problems. The player’s hitbox can be a little weird sometimes, which is especially a problem during the more hectic fights with a lot happening on-screen at once. Even though the game isn’t particularly challenging, it can still be annoying to suddenly get hit with a slow effect that should have missed you. My other complaint is that there’s a mechanic exclusive to the final dungeon of the game involving forcefields that repel and curve bullets that are interesting in theory but obnoxious in practice because if an enemy decided to stand in the middle of one I would have to wait until they left it again to be able to hit them at all. At the very least they couldn’t hit me either when that happened, but that creates its own problem in bringing combat to a total halt for a few moments.

Nevertheless, I had an absolute blast with Trigger Witch. It’s not a long game – my playthrough took me about eight hours, and I was admittedly moving through it relatively slowly – but that just means that the content that is there is all the more focused, a quality which is entirely too rare among contemporary games. I zoomed through those eight hours in one day, too, because I just couldn’t put it down – the progression and plot are that satisfying. For a small title from a smaller developer, Trigger Witch is about as good as it gets.