There’s currently no shortage of Souls-likes in the gaming market at the moment. If anything, the market is starting to become saturated with the genre, making it increasingly difficult to cut the wheat from the chaff. So if you’re going to be entering this genre, you have to do something really special to stand out.
Luckily, Little Witch Nobeta, a small, but ambitious Souls-lite from developer Pupuya Games, does just that. Little Witch, you see, isn’t a traditional melee Souls-lite, but rather part of the subgenre dedicated to ranged Souls-likes such as Remnant: From The Ashes.
You take on the role of pint-sized witch Nobeta, whose quest to find the throne, and thus who she actually is, takes her to the labyrinthine structure of an ancient castle. Her journey will not go smoothly.
Nobeta’s main form of attack is her ranged spells while she can melee enemies with a three-hit combo with her cane if they get too close. Her spells essentially take on the role of various projectile weapons you’d find in most shooting games, each with a second ability as well. Fire is basically your shotgun with its second ability been a grenade launcher while Ice is a machinegun with its second ability a missile barrage worthy of any mecha anime.
While Nobeta uses the Souls-like structure, you’ll rest at goddess statues which replenish health and respawn enemies and use Essence from them to upgrade your stats, Nobeta feels closer to a 3rd person action game than a Souls-like. Combat is much faster and you’re defensive abilities are limited to dodge rolls and air dodges for the most part. Your physical attack is mainly used for regenerating mana or when enemies get too close rather than as a viable attack option.
Which is perfectly fine as Nobeta’s combat is quite good. Magic abilities are satisfying to use and throw out a lot of damage. Ice whittles away health bars lickety-split while Lightning is OP as hell, decimating most opponents with one shot. However, you’re still going to need some lightning-fast reactions to dodge attacks.
The games Boss fights are fun to play and you’re going to have to rely on that old adage of memorising attack patterns while using the right spell to deal maximum damage. They’re creative as well and use their anime inspiration to great effect.
Normal enemies are less interesting, unfortunately, ranging from wrecked mannequins to scissor-wielding dolls. The variety is severely lacking, but since Nobeta is a short game designed for multiple playthroughs, I can’t quite complain even if I felt like I’d spent too much time fighting the same handful of types far too much.
Visually, Little Witch Nobeta does the Switch proud. The game is very pretty, despite taking place essentially in a one-location environment. The castle architecture is always pretty, featuring some great larger locations while the game shines in its character designs and visuals with a cel-shaded visual aesthetic that looks fantastic on the Switch’s screen and in motion. The game ran perfectly as well without any performance issues.
Little Witch Nobeta is also on the easy side right now, at least on the standard difficulty that buffs some of her skills. Personally, I’m quite fine with this as it puts Nobeta into that class of Souls-lite that you can actually complete. Purists may be put off by this, but that would be a disservice to both the game and themselves as Nobeta is incredibly fun with great combat that breathes a bit of life into what I feel is now becoming a bit of a tired genre.
Platforms: Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, Microsoft Windows
Checked out on Switch
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