Trigger Witch takes the “ultraviolent Nintendo game” gag to its logical conclusion
By Amr (@siegarettes)
Trigger Witch
Developers - Rainbite
Publisher - eastasiasoft
Switch, Playstation, Xbox
Among easy internet gags “Nintendo game with ultraviolence” is a long time staple. One look at Trigger Witch and it’s easily clear this is its starting point. Everything from the viewpoint, tilesets, structure and even certain melodies mark it as a clear pastiche of A Link to the Past, with AKs and Magnums replacing the swords and magic. Complete with the violent bursts of blood when you finish off an enemy.
What makes Trigger Witch stand out is how far it’s willing to take the concept, answering questions of how and why, and doing legitimate world building around it. Witches in the world have forgotten how to use most magic, and in its place a faith devoted to the use and crafting of firearms has developed, complete with rights of passage to receive your first gun.
It’s at once far more elaborate than you’d expect--going so far as to talk about the infrastructure that allows them to develop and magically conjure ammunition--and not elaborate enough. By answering so many questions about the world it leaves many more open. And coming from American gun culture, in which the right to lethal force is presented with equal religious fervor, Trigger Witch rides an uncomfortable tension.
More straightforward is Trigger Witch’s play on the Zelda structure, complete with an overworld that slowly opens its gates as you earn new weapons. Traversal’s a little less charming when the doors open to a grenade launcher, however. Likewise, enemy patterns become less interesting when your entire arsenal is projectile based. Most enemies you’ll encounter perform some form of either rushing you down or firing at you, and though the room design attempts to keep this novel, it quickly becomes rote.
When combat does switch up for boss fights, it becomes a hectic, sloppy mess. Not confident that it’s boss gimmicks can carry it, Trigger Witch throws enemy mobs into what are already iffy fights, completely breaking up the steady rhythm that its combat sets elsewhere. The first boss fight in particular proved so tedious that I ended up just spraying bullets and spamming health potions to grind through it.
Building on that is Trigger Witch’s bizarre ammunition system. Your revolver is the only weapon that can be manually reloaded, with other weapons requiring you to switch to the pistol and wait until a full clip conjures itself into the chamber. It’s already a bizarre system with only two weapons, but the more weapons you pick up the more unwieldy it becomes, adding an unwanted sense of chaos to combat.
Trigger Witch is full of small decisions like this that make it more messy as it goes on, which draws a lot of unfavorable comparisons when the game you’re riffing on is known for its flawless polish. Outside of boss battles, it does a surprisingly good job setting the pace, but these small problems continually have Trigger Witch stumbling over its own feet.
With more considered combat Trigger Witch could have remained an enjoyable, if derivative, Zelda style adventure. As it is, it’s a light hearted gag that does more than expected, but doesn’t quite deliver.
I grabbed Trigger Witch recently when I happened to see it because it was on sale and liked the thumbnail art and joked that it looked like the character was a witch who the only spell she knows is bullet. I turned out to be 100% correct about that, and the game itself turned out to be surprisingly fun.
Basically the premise is what if A Link to the Past was a twin stick shooter set in a world where witches forgot how to use magic after the introduction of firearms and all follow the Church of Ballisticism now? Great concept, I'm immediately on board.
It's a bit lighter on the puzzles than a proper 2D Zelda game most of the time, but the exploration and structure of the game is pretty similar, and there are some decent puzzles here and there and different gimmicks in different dungeons that make them play differently from each other.
Your main way of interacting with most things in the world is shooting them, and luckily they did pretty well with that part of the game. Everything feels pretty tight and responsive, the different weapons feel different to use and are useful in different situations, and there's just enough enemy variety and interactions between different enemy types to keep things interesting.
The characters are all fun enough too, even if they're not super deep, and the same could be said for the story. The big reveal late in the game that explains why the world is the way it is is satisfying enough, and I did not expect the final boss to be who it was, but aside from who it was I was a little underwhelmed by how that boss was handled, and none of the stuff the game did with them was either particularly insightful commentary or particularly funny and was kinda low effort. Aside from that it was fine for the most part though.
Another pleasant surprise that I had zero expectations for going in, and another short-ish game that was pretty good but didn't quite make it to great. I feel like there's some potential there for them to maybe improve on this with future games, but I guess we'll see.
Check out this gameplay video of the twin-stick shooter TRIGGER WITCH and subscribe for daily gaming videos on YouTube (I am also on Rumble and RUTUBE).
Rainbite's previous game, Reverie, was a charming Zelda-like set in a magical-realism-tinged Aotearoa. This follow-up from the small Kiwi team adopts a similar formula, but with a ballistic twist: it's also a twin-stick shooter! Be warned, I will spoil late-game plot twists in this review.
The setting is a magical realm where witches and goblins, once cohabitants, are now separated by a mystic barrier. The witches have abandoned magic in favour of the firearms that fall through a portal in their town. Their preoccupation with guns provides avenues for light satire of religion and cultural prejudices, although oddly issues of gun control aren't really part of the narrative. Either way, the story is lightly handled, with some nice character dynamics between your protag Colette and her two friends who you cross paths—and butt heads—with as you journey to thwart the plot of a sinister interloper, the man in black.
The revelation at the climax of the plot pushes the game into absurd territory as it's revealed that the mysterious antagonist is none other than Joseph Stalin, experimenting with interdimensional travel in order to gather magic power for the glory of Soviet Russia. Suddenly the cute monsters you've been blowing away in great clouds of blood [confetti mode is also available] are human Soviet soldiers and I start feeling even more iffy about the central mechanics of gun violence using real-life firearms. Then Stalin shoots your mother in cold blood (don't worry, she gets better), and you fly to the moon to fight his super space mech. The mix of goofiness, heart, worldbuilding, social commentary, and violence makes for some odd tone swings that don't always come together but are fascinating to watch.
The gameplay is more consistent, solidly homaging 16-bit action-adventures like Zelda with lovely colourful pixel art and some fun dungeon design. The action is handled via your swappable and upgradeable arsenal of guns; your ammo is infinite but reloading takes time, so you usually use a more advanced one until it runs out then swap to another, or default to your basic hand cannon. Combat encounters are often frantic and fun mini twin-stick shooting arenas, with a few vertical shmup sequences sprinkled through the game.
I'm not sure what else there is to say except to compare Trigger Witch to Rainbite's previous game. Reverie's down-home charm being swapped out for more overt fantasy is a lateral move at best for me, although the big swings taken here made for an interesting experience. The puzzles are gentler but the action is engaging, and ultimately the "Zelda with guns" goal can be marked with a big tick. I think I would recommend Reverie above this but it's not a zero-sum game, go ahead and check this out afterwards as well!
This demo was a pleasant surprise and got me to buy the full game right after playing it. The story follows a young woman named Colette, who is about to graduate from "The Stock", an academy for witchcraft and triggery. She lives in a world where magic has been around along time and has been mostly forgotten in the modern age, seemingly due to a new rift that appeared in the forest, giving magic guns to whomever it deems worthy. The demo will take you through the introductory story where you get to explore your house and hometown, meet several characters and then go on to your big graduation trial which serves as the game's tutorial before the demo ends. The graphics and music are lovely with lots of detail and the characters are all likable. The game has a set of difficulty options you can choose form, but it also has the neat feature of letting you adjust individual parts of the difficulty to fine tune it(though the parts are only represented by images, which left me just having to guess at what they represented). Once you get into combat of the tutorial mode it flows quite smoothly. I started getting back into the mindset of playing Hotline Miami due to the top-down shoot em up game-play, although Trigger Witch is definitely a more merciful game as it allows you to take multiple hits and also heal during combat (as long as you have enough health energy in stock from defeating enemies). As you progress through the training area, you'll also learn how to solve puzzles and use some of the still-known magic spells, such as your dash spell which lets you move quickly and dodge threats. All-together, this makes for a nice mix of adventure gameplay and challenging shooter action all wrapped up in a interesting game world.
So in short:
Female protagonist that isn't just another walking boob-factory?
Positive, heroic representation of Witches?
Cute Zelda-style graphics and music?
Badass magic guns?
Customizable difficulty settings to make the game super accessible?
AND you can pet dogs?
Hell yeah, I recommend trying the demo, and if the full game is just as good, that too!
