Mandragora: Whispers of the Witch Tree - Review

Mandragora

8.9

Get

Mandragora

8.9

Get

If you asked ChatGPT to combine all the most popular action-RPG mechanics in the hopes of creating a single game with broad appeal, you might end up with something as regrettably unfocused as Mandragora: Whispers of the Witch Tree. This 2D sidescroller borrows from soulslikes, metroidvanias, platformers, and more, but it only ever achieves a moderate level of success with any of them and is spread woefully thin in the process. You can see a glimmer of potential in its combat, but that’s immediately undermined by one-dimensional, repetitious enemies with easily evaded attacks; The setting and characters start out intriguing, but quickly devolve into a chain of predictable tropes; And initial lure of running back through previous areas with new abilities becomes monotonous once you get about halfway through and realize how shallow this map really is. None of these missteps are so grievously bad that I outright regretted my time dodge-rolling around the world of Faelduum (apart from the combat), and the deep RPG options the six interesting character classes, dense skill trees, and in-depth equipment and crafting systems provide went quite a long way toward keeping me invested, but this still an otherwise underwhelming adventure in most aspects.