‘So bad it’s good’ is a pretty charged phrase. It implies that a piece of entertainment, no matter how dreadful or painful it is to engage with, can still leave a positive impression on you. Goat Simulator is a mess of physics and stupid humour, but it’s still a fun time. The CD-i Legend of Zelda games are memetic gold for their shoddy animation work. Sonic ‘06 has a certain undeniable charm. There are facets to these games that make them shine despite the dullness of the overall product. Little Witch Nobeta has no such facet.

Little Witch Nobeta is a few things. First and foremost, it is confusing. The story is nonsensical - all you know is that you are playing Nobeta, a little girl who’s also a witch, and you need to reach a throne. You have an annoying feline companion who does nothing but insult you and insist you work your way toward the throne. There is little to no exposition; you’re just set off to explore this castle of repetitive environments and bland level design. The cutscenes throughout are filled with stilted dialogue that doesn’t make sense and makes far too many assumptions about what the player a) knows about and b) cares about.

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The game also completely misunderstands what makes the Soulslike formula effective. The devs think ‘lore-rich item descriptions’ are the way to go, but they do not understand why they work. In Dark Souls, the items you pick up are interesting - weapons and armour that you can use, spells and key items that let you engage with the world, et cetera. Here, items are only a name and an icon, with the lore being buried in a datalog-style menu. There is no engagement, just an encyclopaedia of poorly written blurbs that expect you to piece together all the lore for a world that you have no incentive to learn about.

Little Witch Nobeta aiming at an enemy

Combat and gameplay are functional - Nobeta has a melee attack and four elemental spells that function like your standard third-person shooter weapons, and there’s some basic platforming to be had. Your defensive options are limited to a dodge roll that doesn’t have enough i-frames and simply running. Don’t worry though, the game is so easy that getting hit constantly is no threat - constantly regenerating health and mana makes resource management child’s play - the only times I died were when Nobeta fell through the floor in a buggy mess of physics. Don’t run out of stamina, though, or Nobeta will fall over dramatically, wasting everyone’s time and causing her skirt to flash up.

That’s another thing. Little Witch Nobeta is filled to the brim with egregious, pervy fanservice. If an enemy isn’t an amorphous blob, it’s an anime girl with exposed skin. The bosses are all anime girls with exposed skin. Your cat companion? Turns out to be an anime girl, too. Naturally. The intention with this direction is so blatant as to fly right past parody, landing the game firmly in skeezy territory. One cutscene has a grown woman (with ridiculously gratuitous jiggle physics, of course) planting a kiss on Nobeta’s lips. Did I mention Nobeta is a very small girl? The worst thing about this game isn’t the monotonous, uninspired combat or the abject lack of a coherent narrative, but its utter refusal to engage with any sense of taste. One of the unlockable costumes - remember the fact that Nobeta is a child - is a bathing suit.

Little Witch Nobeta - Nobeta holding the cat

I smiled precisely twice during my five-hour playthrough. The first was during a totally random diversion where Nobeta loses her hat and insists that she spend the next 25 minutes engaging with an annoying dungeon filled with dark/light puzzles. Despite losing her hat so obviously in the cutscene, she spawned right after with the hat squarely on her head. Then, after hours of confusing cutscenes that did not endear me to a single character and twists that were either startlingly obvious or bafflingly left-field, the final boss fight starts up, and the soft, plinky plonk melody (designed to evoke the same sad gravity of Dark Souls and Dark Souls 3’s final fights, no doubt) sent me into hysterics. I’m fighting a ghostly apparition of a tiny girl wielding a gigantic sword, and the game expects me to be sad about it. No.

Little Witch Nobeta is not for me, but then I’m not certain who it is for. It is a catastrophic fumbling of the bag with a narrative that makes no sense, combat that feels far too basic, puzzles that don’t even warrant a mention, and a distinctly unappealing target demographic. The only magic I want from Nobeta is a disappearing act.

Nobeta review card

Score: 1/5. A review code was provided by the publisher.

Little Witch Nobeta

A looming castle awaits in Little Witch Nobeta. Alongside your trusty black cat, you must discover your past while contending with 3D action-shooter gameplay. 

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