Mandragora: Whispers of the Witch Tree

The Souls-like genre is something that has really taken off in the past decade. Developer FromSoftware likely didn’t realize that they were spawning an entirely new genre of games when they released the original Dark Souls. Since then, the genre has become a mainstay in the market and there are now tons of options out there for those who enjoy games with grueling difficulty that test your patience and resolve.

Until now, I have not really found myself having the patience to work through these types of games. I have tried many of them, including several Dark Souls entries, Bloodborne, and countless other indie titles. My frustration always got the best of me.

However, when I saw my first glimpse of Mandragora: Whispers of the Witch Tree, I had a feeling that this might be the game that changes things for me. It looked gorgeous and blended in another genre that I absolutely adored: Metroidvania. It was my hope that applying that Souls-like experience to what is arguably among my favorite type of game would be the tipping point that finally made me a fan of the genre. Hopes turn to dreams, and dreams come true: that is exactly what Mandragora has done.

Mandragora puts you deep into the world of Faelduum, where you are in Inquisitor, an unnamed soldier/mercenary of sorts who operates at the direction of the King Priest of Crimson City. At his direction, you seek out and destroy all things inhuman and evil that threaten mankind.

Among those things are witches, beings that have been identified as enemy number one in his eyes. During a public interrogation of a captured witch, or rather a public torturing, the screams of the witch drive you mad enough that you interfere and mercifully execute her to put an end to it all, much to the displeasure of your liege.

Upon striking the death blow on the creature, its essence leaves her body and enters yours, visible by all in attendance of the event. Nobody knows what this means at the time, and it creates an aura of fear and uncertainty within the leadership of Crimson City and among the people. Can you be trusted? Are you now forever cursed?

The King Priest sees it as an opportunity, though. As both a means of punishment and taking advantage of any potential gifts that you may now possess, the King Priest sends you out to track down another witch and bring her back alive so that he can complete his interrogation. This quest, however, will lead you down a path of learning the truth about the world you live in and those who rule it. You will come to learn that not everything is as it seems or as it has been taught, and will have you questioning all that you know.

Perhaps the first thing that anyone will notice about the game is that it is absolutely beautiful from a visual perspective. The art style is rich and detailed from start to finish. I know the term “like a painting” is overused as a descriptor when talking about games, but that describes it perfectly. The world looks like it is hand painted, using layers in the form of background and foreground images to construct an interactive world. Each of those layers is alive with their own animations and the combination of them all is stunning. This is a classic tool in animation, but really well-utilized and executed here.

You can really see the “painting” style in the game’s cut scenes. They play out as a series of “crude” animations (not meant in a bad way), with sequential variations of the paintings being displayed that change slightly to depict progression and movement; it just works perfectly for this world. That crude style isn’t there in the gameplay though, where the animation is detailed and smooth as silk. All the enemies and stage interactions are incredibly intricate and detailed. Be it your Inquisitor lacing his blade with a vial of poison, or a fallen skeleton enemy reforming after you have shattered them in battle, the all look incredibly detailed as they occur.

The only time that things don’t seem to work is when the game is attempting to quickly move you from one scene to a completely different one, particularly moving through a portal that shifts you to a different environment. There always seems to be a bit of slowdown in these cases, as the game attempts to quickly “paint” the new scene. I had hoped that this was only a one- or two-time issue the first few times it happened, but this was something that consistently happened throughout the adventure. Thankfully, the portals aren’t used extensively, but they do come about enough that you will notice this hiccup.

As stunning as I found the visuals to be, the soundtrack was even more impressive. The game has an amazing orchestral-themed soundtrack that sets the mood perfectly for every scene and interaction. It is always subtle, elegantly helping enhance the scene. It never once comes across as forceful or overpowering and can almost be taken for granted if you aren’t listening for it. Once you do start homing in on it, then you will quickly learn to appreciate everything that it brings to the experience.

Along with the impressive soundtrack comes a lot of really great voice acting as well. I'm not saying that every voice in the game is well done, but I would say that a majority are. The writing fits the story and the setting perfectly. Nearly every character does a great job in expressing their personality through their voice. There are exceptions to this rule as there are a couple, including a particular vampire, whose voice is almost laughable and seems to be the opposite end of the spectrum as the other voices in the game.

As I mentioned earlier, Mandragora is a blend of the Souls-like and Metroidvania genres. For the Souls-like aspect, it is definitely a very difficult game by design. The focus is on combat against ever increasingly difficult enemies. It isn’t supposed to be easy and pushes you to study your enemies and hone your skills to make progress. You will often find yourself facing off against monsters and enemies that far exceed your individual power or ability. It is up to you to take the time to both advance your character's ability and learn your enemies' attacks so that you can approach accordingly.

Nearly all the enemies in the game have a pattern that they use for attacking, or clues that tell you what they’re going to do; you need to study them and learn them and then approached them accordingly to counteract their movements and strategies. If you hit a point where you seem like you're at a roadblock, it is often good to mark it on your map and come back to it later. You'll find that as you start to explore other areas, you will earn new abilities and strengths that make you better suited to face those obstacles that previously seemed insurmountable.

Thankfully, there are a lot of enemy variations in the game. This does not mean that you aren't going to see repetition throughout the adventure, as there are some enemy characters that get reused. Things such as wolves or rats show up in several areas, with their colors varied depending on the environment they’re in. These variations often have different strengths and traits involved with their attacks, such as poison, ice, or fire. I never found it overused at any point except for maybe the use of a particularly large rat sub-boss that was used six or seven times throughout the adventure. It isn't that he was particularly difficult, but he just got tired of seeing him pop up again in areas that really didn't suit his existence. It made sense to run into him in the sewers or perhaps a rundown mansion but why does he pop up again in a snowy mountain area? It didn’t make sense and there were plenty of other enemies who were ripe to have larger sub-boss versions appear.

I also really appreciate the game's bestiary. As you defeat different quantities of each enemy type, you unlock more and more information about them in the bestiary. Eventually, you will unlock details such as their weaknesses, specific statistics, and even which items can be obtained from them. It became a resource for tracking down ingredients and specific items late in the game, which added a fun little twist to the genres. 

This all plays very well into the Metroidvania aspects. Exploration is just as important as everything else. You will often find yourself physically running into dead ends (in addition to the difficult ones) or sections where it is clear what you need to do, but you lack the ability or tools to do so.

You have the ability to make notations on your map so that you know where you need to come back at different times. Perhaps you run into an area where it's clear that you need a grappling hook. All you simply need to do is open the map and choose one of the preset symbols and place that on that area of the map. Then, once you obtain the grappling hook, you can go back to those different points on the map and adventure a little bit further. This helped me in both leveling my character, exploring the map, and building up different resources that I needed to spend on crafting items.

This works because the world is incredibly well-connected. The flow of it all just makes sense in terms of the way the areas bleed into one another. A dilapidated town eventually leads to an area where the remaining citizens have fallen back to and made their primary home. Forests lead to swamps and tunnels lead to sewers which eventually find their way into the basements of large, abandoned castles. It's a large and interconnected map and it is beneficial for you to explore every nook and cranny.

Thankfully there is the ability, once you unlock them, to fast travel between different points on the map through Witching Wells. For a majority of the of the game, these are well-placed around the map, spacing things out in a natural and understandable manner. However, when you get to the last arc of the game, they practically disappear.

I became increasingly frustrated as the last two major areas, which are arguably the most difficult, lacked any Witching Wells for both fast travel or resting/saving my progress. It became increasingly frustrating to work my way through a large area of the map only to inevitably die and redo the entire section again because there was no save point in the area.

I can understand the purpose of this by design in conjunction with the concept of being a difficult game. But the fact that it just sort of drops off at a certain point in the adventure is extremely frustrating. You get so used to having them spaced around and they become a tool that you heavily rely on—that suddenly disappears.

I eventually overcome this as I unlocked new paths that dropped you into different areas of these new spaces. But ultimately it remained a frustrating aspect towards the end of the game that left a bad taste in my mouth.

Aside from exploration, there is also a big focus on crafting items and weapons. Throughout your adventure, you will meet and befriend a number of individuals who are quite skilled in various areas that are beneficial to your cause. There's a blacksmith, jeweler, chef, seamstress, as well as a scoundrel, and a master of the arcane arts. Your friendship with these characters will lead to the creation of a small caravan which becomes your home base.

As you return to this home base frequently throughout your adventure, you will be able to use it not just for rest and to advance your character's abilities, but also to obtain new tools and items. Each of these individuals has a workshop in your caravan and the more you use it the more they evolve and grow, offering new items and tools and learning their own new abilities.

You can also use these as a hub to sell and make money as you get rid of different items you come across that you don't need. One of my favorite parts happens to be a garden that one of them starts , which you will eventually use to grow a variety of items that are used by the other shopkeepers. This was great for not only obtaining the items they can create and because I could farm my own ingredients, but I also got to a point where I could farm so many that it became an income source. I could always farm more than necessary and sell it off to make extra cash.

At the core of all this is the combat system. For any game of either of these genres to be successful, they must have a good foundation for combat. Mandragora presents you with six combat styles, each with their own skill tree. This gives you a chance to build things, such as a straight pugilist who uses a sword and shield, or an assassin with daggers who's all about speed, and even a variety of spellcasters, or enhanced sword fighters. Each of the individual trees is incredibly intricate, providing you with lots of options and a ton of abilities to unlock as you advance.

The really nice thing about them is that they flow into each other as well. You may start off focusing solely on a Flameweaver build, who is a sword fighter with some magic abilities. After you invest a lot of skill points into that tree, you will eventually get to branches that will cross over to the sword/shield tree. Once you connect that branch, you can start to bring in abilities that are only available on that skill tree. Not all of these trees all flow into each other, so it isn't like you can just jump from the flame tree to the poison tree. There is an interconnection between them by design that makes sense.

This gives you a lot of options to tailor and personalize your character based on how you wish to play. For example, I tried to keep it simple, starting off by focusing solely on the Flameweaver as I just wanted to hack and slash my way through enemies, while perhaps setting a few on fire. Eventually, as things went on, I found myself needing to give more focus to either the spellcasting side or the sword side of things, as trying to balance the two left me feeling underpowered. I chose the latter and became more of an offensive swordsman who had the ability to enhance my attacks and my defense using the element of fire.

It's also nice that you will eventually reach a point where you can re-spec your entire skill tree at will. This gives you the ability to start experimenting and trying out other classes of characters to see if you like one over the other. There is a cost associated with this, but it is nice to have the ability to do it any time you see fit.

With the different classes also come certain weapons that are more fitting for one class over another. Things such as great swords and heavy hammers aren't necessarily something that will be utilized in your spellcasting or magic builds. As a result, if you're investing your points into those skill trees, you're likely not going to have the base statistics necessarily to wield those large weapons. This also plays out the other way too, where if you're building strength-based class, you likely lack the statistics necessary to wield the arcane artifacts necessary to cast high level spells. You will have to experiment and learn what works for you and build your character accordingly.

The game does offer some post-campaign gameplay, or end game experiences. Unfortunately, this also comes with a design decision that really baffles me. In the end game, you lose access to a major character in your caravan as a part of the story. Because of this, it becomes increasingly difficult to tweak and play with the build(s) of your character. This character is an integral part of your advancement. I will keep their identity shielded to prevent spoilers, but it breaks your ability to really explore after things are all said and done.

In the end, I can say that I absolutely adore Madragora: Whispers of the Witch Tree, but it isn’t a relationship without issues. A game is, after all, a sum of its parts, and I have to keep that in mind. Despite the annoyances and frustrations that I have had, at the end of the day I keep coming back to the world of Faelduum for just one more push. There are certainly frustrations to be had, but ultimately a love of the story, and the package as a whole drove me back after short spurts of rest. I cannot lie: I came very close to giving up in the last 10% of the game due to the saving and fast travel issues, but persistence won out and I pushed through to the end.