Witchspire preview: Enriching survival crafting with a touch of magic

If Gamescom 2025 has shown me anything, survival crafting games are still very much thriving, but they’re having to change — they’re getting fancier to break the somewhat stagnant core formula of the genre, adding bits and pieces to make themselves stand out from the crowd, like Palworld. Take, as an example, Crosswind with its pirate flavor, naval combat, and interesting gear system. Yes, it has lots of survival crafting elements, but it’s primarily supposed to be a pirate game for pirate fans.

Envar Games is trying something similar with Witchspire, a casual co-op survival crafting game with creature collection elements that wants to differentiate itself from its peers by asking a very simple question at every turn: How can we make this more magical?

Witchspire lead producer Liam O'Neill and game director Oliver Granlund give me a tour of the game in Cologne ahead of its announcement, sharing their vision for an approachable survival crafting game that uses the theme of magic to its full potential. 

That starts, of course, with the characters being witches who wield wands, ride brooms, tame familiars, and wear majestic hats. Mechanically, the familiars are the most obvious gameplay draw: Defeating wild creatures in combat may cause their spirit to keep lingering in the world of the living for a while, allowing you to bond with and summon them as a familiar that can then accompany you on your adventures, providing you with abilities in and out of combat.

“I hope you don’t use any spherical objects to catch them,” I joke in reference to Nintendo’s lawsuit against Palworld developer Pocketpair. “No,” O'Neill laughs. “We do, in fact, not. No spherical objects, good shout.”

Creatures have specific types and can naturally appear with different levels, similar to other genre representatives. In Witchspire, they also have rarity classes, though, ranging from the common version of a creature all the way to legendary and celestial.

“That’s honestly kind of a shiny version that just has a different vibe to it,” O'Neill admits. “But as you find these higher rarity versions, they’re going to spawn with particular traits and these help them to get more power or more usefulness in your base for things like crafting or gathering. So, just because you’ve caught a creature once doesn’t necessarily mean that there isn’t a reason to get more.”

The same principle applies to crafting equipment, as each piece of gear you make will have a different set of stats.

With traits being mentioned, I naturally have to ask if there are breeding mechanics in the game. “We can, at this point, not answer this,” Granlund says. “It’s a good question and it’s something we are experimenting with. As you can tell, we want this to be a cozy game, so we are trying to find a tasteful way to do it. We haven’t found our twist on it yet.”

Witchspire being designed as a co-op game has had some influence on the title’s tech tree and progression. The skill points gained from leveling up can be spent inside different nodes that are concentrated around different skills, allowing players to specialize in specific areas. The group’s main builder can unlock additional structures, the cook can gain more recipes, and the fighter can obtain more combat buffs. You can become a generalist, but that means accepting the fact that you won’t be able to go to the end in every part of the tech tree.

This is reinforced by how the nodes themselves are unlocked: Similar to Valheim, Witchspire has you level up skills by using them. If you chop a lot of wood or fight a lot of battles, related nodes are unlocked.

“It’s not exactly a class system, but one of our goals is that not everyone is exactly the same all the time,” Granlund explains. This is also expressed during character creation, which allows the player to choose a coven for their witch. This not only provides them with different starting gear, but also a unique passive ability that helps define their playstyle.

Every familiar comes with their own skill tree as well, providing further customization options as players progress through the game.

“In a lot of survival games you start naked on a beach, have access to rocks, and are dying of thirst,” Granlund says. “We asked ourselves how we could have a different take on that, which might also be a little bit smoother.”

A practical example of this attitude towards approachability is the game’s building system. With magic powers, a witch doesn’t need to place walls by hand, so you can simply leave the coils of your mortal body behind temporarily and enter building mode, which allows you to move around with complete freedom. Granlund likens it to Minecraft’s creative mode.

Similarly, the game doesn’t exactly follow the laws of physics to the letter. You can construct a floating building in the sky without issue. The game will recognize this, automatically adding the necessary magical eye candy (in the form of some visual effects) below the construction to make its floating nature more immersive and believable. 

“We just want that creative freedom,” O'Neill states. “What’s important to us is that it feels like a home, a community of friends that’s chosen to work and live together. It’s not a factory — not that there’s anything wrong with those sorts of games.”

Similar to Palworld, Witchspire will allow players to employ their familiars in their base, having them man workstations. However, each station can only be used by specific creature types, so players will be organically incentivized to go out and find these creatures to expand their base.

“You don’t see hunger or thirst either,” Granlund adds. “We are trying to avoid what I call passive drains. Things that just drain while I’m doing nothing.”

Witchspire’s open world consists of various different biomes, each with their own challenges and opportunities. In general, everything a player sees can be reached and explored, from far-away lands on the horizon to floating islands in the sky.

“Our hope is to invite players who might be a little scared of survival games,” Granlund explains. “The audience that might like Minecraft, but they’re scared of Rust. I’m scared of Rust.” Survival elements will be prominent in the game, but they’ll be contextual and based on the biomes, requiring specific gear and so forth. “We are just not frontloading that, so you won’t die of hunger in the first five minutes.”

The hope is that genre veterans will push through the easier beginning and quickly reach the areas in which the game starts pushing back, offering an engaging experience to both types. Envar Games also wants to offer plenty of customization options to tune the difficulty, such as hardcore rules in which players and familiars can die permanently. 

In the same vein, the game offers different combat styles. Players might choose a wand that deals tons of damage but needs to be aimed manually, or go for a weaker one that fires homing missiles. Many powers and abilities in Witchspire are tied to the gear, which makes it easier for players to get friends into the game — there is no need to grind levels to bridge the power gap when you can simply hand your buddy some high-level gear you’ve crafted.

Naturally, magic heavily impacts one of survival crafting games’ most basic gameplay aspects: gathering. “We’re a witch — we’re not going to punch the tree down,” O'Neill explains. “It also didn’t seem right to hold a hatchet and then chop it down, that’s just not very witchy.” 

Instead, players can use specific spells to log and mine, which get the job done more efficiently and at greater pace than in other games to reduce the feeling of grind the genre can induce. As O'Neill puts it, chopping down the first ten trees feels satisfying, but once you’re getting into the hundreds, things look radically different. 

So instead of chopping down trees one by one, you swing a magical scythe that slices through several stems at once, bringing down an entire group of trees. A different logging tool causes magical blades to orbit around you, enabling another logging technique. You can replenish the forest traditionally by planting acorns and waiting for the trees to grow, but you can also craft a magical scroll of regrowth and immediately renew the local supply of wood. If you run out of ores to mine, you can summon a meteorite to resupply you. It’s creative, it’s quick, and it’s thematic. 

Ultimately, players will strive to defeat bosses and fulfill objectives to reach and enter the titular Witchspire on the map — the gateway home. Supposedly. While players mostly make up their own adventure, the map’s ancient ruins and different factions tell an underlying story and offer some worldbuilding. Similar to shrines in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, ancient ruins will feature combat and puzzle challenges alongside delivering tidbits of lore.

Witchspire is also taking a page out of Pokémon Legends: Arceus’ book. From time to time, dark meteors impact the map, spawning small zones of corruption full of deadly enemies — and rich rewards. Players can take the risk and delve into these areas before they despawn or let the chance pass by.

“We have a very cozy, kind vibe,” Granlund says, “but we’re not going the full utopia, everyone’s smiling all the time route. We like the contrasts. Ghibli is a huge inspiration for me, personally, and I hope that really resonates with people. I love that there’s a little bit of teeth to it.”

Anyone on the lookout for a more digestible survival crafting game (with “a little bit of teeth”) to play with friends that’s designed to allow you to dart in and out should keep an eye out for Witchspire, which is set to come to PC via Early Access in 2026.

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