Never Grave: The Witch and The Curse is a spellbinding roguelike where a living hat changes everything.
Never Grave: The Witch and The Curse is one of the more odd roguelike games you may play. It was made by Frontside 180 Studio and published by Pocketpair. Over the past ten years, the genre has become very famous, owing to games like Dead Cells and Hades.
However, it takes something really weird to stand out among them. Never Grave: The Witch and The Curse does just that by providing you with a main character who is not just a witch, but also a witch whose hat is alive and is probably the real star of the show.
At first, it might look like just another side-scrolling roguelike game with randomly generated dungeons and a constant cycle of dying and trying again. But as soon as you start playing around with the hat mechanic, you can tell that Never Grave: The Witch and The Curse is eager to try out some really strange concepts.
Never Grave: The Witch and The Curse always strives to mix typical roguelike advancement with new concepts and light management tools.
Never Grave: The Witch and The Curse‘s graphic style and atmosphere are clear even before you start playing. The sprite work is brilliantly animated, the landscapes are realistic and somber, and the music slowly builds an eerie fantasy mood that fits the strange situation nicely.
The end product is a roguelike game that is both fun and scary at the same time. It’s hard to say if that goal will be fully realized, but there’s no denying that Never Grave: The Witch and The Curse works very hard to create its own character.
In Never Grave: The Witch and The Curse, you play as a female-presenting witch who is exploring a strange world full of ethereal beauty. The funny thing is that your most significant friend is not another character, but your own pointed witch’s hat. This headgear seems to have its own mind, and it is what brought the character you control to life in the first place.
This idea right away brings up one of Never Grave: The Witch and The Curse‘s most interesting mechanics. You can make the hat jump off your character at any time, and then you may hold down a button to bring the witch back to life whenever you choose.
This is often needed to go to specific heights or hard-to-reach places in the environment, and it works like a more intricate double leap. Never Grave: The Witch and The Curse is already a game that is based on strange notions, and this hat mechanic is the main way to explore and solve puzzles throughout the trip.
As you go deeper into the dungeons, you come across all sorts of strange creatures, like mummified archers, disembodied hands that crawl around like something out of a gothic horror comedy, aggressive plant monsters that chase and bite you in strange ways, and even a huge enemy that looks like a sci-fi predator with slicing arms.
The idea behind the story is interesting, but the story itself is rather shallow when it comes to the world and its enemies.
These enemies are very interesting to look at and make you want to know more about them, but Never Grave: The Witch and The Curse never really explains where they originated from or why the witch is fighting them.
If you favor roguelike games with story elements, this can make the experience feel empty at times. There isn’t much information about how your main character got to this unusual place or what her final objective might be.
Instead, the story mostly takes a backseat to how Never Grave: The Witch and The Curse progresses. Some players might be fine with this simple way of conveying a story, especially because roguelikes usually put gameplay ahead of story. A little more world-building could have made the dungeon delving feel more meaningful, though.
Never Grave: The Witch and The Curse is based on the traditional roguelike premise of going through dungeons over and over again. The Church is the main hub where you start each try. It is also the entrance to the different dungeons in Never Grave: The Witch and The Curse. After that, you go into side-scrolling areas with monsters, platforming parts, and secret treasures that you can find.
There are three locks on the boss’s entrance in each dungeon. You take one lock off that door after each successful run through the dungeon. You have to finish the dungeon at least three times before you can fight the boss at the end. At first, this structure may seem repetitious, but Never Grave: The Witch and The Curse tries to make up for it by giving you a lot of resources and upgrades during each run.
You get temporary power-ups like stat boosts, new skills, and helpful objects as you explore these locations. These perks can completely influence how each run goes. Sometimes, getting the correct mix of improvements will make a challenge that seemed hard at first much easier.
Each dungeon has its own theme, with different enemies and items to acquire in the surroundings.
One more useful thing is that there are portals all across the maps. When you turn them on, these portals let you quickly travel between parts of the dungeon that you’ve already found. This method cuts down on backtracking and makes exploring feel smooth as you look for hidden paths, treasure chests, and mysteries.
The combat in Never Grave: The Witch and The Curse is meant to be simple at first glance. You can attack with your main weapon, which is usually a little dagger, by pressing a button. Another button lets you evade attacks that are coming at you. The simple control scheme keeps the focus on location, using items, and making strategic decisions instead of on elaborate combination systems.
Mana Bullet shoots purple dust that knocks enemies away, while Floating Blade is a magical weapon that floats around you and automatically attacks surrounding enemies. These are two of the most fun spells. This last skill is extremely fun since it turns your sword into a defensive drone that attacks enemies when they get too close.
You can also locate a lot of goods that you can use up. Some weapons call up floating swords that follow you and attack enemies in range, while others give you status effects or poison damage when you throw them. But these goods are in short supply, so you have to think carefully about whether to utilize them in battle.
One of the most interesting things about Never Grave: The Witch and The Curse is that you can take over some enemies after you kill them. You can take possession of an adversary once it is disabled. This gives you a whole new health bar and changes how you interact with the world around you.
In certain situations, these possessed creatures can even be used as mounts, letting you ride four-legged enemies across areas of the dungeon. You can get to a village area through The Church when you’re not in a dungeon. As you go on adventures and gather resources, blueprints, and loot, this hub becomes more and more essential.
You can build things in the village by placing them on a two-dimensional grid. This is how the village works.
If you have enough supplies, you can plant seeds, irrigate plants, and gather ingredients that you can use later to cook. When you cook food in your cauldron, it gives you big boosts to your health and magic on your next dungeon run, which gives you a strategic edge.
You can also use stuff you find in the dungeons to improve your character through skill trees. These upgrades slowly make you more likely to survive and fight better, giving you a sense of progress over time, even though roguelike games are known for having a lot of deaths.
But the village system can also be a little hard to understand. Never Grave: The Witch and The Curse does a good job of describing how to farm, but it doesn’t do a good job of explaining how to build things or why some pieces of furniture are useful.
You frequently discover blueprints during dungeon runs, yet figuring out how to properly utilize them can feel unnecessarily complicated. If you don’t really care about creating bases, you might just skip this phase of Never Grave: The Witch and The Curse and go back to exploring dungeons.
The cooperative multiplayer mode in Never Grave: The Witch and The Curse is another surprise thing about Never Grave: The Witch and The Curse. The game lets up to four people play together online and explore dungeons. This changes the traditional solitary roguelike experience into a wild cooperative adventure.
In multiplayer games, each player can break off and explore different paths in the dungeon.
This lets your party cover a lot more ground in a shorter amount of time. Whenever an ally finds a crucial place, such as the door that leads to the next part of the map, helpful cues flash on the screen to make it easier to reassemble.
Never Grave: The Witch and The Curse is really stunning to look at. The pixel art in Never Grave: The Witch and The Curse is quite well done, and the smooth animation makes both the characters and the scenery come to life. There is a lot of dramatic depth in every dungeon level, from creepy underground rooms to hauntingly gorgeous fantasy landscapes.
The designs of the enemies are really inventive, with weird monsters that are both scary and interesting. The bright sprite motion and dark lighting work together to give a unique look that is both playful and a little scary.
The music is also very important for keeping Never Grave: The Witch and The Curse‘s mood. Soft, atmospheric music plays while you explore, and it builds suspense between fights while keeping the tone unknown throughout the whole experience. The music never feels too much; it just blends into the background and makes the experience more immersive.
Never Grave: The Witch and The Curse is a roguelike that does well with strange notions. The sentient hat mechanism alone makes Never Grave: The Witch and The Curse stand apart from other games in the same genre. The ability to possess enemies also adds a new level of creativity to both battle and exploration.
The dungeon runs are usually fun because you get a lot of different spells, equipment, and temporary improvements each time you try. Never Grave: The Witch and The Curse has a lot of content that will keep you trying out different playstyles, thanks to the village advancement mechanisms and the cooperative multiplayer option.
But the experience isn’t perfect. The universe feels underdeveloped because there isn’t a good story, and the same dungeon layouts can get boring after a while. Also, several elements, like building bases, aren’t described well enough, which could make it hard for you to figure out how to use them to their maximum potential.
