Ikenfell

I have so many praises that I want to sing about this extremely cute and queer fun witch game! The story is incredible, the battles are surprisingly engaging and have some timing mechanics to add an extra bit of skill to the battles, and the world building and design is just wonderful.

There are some difficult topics that are spoken about in the game, such as themes of trauma, but it all works together into a gripping story that you really just want to experience right up until the end. But if that sounds off-putting to you, let me tell you about the most innivotive part of this game, its accessibility menu.

The game has a lot of options that are aimed at assisting people with various disabilities, such as being able to partially or fully automate the combat timing minigames, adding content warnings and an option to skip difficult story beats, tools to reduce screen movement and flashing, or for players who just want to get through the story and arent interested by the combat, there is a victory option, which you can enable in the settings, then select in battle to automatically defeat all enemies, or move to the next phase of the combat. There is no penalty to using any of these options, they’re entirely there for people who want to experience the story more uninterupted.

The game follows a squad of queer witches, which some people have criticised as being too unrealistic, but in reality we tend to flock to our own. Queer folk, myself included, tend to lean towards making friends with other people who understand us, so its not surprising to me that there are a lot of us in focus in this game. When you consider the alternative options for wizard school settings, I’d much rather have the cute queer squad than a crazy woman gunning for our lives so thats something to consider I guess…

Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/854940 £15.49
Humble Bundle: https://www.humblebundle.com/store/ikenfell £15.49
Switch: https://www.nintendo.co.uk/Games/Nintendo-Switch-download-software/Ikenfell-1848038.html £17.99