The Haunted Hoard: Witch College (PC)

Because of the relative ease involved in making a visual novel video game, the genre often finds itself the platform for games that are essentially just delivery methods for adult content. The writing might work to establish the characters some, but it can often feel like you’re just sprinting to the erotic scenes, the game living or dying based on the quality of the art and writing featured at those key moments. Developer Kavorka Play certainly isn’t immune to this approach, their game Lovely Heroines almost on that level, but Witch College, despite featuring erotic scenes, doesn’t feel like it’s only trying to get you to them. Surprisingly, Witch College is a game better described as sweet and fluffy rather than just sexy.

The major reason why Witch College doesn’t feel like another run of the mill vehicle for a collection of mature content is that its story actually devotes itself to the angles it’s pursuing. Playing as a young male going to college, you have two major routes to pursue when it comes to romance, and while you will eventually end up in bed with the girl of your choice if you pursue them properly, the game doesn’t feel like it’s all a build-up to getting them naked. The red-headed Aki slips into the well-worn trope of a childhood friend who has had a crush on your character for years but never spoke up, and her route is certainly the more saccharine of the two. Aki herself can be a tease or pretty forceful in conversation, but your relationship with her hits some sweet beats and involves plenty of the shy blushing typical of a less lurid romance. Just like in real life, having an intimate physical relationship with someone doesn’t necessarily preclude you having sweet and sugary moments with your significant other, and Aki’s route covers this pretty well.

The blonde Sam is the other girl you can pursue, this young lady moving into town and catching your character’s eye immediately. Compared to Aki she’s spunkier and somewhat rebellious, more in line with an adventurous tomboy who flirts rather directly. Getting to know her better and helping her explore the new town guides your interactions with her, and while the visual novel presentation relies on few locations and asks you to use your imagination to fill in gaps, the two female leads are established enough that getting their ending is about more than taking off their clothes. In fact, the game is relatively reserved on when it presents such intimate scenes. After setting up the early parts of the plot it does throw in a gratuitous scene early on regardless of your route, perhaps to assure the player that there will be nudity in this game, but after that it takes a long break, choosing to establish its characters and set up an actually somewhat intriguing mystery plot.

Witch College, despite the name, is not actually about a college where witches learn magic. The college is completely mundane, but with a Halloween dance approaching at the school, you are spurred to decide who you want to bring to the party. However, the Halloween dance also lines up with a day spoken of in rumors from the city’s history, a day where someone known as the Sunflower Witch will be at full power, and it’s quite possible that the witch is someone you know at your school. Most of your choices over the course of the rather short story relate to who you hang out with, the best choice being to exclusively pursue Aki or Sam in a playthrough because even one wrong choice might seemingly throw you into the other girl’s ending. Along the way to asking your girl of choice to the dance, you slowly get fed more and more info about the Sunflower Witch and suspicions rise on who it could be. The ending of the game ends up not only a culmination of the relationship you chose but this mystery plot as well, and while both of the game’s endings address it in different ways, it’s perhaps best thought that they are two separate and different worlds since one ending can taint the other if certain details revealed in one were true of the other as well.

Because it chose to focus on the romance and the mystery, Witch College overcomes a lot of its narrative simplicity and manages to hold your interest well enough. The barely animate characters with flapping mouths don’t do it many favors, but the art has a clean cartoon style with flat colors and mild shading, and when you get to the erotic content, the expected bump in quality to the more detailed still images is done pretty well. Compared to Lovely Heroines, a game that is even referenced in Witch College as an in-universe fictional franchise, there are far fewer discrepancies between how characters look when involved in conversations compared to how they appear during intercourse, although there was one unexpected error. Sam’s dark eyebrows are practically a defining feature since they contrast with her blonde hair, and yet the first time she appears in the erotic scenes, her eyebrows match her hair color instead.

There are two other girls involved in the plot, but they are not eligible for romantic entanglement. Instead, the two additional ladies featured in the story have side stories that can culminate in a good way, just not with you removing their clothes. Hanna, or possibly Hana but we’ll get to the typo problems later, serves as your companion in investigating the Sunflower Witch, the game seeming to go for a more platonic relationship with this shy nerd, but the running joke about your character not noticing her when she’s around is sort of beat to death. Miss Seiko, on the other hand, goes for a somewhat typical “hot for teacher” route, the path of her story involving some reciprocation but not a full on relationship. Earning the better endings for these side stories involves a few moments where your choices are more complex than choosing to hang out with Aki or Sam. Miss Seiko requires you to answer questions correctly in class, both testing to see if you’re reading the game’s writing and helping nail in some details about the Sunflower Witch mystery. Hanna, on the other hand, seems to involve picking the right face-down tarot cards, which isn’t exactly a great way of designing a route because of its seemingly random nature. Perhaps wisely though, after release Witch College added in two side stories you can play any time where you consummate a more intimate relationship with Hanna or Miss Seiko. Better played after at least one run through the normal game and feeling like a coda to Hanna and Seiko’s less lewd endings in the main story, it’s easy to imagine they were thrown in to avoid the inevitable criticism visual novels get when one of the main ladies isn’t a romance option in any form.

However, as mentioned earlier, Witch College is let down a bit by a few technical flaws and outright errors. Typos are not uncommon in the dialogue, and the skip function to speed ahead through text doesn’t have a properly functioning option to only skip dialogue you’ve seen before. There is a save feature that seems to have many pages, allowing for you to return to choice points if you want to alter your response for things like Hanna’s cards, but if you choose to use more than the first page, you can run into an unusual error where it starts to override the save slots on other pages. It’s hard to tell which ones will stick around as they start to overlap each other, so it’s best to just never flip the page and treat the handful of slots on the first one as your only options. The game being fairly short helps make this easier to stomach, but something a little stranger is when the game seemingly wants to play both outcomes to an event. At one point in the plot I took a test in class and saw the results for getting a perfect grade and for failing it miserably, and this isn’t the only place where it can sometimes struggle to display the right outcome. It’s easy to look past it since it doesn’t seem to disrupt the path you’re on, but Witch College does give the impression that it’s barely holding together. Hearing the music track from one scene still stick around as the next scene’s music kicks in can be a problem that’s harder to put up with though, but saving and loading can undo this issue at least. Even the CG Gallery where you can view the detailed images from the game’s story has weird issues with automatically displaying pictures across the corner of the menu screen. None of these problems truly destroy the experience, but it’s certainly a rickety ride that requests your patience in return for something a bit more than your regular adult visual novel.

THE VERDICT: Despite providing mature content to lure in prospective players, Witch College manages to provide a bit more than just a simple set of titillating images. Sweet romances with the female leads do a fair bit for making pursuing them more interesting, and the mystery that serves as the backbone of this short story adds some intrigue to the first playthrough. Light-hearted and with a clean cartoon art style that transfers well to the adult imagery, Witch College balances providing the expected content with a story that carries its weight well enough. It’s not complex, perhaps overly saccharine and cliche at times for sure, but despite the technical issues and typos that bring it down a little, Witch College manages to make asking a girl to the Halloween dance a fairly decent little diversion.

And so, I give Witch College for PC…

An OKAY rating. Whether or not you let the technical flubs and unfortunately common typos get to you, Witch College still feels like an appropriately brisk little dating plot about wooing either Aki or Sam and finding out the truth about the Sunflower Witch. It’s not asking for much input from the player and choices are fairly straightforward, but it has enough cute moments during the dating side of things and a simple mystery adding a unique through line to what would otherwise just be a game about picking which college girl to get with. It’s refreshing to see the adult content is just a feature rather than the focus, but it would still be going overboard to say it’s doing anything exceptionally well. The erotic art matches the art style well for the most part and the build-up to it is done well enough, but Witch College isn’t trying to be deep and thus ends up a fluffy little visual novel that can leave you feeling good in ways beyond titillation.

When I saw Witch College 2 release, I had to wonder what made the original Witch College the game to get a sequel out of Kavorka Play’s small catalogue of visual novels. It seems pretty clear now that Witch College’s mix of cuteness and sexiness was what helped it stand out above things like their superhero game, and while it’s not amazing in any particular department, it puts in just the right amount of effort in the important areas to make up for its numerous small flaws. It struggles with the technical side and isn’t ambitious with its plot or romances, but Witch College manages to be a delightful little example of an erotic visual novel that didn’t just settle for being a shallow sprint to lewd images.