Maria The Witch is a cute 2D Platformer. Maria is a trainee witch working for the postal service, but she has a bit of trouble controlling her broomstick. Learn more about it in our Maria The Witch review!
Maria is working at the post office, and some cheeky thieves have stolen the mail and scattered them all around the world. By tracking down the pair and finding the mail, Maria will restore peace of mind to the Kingdom and to the customers of the postal service. The tutorial is simple to follow and understand which is always a plus.
Despite the cute pastel colors and characters, Maria The Witch is not an easy game to play. The broomstick is highly temperamental and crashing is inevitable…. not just a few times overall but a few times every minute. The controls of the broomstick are oversensitive by default, but you can turn it down which will make a slight difference, but you’ll most likely be easily frustrated as progress feels too slow.
Fortunately, enemies are few and far between, so your main aim is to try and keep the broom as steady as you can without crashing. Crashing takes you back to your last checkpoint, but that’s not all you have to worry about since checkpoints cost coins to activate, and coins are pretty sparse, making the game more challenging than it should be. The obstacles are not as bad, and there is some room for you to manoeuvre, but the hard controls are too complicated to get the hand on. For me, that was a turnoff, it wouldn’t have been so bad if I was able to control it but you can’t.
Collecting mail around the levels may sound easy, but it’s not since they’re very easy to miss, but you can force yourself to crash to get them. That isn’t all since there are secret tunnels with collectibles to find, and sometimes coins are inside of those secret tunnels, and you definitely need them to activate checkpoints. Another thing that I wasn’t keen on was the looping music, but it’s easy to turn it off in the options menu.
All in all Maria The Witch has some good points, like the art style and the colorful settings but, ultimately, it’s pretty hard to recommend a game as frustrating as this one. At first glance, I thought it would be a good looking and relaxing platformer, but it is a shallow game that is challenging just for the sake of being challenging.
Disclaimer
This Maria the Witch review is based on a Nintendo Switch copy provided by Naps Games.
