Indie Game Review: NINE WITCHES: FAMILY DISRUPTION
Nine Witches: Family Disruption from Blowfish Games is an indie adventure game that tries to recapture the magic of Lucas Arts Adventure games like Monkey Island, Grim Fandango, and Day of the Tentacle and Blowfish while it mostly succeeds it also reminds us why some things are better left in the past .
In Nine Witches: Family Disruption, the Norwegian village of Sundäe swarms with occult energy the Third Reich intends to harness to win World War II. You swap between two playable characters, professor Alexei Krakovitz, a researcher with the power of astral projection, and his faithful assistant/bodyguard, Akiro Kagasawa.
Akiro is the character you’ll start off as and mainly use for most of the game. In the combat sections you use a pistol that can jam while picking up other guns off the ground. The gunfights are nice but a little overlong. But it’s Krakovits that has more compelling role in the game. As Krakovits you are mainly confined to your wheelchair, but are able to project your soul to wander through locked doors and get valuable information to continue the plot. The astral projection part of the game is one of the strongest and unique aspects this game has and sadly it doesn’t use or build off it nearly enough. The only upgrade you unlock for that skill is partway through the game and while being fun to use, it doesn’t come in handy nearly enough.
The puzzle solving is quite fair I would say, not too easy but not too obtuse. Sometimes you may wonder why you can’t use the crowbar on every door alas that’s the flimsy logic of point and click adventure games. There were a couple of items needed that I had to spend ages backtracking for as I forgot to use Krakovits’ ability to see the objects I can interact with in any given scene. Using that ability over and over though got to be a little annoying, as it disrupted the flow of playing. On XBOX, I also found that certain achievements were not unlocking properly, having to load the game back up for it to recognize I had indeed unlocked it.
The retro pixel art style though is quite gorgeous and one of the strongest aspects of this game. Locations at times look a little too similar but overall each scene you move through is a great piece of pixel art. The writing however is so-so. While at first I found the humor funny and charming, the jokes started becoming very stale often relying on the eighteenth fart joke for a laugh. There are also many fourth wall shattering jokes that vary in their mileage. There are also many many testicle jokes that are pretty central to the towns lore, but they just didn’t do it for me. The story is a fun dime store novel style race against time to stop the Nazi threat. Anyone familiar with Indiana Jones, Hellboy, or Wolfenstein should know what to expect here. The Nazi’s are bumbling, their plan ridiculous (it involves creating a second dark moon), our heroes steadfast. The story was fun which made the weak jokes stand out that much more.
The pace of these adventure games has always been on the slower side as you study scenes, walk back and forth between places you’ve visited, but in the year 2020 we need the ability to fast travel via map to these scenes. There are only so many times I can walk the same dirt path or go down the same road, before it just becomes tedious filler. It makes the player question the actual amount of content their getting, which just shouldn’t happen. Especially for a fun fully realized story like this one.
If you have always wanted more point and click adventure games with zany characters and out there stories in the vein of Lucas Arts or Double Fine, Nine Witches does an admirable job; a more modern take on the genre that throws in some unique mechanics of its own. It’s a shame a lot of the humor just doesn’t work.
