Patient gaming, Blasphemous. Not much to say about it. I enjoyed the pixel art and the world building but found the gameplay somewhat janky and maybe partly because of it also hated most of the boss battles. I haven’t fully completed it, the in game progress meter gives me around 70% done and I’m just looking if I find the motivation to push it to the finish line. But I’m more stuck in my not so patient gaming game.

Not patient gaming, Witchfire. Blasphemous left me with a dark fantasy itch so I was looking for something to scratch it with and I remembered Witchfire had a major update a month ago. Now to talk about Witchfire itself. Witchfire is a game by the former developers of Painkiller (for those who are ancient enough to know about Painkiller) and is about a fictional church vs witches war where you’re the church assigned “preyer” (witch hunter) who has to go and recover a lost relic from an area controller by a witch that may change the tide of war. Thematically it’s a dark fantasy and while I’m getting some Dark Souls vibes in some of the gameplay elements I feel like there’s much bigger inspiration taken from Bungie with the emphasis on verticality, impressive vistas and tight gunplay.

As for the gameplay, if we were to be genre fluid it would fit in the extraction shooter genre. You go on expeditions into one of the 6 maps to gather resources, level up weapons, explore the maps, do quests or progress the meta progression and when you’ve completed what you set out to do or you feel like you no longer have resources to continue you go to an exit portal and effectively extract. The game very much has every aspect of an extraction shooter except for the multiplayer PvP and it will never get that because the developers have been very clear it will be single-player only. I guess technically there’s also no time limit for how long you can stay in the expedition but there’s a late game mechanic that you can interact with to ramp up the difficulty to a point where sticking around becomes extremely dangerous. The gunplay feels really good. Not as good as Destiny 2 but for me it comes very close because it’s one of the very few games where I can easily intuit how my character moves, where the enemies are and which shots will and won’t land. I have no idea what micro interactions are happening there but the moment to moment gameplay is so satisfying for me. The only exception is when enemies are so close that the particle effects are having a full-on rave on my screen and I can’t see if I’ve killed everyone or if there’s an enemy about to attack me.

It’s still in early access with a release around the corner (last roadmap that was released a few weeks ago had a late Q4 2026 release window) so it’s not patient gamers ready, but I think it’s definitely worth putting on your radar because I genuinely think it’s also worth the $40 price tag. I bought it when the 0.8 update came out and had fun but ultimately put it down because the late game mechanic (world corruption for those who have played the game) was a difficulty spike I wasn’t expecting and it sucked the fun out of it, at least for me. I was going to skip to 1.0 but like I said, Blasphemous gave me an itch and Witchfire was going to scratch it. And I’m glad I didn’t wait because I experienced it first-hand that the developers are taking feedback from early access and they’re actually listening because with the 0.9 release I was blown away how significantly they altered the the late game mechanic. It went from something that forces difficulty to ramp up to something you can choose to interact with and if you do it doesn’t just ramp up difficulty, it also gives you a few choices to power up yourself as well. So a mechanic that at first was just something to make the game harder became a mechanic that makes the game more challenging. This on a whim decision to play Witchfire has made it one of my most anticipated releases of 2026.