Early Demo Preview: Mika and the Witch's Mountain

With the Steam Next Fest beginning tomorrow, there are going to be tons of new games to try out from upcoming indie developers. In anticipation for that, we have been selected as one of the lucky few to try some of these demos early. One of the ones I was hoping to cover, and got lucky enough to try for myself, is Mika and the Witch's Mountain.

Being created by Abraham Cozar (who gave us the opportunity to try the demo) and the team at Chibig, Mika is a fantasy adventure game about a witch-in-training who picks up a job delivering packages to people. On this small island, you will soar through the sky on your broom, flying over a gorgeous island, earning money to buy new brooms with unique abilities. While you can focus on the coming-of-age story about friendship and community, you can also just take a break to just take in the sights of the land.

Mika and the Witch's Mountain - Impressions

The demo itself is quite short. After being tasked with getting back up the mountain without any help, all I could do before the demo ended was fix the broom, make 1 delivery (technically 3, but they were all under 1 "quest"), and buy a better broom. While it was short, I did get a good look at what to expect from a longer demo and the full game once released.

Probably one of the first things I noticed when looking at the game were its inspirations. Reading through the Kickstarter page, I could easily see the similarities between Studio Ghibli movies and The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker. The art style and visual presentation here are phenomenal, bursting with just enough color to feel vibrant and simplistic. I found myself multiple times going off the beaten path of the demo just to see the sights.

Gameplay wise, flying around on the broom is a blast. The starter broom I had, which you can swap between getting on and off the broom by pressing the Y button, allows for faster traversal than going on foot. By pressing the right trigger, I got a boost to lift off the ground, but I wasn't able to fly around in air in a straight line. I would bounce up into the air and slowly come back down to the ground, and once I hit the ground, I could bounce again. I would have loved to be able to float and stay in the air, but I assume that will be for more advanced brooms I couldn't buy yet.

It felt really cool to fly around and I preferred that way more to the normal walking and jumping around, which you can do in this game too. Everything just really fit together nicely and made me wish for a longer demo so I could fly around or try out another delivery to get to know more of the townspeople. As a game, I am very excited for the full release!

Steam Deck Performance

So far, the demo has been running extremely well on the Steam Deck! For an early access demo, I was excited to see that it could mostly run at 60 FPS without any TDP cap, but I still felt dips going down to 44 while walking and flying through the town. For now, a solid 40 FPS cap kept everything stable and a decent battery drain with a TDP limit of 9. I felt this was a good start for an early look at an unfinished product and it gives me confidence the final version will be well supported.

Overall, Mika and the Witch's Mountain is an exciting game to look forward to. The demo was on the short side, which was disappointing as I loved the game so far, and I can't wait for the final release! You can check out the demo for yourselves starting tomorrow and be sure to check out the Kickstarter and support this awesome game (it already went way past its funding goal too).

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