At the end of the day, Ashley writes about games because she genuinely loves them. She’s not chasing world-first raids or 2,000-hour playtime milestones. She’s just someone who’s been playing for decades, who understands what makes a game click, and who wants to help other players discover their next favorite experience.
The survival genre is currently stuck in a loop. For over a decade, we’ve punched trees, watched hunger meters tick down, and desperately crafted stone axes before nightfall. It is a rhythm that millions love, yet millions more have grown tired of.
Enter Witchspire, the upcoming “cozy survival” title from Envar Games that promises to break this cycle by asking a simple, radical question: What if a survival game didn’t actually want you to just survive, but thrive?
If the name Envar Games sounds familiar, it’s likely because you’ve seen their work without realizing it. As an elite outsourcing studio, they’ve crafted assets for titans like Riot Games and Blizzard. But with Witchspire, the studio is stepping out from the shadows of work-for-hire to build their own IP, and they are bringing a distinct philosophy to the table. In an exclusive interview with GameRant, Liam O’Neill, Head of Envar Games, made the studio’s stance clear: they are done with passive drains on player fun.
Death to the Hunger Meter
The first casualty of O’Neill’s design philosophy was the genre’s most staple mechanics: hunger and thirst. While competitors lean into “hardcore” realism, Witchspire is sprinting in the opposite direction.
“I don’t want to be shady to any other survival games,” O’Neill told us, “but hunger and thirst were never really mechanics that we wanted in Witchspire.”
This decision ripples through the entire game. Instead of scrambling for berries to stop a health bar from depleting, players are encouraged to explore. Even stamina, the great limiter of open-world exploration, has been overhauled. Early playtests revealed that limiting sprinting just wasn’t fun. “The more we played it, the more it just felt like ‘why are we restricting the player in this way?'” O’Neill explained. “It just didn’t feel rewarding to explore.”
The solution? “Spirit Charges.” You can sprint forever, but special actions like triple-jumping to reach high peaks consume charges. It shifts the mechanic from a punishment to a tool for traversal.”
The Magic of Automating the Bore
Perhaps the most contentious topic on Reddit about the game is the promise of “automating the grind.” Players are rightly skeptical — does automation mean the game plays itself? O’Neill clarified that the goal is to make resource gathering feel powerful, not passive.
Take logging, for example. You aren’t just hitting a tree 50 times. As you upgrade your tools, the gameplay evolves. “The second [tool] you unlock, it almost works like a magical buzzsaw,” O’Neill said. “You have these little spirits that are orbiting around you, and they’ll just shred down trees.”
This extends to the game’s “Familiars” — creatures you tame and bring back to your base. These aren’t just stat blocks; they are workers with personality. O’Neill described a workstation animation involving a “Lamloof” (a sheep-like creature) versus a “Rockling.” While the Lamloof runs elegantly on a wheel, the Rockling “is not as elegant… let’s just say it gives them a lot of character.”
Cozy Meets Cosmic Horror
Visually, Witchspire channels the whimsy of Studio Ghibli, but there is a jagged edge hidden beneath the cottage-core aesthetic. The community has dubbed this “Dark Cozy,” and it’s intentional. The world is plagued by “Void Storms” and ancient corruption.
“If you want to make a story that has brightness and optimism, you also want that contrast of some kind of urgency,” O’Neill noted.
That urgency manifests in creatures like the “Shudder Matriarch,” a terrifying hybrid of a shark and a bee that patrols the desert biomes. “She is absolutely massive,” O’Neill warned. “The first time you see her, you are not going to be ready to deal with her. So run.”
A Narrative With A Voice
Unlike many survival sandboxes that rely on text logs, Witchspire is leaning into a “Reflections” system voiced by industry heavyweights Matthew Mercer and Victoria Atkin. Instead of cutscenes interrupting gameplay, your character reacts contextually to the world.
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“If you want to dive a little bit into the lore… you can press a button on the keyboard and your character is going to talk,” O’Neill explained. “But why we’ve designed it this way is we don’t want to force the story on the player who just wants to rush through the action.”
The First Playtest Date is Coming in February
For those itching to see if Envar can stick the landing, you won’t have to wait long. O’Neill revealed exclusively to GameRant that the first major public playtest is imminent.
“It’s kicking off properly February 10th,” O’Neill confirmed. “And obviously Steam NextFest is coming up towards the end of February, which is also somewhere where we want to participate.”
Envar Games is taking a massive gamble by trying to marry the relaxation of a farming sim with the tension of an eldritch horror RPG. But if they can pull it off, Witchspire might just be the game that proves you don’t need to starve to feel like a survivor.
Witchspire – Official Announcement Trailer
Witchspire is an open-world survival and crafting game developed by Envar Games. Take a look at the official announcement trailer here.
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By GameRant
Survival
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Witchspire
Adventure
Crafting
Survival
Systems
Developer(s) Envar Games
Where to play
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WHERE TO PLAY
DIGITAL
Genre(s) Adventure, Crafting, Survival
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