Inspired by the works of Studio Ghibli, Mika and The Witch’s Mountain is a charming open-world 3D platformer with a heavy emphasis on flight and exploration.
The game stars Mika, an apprentice witch who is left stranded on a tropical island as part of her training. Mika will meet a colorful cast of characters, help deliver packages as a courier, and hopefully become a fully-fledged witch.
Are you ready for a magically tropical experience? Then strap in for our full review of Mika and The Witch’s Mountain!
Mika and the Witch’s Mountain
Developer: Chibig, Nukefist
Publisher: Chibig
Platforms: Nintendo Switch and Microsoft Windows (Reviewed)
Release Date: August 21, 2024
Players: 1
Price: $19.99
The game opens up with the enthusiastic Mika meeting up with her teacher, the witch Oligari, who immediately pushes Mika off a mountain. The fall breaks Mika’s broom but not her spirit, as she vows to make her way back up to receive her training.
Soon after crash-landing, Mika meets Allegra, a mechanic who bears resemblance to the main character from Kiki’s Delivery Service. Allegra fixes up Mika’s broom and promises some upgrades in the future as long as Mika can pay, guiding her towards the town’s courier service, which is in desperate need of a new worker.
After that, Mika starts to become familiar with the citizens of Mont Gaun and their backstories, as her deliveries help bring people close together.
Every package that Mika delivers has a different set of rules and a durability score. Some can’t touch water, while others have to be delivered quickly or can’t hit any objects. The game is pretty casual and lets you retry as many times as you need, so it never becomes stressful or too difficult, even when time limits are applied to the packages.
While doing her deliveries, Mika also works on a side project as she retrieves random items scattered across the island. These deliveries can be tackled at any point in the game and usually reward you with more dialogue from the island’s citizens.
Upgrading your broom lets you carry more than one item, meaning that you can work on multiple deliveries at the same time. Something slightly upsetting about the game’s side objectives is that whenever you drop an item on the ground, it will most likely roll off and disappear, so despite being able to carry multiple things at once, it’s not exactly ideal to drop any items mid-delivery to collect something.
A good chunk of the people on the island are nice and appreciative of Mika’s courier service; after all, she’s the only person doing deliveries, but a few characters that you interact with will rate Mika’s service poorly for no good reason, and her boss, Greff, will side against her every time.
Possibly the biggest issue with Mika and The Witch’s Mountain is how the game just feels incomplete. The main plot thread gets resolved when Mika climbs her way back up to the mountain, but characters like Greff and W. Soot disappear after the second day and don’t seem to show up again, leaving the overall island plot largely unfinished.
W. Soot is the closest thing that the game has to an antagonist, with Greff following behind in second place, as they both serve as representations of industrial and managerial capitalism, respectively. Soot’s interference with the island’s windmill is especially a big part of the plot, so it’s jarring for him to never get any sort of comeuppance after his misdeeds are found out.
When it comes to gameplay, walking around is about what you would expect from a simple 3D platformer, while the broom serves more like a glider rather than something that can actually fly around. The controls feel like the bare minimum, and a game with such a heavy focus on movement should have a little more flair to its traversal rather than simply being serviceable.
The brooms you get in chapters 3 and 4 let you perform a dash that every time you enter a wind current, and also provide access to more wind tunnels and shortcuts, but it still doesn’t make the movement interesting, just slightly faster.
It’s difficult to not remember Tchia and all of its little additions to both movement and exploration, while Mika and The Witch’s Mountain has at best a handful of collectibles, while gameplay mostly consists of holding forward and following a path of wind tunnels.
Mika and The Witch’s Mountain sits in the middle end as far as 3D platformers go. It’s definitely not a fully polished title like A Hat in Time, but it’s also not an unplayable mess made by an inexperienced studio.
The game’s art style is very easy on the eyes, and there’s a surprising amount of uniquely designed NPCs, even if they don’t have any plot relevance. It’s nice to see that a good amount of care went into decorating the game’s world rather than just placing characters around at random.
Being an open-world game built in Unity does mean that Mika and The Witch’s Mountain is not really stable, as it crashes at least once per chapter. Thankfully the game is reasonably short, clocking in at around 3 hours of main story content, but it’s still annoying when it crashes mid-delivery.
Overall, Mika and the Witch’s Mountain is not a bad game, but it feels like a demo rather than a full product. It is incredibly charming and features a fun cast of characters, but the lack of compromise that it has with its own plot is a little disappointing.
The straightforward controls, intuitive gameplay, and bright colors make it a reasonably good game for kids, but when judged through more objective lenses, it falls a bit short, especially when compared to other 3D platformers released in recent times.
Mika and the Witch’s Mountain was reviewed on Microsoft Windows using a game code provided by Chibig. You can find additional information about Niche Gamer’s review/ethics policy here. Mika and the Witch’s Mountain is available on Nintendo Switch and Microsoft Windows (through Steam). Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5 ports are set to release at a later date.
