Someone is definitely a fan of The Legend of Zelda: Link to the Past. Not just me, either. I’m a huge fan myself, but while I was playing the newly released Trigger Witch from developer Rainbite and publisher Eastasiasoft, there were some serious LttP vibes happening. That’s certainly not a bad thing. Indie developers have been moving backwards instead of forwards, challenging the power of 8 and 16 bit styles of game design for a while to bring back the fun factor into an industry increasingly obsessed with mass audiences and cookie cutter open world games. Fortunately, Trigger Witch is anything but cookie cutter.
In Trigger Witch, you play a young witch named Colette who is joining the Clip, a religious group of witches who have forsworn magic for the modern art of Ballisticism, a type of gun worship that leads them to be protectors of their village. But magic is creeping back into the world, a mysterious Man in Black has come out of the rift that supplies the witches with their guns (just bear with me), and Colette is on a mission to set things right in true video game fashion by collecting items and shooting everything that moves.
It’s a ridiculous premise and a silly story, but that’s kind of part of the charm of 90s gaming and Rainbite manages to make it part of the charm for Trigger Witch as well. Starting things off in a town, sending Colette into dungeons to retrieve keys, unlock doors, gain new weaponry for her arsenal, and maybe fight a boss at the end of each dungeon is absolutely right down the path for this style of adventure gaming. And if that’s all it was, Trigger Witch might not be quite as fun as it is.
Luckily for us, there’s a bit more going on here. On top of the very blatant LttP overtones, there’s a twin stick shooter here, some comedy thrown in, a bit of vertical shmup action, branching story options, and even some broken tropes with the plot as Colette blasts her way through the game in a hail of bullets. Now, normally I’m not a fan of twin stick games, but with infinite ammo, upgradeable weapons, and a forgiving control scheme, Trigger Witch isn’t the brutal beast that some other twin stick games end up being. In fact, the gameplay is fun but relatively light and if you have moderate gaming skills and a bit of patience, you’ll flow through the stages fairly quickly. There’s no deeper puzzle solving like a Zelda game here, though there are puzzles galore and some of them might take you a couple minutes. They all involve guns, of course, and they’re decently clever, but you won’t be scratching your head.
The same goes for the bosses. While each boss fight features unique patterns and attacks, none are particularly difficult. The design work is top notch though, with creative fights, unique mechanics and excellent flow overall. Not overly challenging, but simply fun to play, and that’s really what counts! In fact, Trigger Witch is simply fun in general, with enemies hurtling themselves at you, a solid variety of weaponry, decent dungeon designs, and fun graphics!
This is a pretty cute looking game too, which makes it all the more disconcerting when you open fire on your first batch of enemies and absolutely splatter their guts all over the ground! There’s blood everywhere and it’s almost confusing because the rest of the game feels so wholesome. There’s a setting you can change in the menu to turn the blood to confetti thankfully and even though I don’t mind the blood, it just felt more right to have the confetti pouring out of the monsters somehow. The arena was particularly gruesome, with wave after wave of enemies slathering the floor in a red wave of ichor.
The rest of the visuals look a heck of a lot like Link to the Past, and that’s not a bad thing. This is a lovingly detailed game that’s fun to look at. Dungeons filled with rainbow gems, environmental storm effects, playful use of text sizes and motion to accentuate dialogue, it’s all here. The bosses are large and articulated and the care taken in the environmental design is outstanding for a small indie title. Trigger Witch is a pretty game, and while the character portraits could have been a little cleaner, most all of the rest of the game looks great. It sounds good too and the music and sound effects overlap well. The soundtrack isn’t something from Uematsu or anything, but it’s solid and fits well with the game, shifting cleanly to match the plot. The only negative really is that your guns are so loud that they kind of overpower a lot of stuff, and chances are good that anytime you’re firing, that’s mostly all you’ll hear, especially since you have infinite ammo and can hold the firing button down.
As mentioned, gameplay is twin-stick oriented, but it’s not as tough as some of the twin stick arena games. The left stick moves Colette and the right aims her guns with the R button reloading, and the ZR firing your guns. Don’t worry, they auto reload as well, but you can do it manually. You can also switch between guns with L and R, use the D-pad to pop up a gun equip screen, and most importantly, dash with ZL. The dash is probably the most important mechanic and you have two shots at it before your gauges are depleted. They charge quickly but you’ll need them because mastering dash is the key to Trigger Witch. Hit ZL and a direction and Colette does a rainbow dash, making her functionally invincible while moving. This means you can move directly through enemies, bullets, and even flames. As long as you’re out of the way when she stops, you’re good. It’s a simple but powerful mechanic that dramatically affects the difficulty of Trigger Witch. If you really wanted the game to be hard, just skip the dash and chances are good you’ll be struggling to survive quite quickly.
On top of all this, there’s a pretty solid customization system for guns, allowing you to add ammo, damage, range, and reload speed to every weapon, using the gems dropped by enemies as currency to pay for them. You can’t start an upgrade path without extra parts though, and you have to find those in hidden chests. Fortunately, you can also buy health extensions and maps that show the secret locations in every area (i.e. hidden chests), so it pays to save up.
Trigger Witch seems like a fluffy, nonsense indie game at first glance, but as you play, you realize there’s a fairly decent plot and some good world-building going on here. Once you get past the initial missions and the story starts to unfold, the game becomes more and more engaging and the dialogue is well-written. You can get a good 10 or 12 hours out of it, depending on how thorough you want to be hunting down upgrades and hidden items, and the plot is fun, with plenty of tongue and cheek silliness and more than a bit of 90s style RPG drama. Apparently, there’s also drop-in play functionality, letting a friend literally connect a controller and immediately begin playing co-op too, which is a very 90s thing. Disconnect the controller and the second player simply disappears, allowing you to continue as you were. This is definitely a mechanic that more games should incorporate! For only $15, you’re getting a decent amount of gameplay here and more importantly, the game is simply fun! Remember fun? That thing we used to have playing games in the 90s? Rainbite does and they’ve brought it back for you so say thank you! Now go check out Trigger Witch and try to remember what fun felt like!
This review was based on a digital copy of Trigger Witch provided by the publisher. It was played on a Nintendo Switch in both docked and undocked modes and was excellent in both. Trigger Witch is also available on the PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X. All screenshots are of actual gameplay.
