The Growing Stones and Valkyrie Initiative came together to tell a macabre story about a village inhabited only by children. Life in this village will soon turn to death if their local pariahs, the witches, fail at an upcoming ritual. This is The Mildew Children.
The Mildew Children follows Kyrphel, a young witch plagued by omens relating to the fate of the village, her fears grow after one of her fellow witches dies, bringing the number of witches in the village down to three. This would not be a problem if not for the fact that there needed to be four witches to carry out a ritual on a certain night to prevent doom from coming to the village. Now Kyrphel must find the fourth witch.
Now, onto the game itself! Depending on how you plan on going about playing The Mildew Children, controls are relatively simple. The game is side-scrolling so there’s not much to the controls. The art of the game is beautiful and looks like you’re reading from a fairytale book. The ambient sounds and soundtrack are pleasant on the ears as well but the game needs voice-acting because if you’re not a fan of reading, you’re going to hate this game because that’s all you really do in this game is read.
When it comes to gameplay, just as mentioned above, you’re mainly reading. At times you could have quick time events going on as you’re reading, but you’re given the option to disable that at the start of the game. This game is mainly a “Choose your own adventure” as you have multiple dialogue trees to choose from that can change the outcome of events and the story overall.
Sadly, the Achilles heel of this game is how boring it is. There are 12 chapters in this game and at the time of writing this I’m halfway through and nothing is happening, nothing spooky, nothing interesting… Nothing. This is sad because the first chapter had quite a strong start but then the story burned out right after that.
On my scale of 1-10, the beautiful artwork, and concept could not save this snorefest from itself. 4/10
The Mildew Children is out now for PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, and Nintendo Switch.
