Spoiler Warning: Mandragora: Whispers of the Witch Tree
I’ve said before that I don’t really like Soulslikes. I still don’t.
Well, Mandragora: Whispers of the Witch Tree is a brand-new Soulslike from Primal Game Studio, which is duly published by the fine folks at Knights Peak. Originally funded via a successful Kickstarter project back in 2022, Mandragora touts itself as a sprawling action RPG set in a picturesque dark fantasy world, with ample crafting systems, dozens of hidden secrets, and scores of monstrous bosses to take on. It certainly looked impressive when we originally previewed the game a while prior to its release. But does it maintain that level of quality across a 40+ hour journey?
Again, I’m biased. But having spent quite a while with Mandragora, I’d like to think that there’s more good here than there is bad. Don’t get me wrong; I wouldn’t call it a perfect experience so far, but we’ll get to that when we get to that.
A World in Ruin
Enter Faelduum: A world ruled by corruption and fear, as tears in reality have begun to unleash terrible monsters beyond human imagination into the countryside. Most find refuge in Crimson City, where the leering King Priest rules with an unchallenged dogma. According to him, the evils of the world are caused by witches, and they are to be hunted down like animals. During the public execution of such a malevolent creature, you find yourself attending the event as one of the King Priest’s loyal Inquisitors, standing mere feet away from the creature as it wails in terrifying agony. However, something overcomes you.
In an instant, you mercifully kill the witch, laying it to rest only a moment before it whispers a mysterious incantation to you. Naturally, the King Priest isn’t too happy about this. Instead of killing you outright for your defiance, however, you’ve been given a brand-new assignment. You need to track down a witch yourself.
But things aren’t as simple as they seem. A mysterious voice plagues your thoughts now. More tears in reality begin appearing in the distance. Suddenly, the truth you’ve been told your entire life has started to grow its own strange holes and discrepancies. What’s really going on behind the scenes? How are the witches and the King Priest tied together? And where do you ultimately fall when it comes to the big picture?
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It’s a decent setup, if not one that feels fairly familiar. The game touts the involvement of narrative designer Brian Mitsoda (Vampire: The Masquerade — Bloodlines) when it comes to its story, and while a few lines of dialogue did occasionally hit the wrong way for my own personal tastes, I did feel intrigued by how things progressed for the most part. A handful of side quests really told some interesting miniature stories within the world as well. One in particular involving a daughter searching for her missing father still sticks out to me. It’s short and direct, but it’s really effective.
The game’s visuals certainly help sell its grim atmosphere. Layered 3D environments, highly detailed character portraits, smooth animations, and some inspired enemy designs made the world feel fleshed out and lived in. Even the cutscenes get a similar treatment. While some are rendered in-engine, others are given this gorgeous, portrait-esque art style via a series of colorful and elaborate illustrations. It’s genuinely fantastic stuff. I adore how this game looks, honestly, and you can see how the years of development came together on the aesthetic side. The game’s music is pretty serviceable, too. Christos Antoniou of the Greek death metal band Septicflesh brought his dark sensibilities to the table with a score that’s as orchestral as it is brooding.
The game’s performance also thankfully saw a substantial boost from my original time with the preview. For one thing, that occasional stutter I noticed is completely absent here. I had nothing but smooth performance throughout my entire time with Mandragora, even with just about everything turned up to the max graphically. It was such a relief to see.
Essence, Talents, Grinding, and More
Playing Mandragora is certainly an experience. It’s one that I’m not as necessarily favorable towards now that I’ve spent a much longer time with it, especially after I tried out the preview, but there’s certainly plenty of stuff to talk about. Let’s just start with what you’ll be doing most.
Mandragora is an action RPG game with some platforming and exploration elements. You’ll run, jump, and battle foes of all shapes and sizes while melding these together in a variety of scenarios. Your starting abilities are determined by the type of class you pick before the game starts, with your character’s appearance and name also being subject to your personal tastes. You have a total of six character classes to pick from, too. I opted to take the Flameweaver class, which emphasizes the use of heavy maces and numerous fire-themed skills that all deal damage over time. You can summon a wall of fire, or a fire tornado, or a fire imp, or coat your weapon with fire, and so on. It’s self-explanatory.
I felt much more in tune with the Flameweaver than I did with any of the classes in the preview, thankfully. While you have access to a regular melee attack, you can equip two other skills tied to your class to a total of two different skill sets, allowing you to freely swap between them whenever it’s most convenient. These skills aren’t necessarily unlocked in the way you’d normally expect — they’re found throughout Faelduum instead of being tied to your character’s growth — but I felt that they provided enough variety to tackle most combat scenarios with a bit of gusto. My flame wall, in particular, was shockingly powerful. You’d be surprised at how many bosses just stand still in between their attacks while flames crawl up their legs.
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Multiclass opportunities do exist, but I can safely say that I didn’t really experiment with them too much. I was more than happy to indulge myself in my pyromaniac fantasies. That said, you’ll have to consider your initial class on top of whatever other classes you want to play as. They’re all tied together in a giant, sprawling talent tree that you interact with whenever you gather enough Essence to level up, meaning you’ll have to organically navigate to whatever class you want to multiclass with through the talent tree’s branches.
Speaking of which, the talent tree is arguably your single most important source of character growth in Mandragora. While other Soulslikes offer substantial upgrades for your weapons and armor, power scaling in Mandragora is tilted heavily in favor of your character itself, with the numerous stats and class-specific traits you unlock significantly improving your ability to survive. You have some typical role-playing staples to improve, like Strength for physical damage or Knowledge for improved mana capacity, but things get really interesting with your class traits. For instance, Flameweaver has a few abilities to enhance your odds of setting an enemy on fire, or even gaining passive mana regeneration for every second an enemy is on fire. But they also have a particularly interesting trait that allows you to take in your most recent damage over the course of a few seconds, allowing you to reduce the total amount of damage you receive via the damage you inflict on enemies within that time frame. I don’t know if I’d consider it an essential thing to grab or not. But it was certainly game-changing when I acquired it.
Essence is a good transition point, I think. In standard Soulslike fashion, the experience points you gain from defeating enemies and bosses alike are not permanently affixed to your character. Instead, they’re more like a form of currency, which has to be exchanged at a number of witch stones throughout Faelduum to level up. But there’s a drawback to this. When you die, you lose your Essence. All of it. You can try to get it back if you head back to where you died and retrieve it, but if you die again before you do so, it’s scattered to the wind.
So, what do you do if you’re only a thousand or two Essence short of your next level up? It means it’s time to grind. And you’ll be doing a good amount of that in Mandragora across several different things.
You see, crafting items is arguably just as important as building up your character. Whenever you need a break from the action, you can freely teleport to the eponymous Witch Tree, a haven of sorts for you and a band of tradespeople of all kinds. A cook, apothecary, blacksmith, seamstress, jeweler, and enchanter can all be found and recruited to your side, and they all provide useful amenities like healing items, runes for enchanting equipment, armor of all kinds, and so on. But they’re not fully trained at first. You’re going to have to level them up as well, not only by finding diagrams that provide crafting recipes, but by crafting excessive items that you’ll never use to simply build up their overall experience. Usable things like the numerous foods you can get or the armor and health items you get from the seamstress aren’t as egregious, but I can only make so many runes that can only go into a head or chest slot or weapons for classes I won’t play as before I get annoyed.
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Then there’s the whole process of gathering resources. Granted, this isn’t as annoying as it could’ve been. You’re able to freely teleport to just about any witch stone you’ve discovered across Faelduum, and should you find a map fragment for a specific area, you’ll be able to see everything that area has at a glance. Resource deposits, chests you haven’t opened yet, gates into Entropy, it’s all a nice thing to have for an activity that’s otherwise really monotonous. The game even has a bestiary that provides information on what items are dropped by specific enemies, along with some substantial flavor text. But then again, you’ll also need a specific resource to open up all the rare treasure chests you can find.
Thankfully, the rifts that lead to Entropy are arguably one of the most interesting diversions you’ll come across in Mandragora, so much so that they even have their own miniature talent tree to develop. They’re essentially challenge rooms — under a strict time constraint, you’re tasked with traversing the rift while platforming, or fighting waves or enemies, or taking down a boss, or maybe even a combination of all three. Should the time limit run out, your health will quickly drain down until you’re ripped out of Entropy, with all of your Essence intact, bizarrely. They’re cool enough, and they even provide a rare resource that can upgrade your individual skills.
Combat Foibles
But enough with numbers and resources and running around gathering both. How does actually fighting stuff feel?
Lovely particle effects and smooth animations accompany every battle, and they still look pretty impressive after seeing them dozens and dozens of times across a few dozen hours. Enemies often react dynamically to your movements, even. Dodging right through a sword swing may force them to suddenly spin around and catch you off-guard, or maybe an archer will break their pattern to take a swipe at you from close range.
I do think that there’s a certain kind of monotony here that I didn’t connect with the longer I had to engage with it. It came to a head with one of my favorite bosses in terms of its concept: the marionettes in Braer Castle. It’s a fight split into several distinct phases involving different marionettes, all tied into the narration provided by the true main boss of the castle. It’s good stuff. You even get to battle the marionettes all at once towards the end. But during the first phase, where you fight a marionette with a rapier, I had entered a very specific dance in which I’d dodge, have just enough stamina for a single attack, dodge, attack, dodge, attack, dodge, attack. . . and I realized just how often this exact formula came into play throughout not just the castle, but the entire game leading up to this point.
This is admittedly where my bias comes in — Mandragora is all about reactions instead of actions. Being too aggressive can and will lead to your undoing, and while I certainly get the appeal of finding an attack window during an intense battle, doing this over and over and over again for just about everything you fight, especially once you traverse Braer Castle, really loses its luster for me. The magic system helps, for sure, but it only really does so much. You can even partially adjust the damage and health values of enemies for a smoother experience, but I didn’t really feel like that would’ve done all that much for me. It certainly would’ve helped with the large knight enemies that roam the castle, who took upwards of half a minute of wailing to bring down.
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The ability to respec — aka, resetting all of your skill points in order to change up your character — does give you a chance to play around with some new talents, but this has one incredibly important issue that really ought to be addressed at some point. The aforementioned skill upgrades you can get aren’t rolled back along with your talent points. The resource that grants this is seemingly only tied to boss fights and Rifts, meaning that once they’re spent, they’re spent. So choose wisely.
There are some other issues, too. Some visual bugs here and there, like my equipped armor not appearing on my character properly in my equipment menu, did occasionally pop up. One particularly annoying bug was the game insisting that I was in combat when I had just finished a quick battle, only to drop and reintroduce the warning every few seconds. Teleporting away to a witch stone in the interval between these was the only way to seemingly resolve it. The game was also very briefly flagged by my anti-virus software and by Steam itself as a malicious executable, which was an all-time first for me across my 12 years of using Steam. Thankfully, the issue was addressed quickly via the game’s official Steam forums, but it was still an inconvenience.
Should You Play Mandragora: Whispers of the Witch Tree?
I may not be the best person to ask, really. However, my natural inclination towards not liking games like this may make my perspective a bit more unusual. I can’t go out of my way to say that it’s bad, that’s for sure.
For those who really enjoy the kind of formula found in similar games like Salt and Sanctuary, I think there’s something potentially interesting here. There are certainly some impressive visual and technical qualities, and while I felt that the game’s combat wasn’t as up to snuff, I was still enjoying myself for quite a few hours. There are some technical issues that need to be worked out, for sure. But you can tell that there was a lot of genuine effort placed into the final product here.
The ability to teleport all across the map is pretty welcome. You get a plethora of map markers and other useful tidbits to help keep track of your overall progression. The ability to buy back just about everything that I’ve ever sold to a merchant was a particularly surprising addition, even. In fact, just about every merchant in the camp had some personality, and while the quests tied to them weren’t exactly mind-blowing, it was a fun way to expand upon their respective backstories. There are a lot of little touches here that I really enjoy.
I just don’t think that it really changed my mind about how I feel about Soulslikes. Combined with some of the other pitfalls that I encountered during my playthrough, it’s far from what I would consider to be one of my favorite games of the year. I’m ultimately glad I gave it a shot, though. If you think you might enjoy it, I’d say you ought to give it a shot as well.
Mandragora: Whispers of the Witch Tree is currently available on Steam, the Epic Games Store, GOG, PlayStation, and Xbox.
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