One of the things I love to see in indie games is a willingness to take existing ideas and combine them in new ways. Sure, it may not always work out for the best, but I tend to at least appreciate the effort. There’s no doubt that adding roguelike elements is always a guaranteed way to open the door to variety and surprises, but Witching Stone goes a little further than merely making another ordinary roguelike deckbuilder. By throwing in an added dimension of using a puzzle game as the method of engaging in battle, it does at least effectively set itself apart.

Starting with the positives, I really appreciate the pretty big swings the developer took with the game, marrying some puzzle RPG elements of the Puzzle Quest series with a form of a roguelike deckbuilder. This can make for some interesting decisions and challenging battles to be sure, especially since you have limited control over the random collection of gems and their placements you’ll get at any point. If you’re able to survive long enough to customize your deck with some badges, in particular, you do get glimmers of a smart system. Being able to either buff your attack or defense skills, and make the sequence of gems you’ll need to activate them shorter or different, shows promising potential. Once you’ve grasped the systems and rules this can make for turns where you can chain together 2 - 3 spells, and that can be quite satisfying… but the honeymoon doesn’t always last.

One of the main issues I ran into is that wrapping your arms around everything and then being consistently effective are both problematic. While there is some in-game explanation of what you need to do, and how everything works, it’s not really sufficient or clear. It took a few runs and failing pretty miserably to work out the mana system, how to simply activate the gems in your attacks, and just the general rules for how some things work. The thing is, even once you’ve got a decent understanding of it all, you can still struggle to make headway. Even in your first dungeon you’ll get hit with quite a variety of gems, enemy attacks that will further complicate your ability to battle, and some simply crushing runs with the sense that the RNG gods are punishing you. Sadly, one of the most common ways this tends to happen is on the heels of an effective round where you manage to chain together multiple spells. Quite often the aftermath of that leaves the board in complete chaos, sometimes making it seem like smaller chains could be a better move for the sake of consistency and predictability.

Taking in all of this, in the end it makes it tough to feel out scoring. There’s absolutely a ton of potential here, and some good ideas, but there’s also plenty of room for improvement. A little more assistance in getting people up to speed would be appreciated, helping to smooth some common early rough edges new players could get frustrated by. Another suggestion I’ve made for many roguelike titles that hit a little too hard too fast, is that there’s wisdom in giving players the feeling of an early win to help pull them in. All stick with little carrot right out of the gate still works for challenge hounds, but considering the puzzle-based combat setup there’s a chance the difficulty could discourage the less hard core crowd out there. It absolutely has elements that work, but it is by no means a guaranteed winner for everyone.