Mika and the Witch’s Mountain Review

I’m always looking for new experiences that tick off the family-friendly criteria for video games. On consoles, it is never overly fruitful in this genre, so I am always grateful to check out something my seven-year-old could potentially play other than Fortnite or Roblox. Mika and the Witch’s Mountain is a new fantasy adventure title from developer Chibig. This developer has some previous work building great foundations for platforming and quest-fetching gameplay and the quality was evident as I played through this. If you’re a fan of delivering parcels and want something a little less serious than the world of Death Stranding, then this may be right up your street.

Deliver To Evri-One

You do get a little backstory at the beginning as you must study to become a more experienced witch, but your teacher shoves you off a cliff and you break your broomstick in the process. Once the broomstick is repaired, you then decide to help deliver parcels around the island to support your dream of becoming a better witch. It helped me to spend about five minutes to get used to the flying mechanics, as when I dived straight into one of the early missions I messed up a bit. This is where the delivery of parcels gets interesting with messages of not getting the package wet or damaged. Sometimes you may have to conduct an express delivery and do it in super quick time. It brings a challenge to the gameplay loop which is fun to tackle.

As you progress you’ll get buffs to your flying abilities and there are elements on the island to help you such as wind zones to speed you up or shade to keep you cool if you’re delivering ice cream. It does start to become a bit repetitive when the same characters come into play but my son didn’t pay attention to this, so it depends how deep you want to look into the community, story and engagement within the world. For younger audiences it’s fine but I certainly noticed that there wasn’t much incentive to explore as there wasn’t much to engage with outside of the main quests.

Visuals & Audio

Visually Mika and the Witch’s Mountain is well presented with a cutesy and vibrant style which is very similar to games like My Time at Portia/Sandrock. Dialogue is displayed as written text which is clear and easy to read. The narrative is simplistic enough that my little lad understood it as if he was reading a book and I loved that. The broomstick mechanics is by far my favourite part of this adventure. Flying around does take some getting used to at first but once you get used to the handling then traversing the island becomes way more fun than travelling on foot. Zooming around with the smoke trail tailing off the back of the broom is an aesthetic that I never became tired of and my son adored it too.

The soundtrack is composed of relaxing notes with minimal sound effects but it all ties in nicely with the glorious variance of colour throughout the island. The hand-drawn characters during the conversations are great to admire and you can gain a sense of the person’s personality through the detailed design. The menus are well-constructed, easy to follow understand and navigate. So overall, a fantastic job of how this game looks and feels to play.

Final Thoughts

I enjoyed my time with Mika and the Witch’s Mountain and whilst the game is far from perfect, I had to remember the target audience and who this would appeal to. My seven-year-old loved joining and playing this one while I reviewed it. He enjoyed watching the conversations and how Mika interacted with people to gain information for the next objective and then using her broomstick to deliver parcels. It does become somewhat repetitive at times and it does fall a little short at around six hours of gameplay, but this is always the sweet spot for an indie for me. It holds enough quality, polish and great mechanics to make it a game to consider for your younger ones, but I’m not ashamed to say I enjoyed this one as an adult too.