When my friend recommended Mandragora: Whispers of the Witch Tree to me, I swore that it was the most playable ARPG this year. As a result, I played for three days, and now I just want to settle the score with him.
The first two hours were really amazing. I chose an assassin character and sneaked into the dark forest with a poison dagger, feeling that I was playing an exquisite independent game. The atmosphere of the picture is good. The protagonist is still a judge who can hear the whispers of monsters. This setting immediately interested me.
But the good times don’t last long. When I reached the fifth hour, I began to feel something was wrong. The enemies are over and over again: slow-acting skeletons, annoying bats, and mice that can never be beaten. Every time I meet a new monster, my eyes light up, but I find that I just changed the skin. The most outrageous thing is that I actually played the poisonous giant mouse boss ten times in the game, and the moves were exactly the same every time.
The combat system makes people want to doze off. The enemy’s attack was so outrageous that I could take the time to reply to a WeChat and dodge. Once I video chatted with my friend while playing boss, but my friend couldn’t watch it any longer: “Are you playing a game or a screen saver?”
The most annoying thing about this game is its plot reversal. Every time he encounters a suspicious character, the protagonist will be fooled. After playing, I could guess the plot: “What? Are you really a bad guy?” This routine was repeated seven or eight times, and even my twelve-year-old cousin felt childish.
However, the professional system has done a good job. I have tried the combination of assassins to mages. There are many intersections in skill trees, and the build combination is quite interesting. The equipment building system is also worth playing. It took me an afternoon just to enchant the dagger. If it hadn’t been for the sake of studying these, I might have abandoned the pit long ago.
The platform jumping part is simply passing through the field. The trap is so clearly designed that I can avoid it with my eyes closed. After getting the grab hook and the second jump, I thought I could show my skills, but I found that the new areas I could go to were all irrelevant corners, and the rewards were pitifully few.
What breaks me the most is the optimization problem. After playing for six hours in a row, the number of game frames will plummet. Once before hitting the final boss, the screen stuck into PPT, and I could only restart the host. This kind of problem is really impossible in the game of 2025.
If you ask me if I recommend this game, my advice is: unless you are particularly bored or want to study the build system of ARPG, you’d better save this money. What I regret most now is that I didn’t apply for a refund two hours before playing.
Have you ever encountered this kind of game of “amaze at the beginning, persuaded to withdraw in the later stage”? Come to the comment section to complain and let me know that I am not alone.
