Garden of Witches

Garden of Witches is Team Tapas's first PC game, and it looks it in the best way. The Seoul studio spent a decade on cozy mobile hits (A Girl Adrift, Bistro Heroes). Then it spent 15 months of Early Access turning a fairy-tale garden into a finished action roguelike. You play Sil, the Thread Witch. The job is to round up lazy, unruly colleagues for a tea party before the Garden falls apart. The weapon is a giant pair of scissors. The tone is cute with a creep underneath, not a joke about witches.

Steam, fetched 31 August 2026 (Europe/Berlin): All reviews Very Positive, 92% of 1,537. Recent reviews Very Positive, 87% of 258. That recent dip is the 1.0 story. Team Tapas did not just bolt on an ending. It ripped out Attribute, Synergy, Tag, and Rune, then rebuilt combat around Scissors, Spells, Imprints, and Relics. Charge, Combo, and Channeling are meant to give each tool a face. Keyboard and mouse finally shipped as the default. 31 achievements. Japanese voice acting for chapters 1 to 5 only. Challenge Mode waits until Epilogue 3 is cleared.

This is an editorial 1.0 verdict from the live store, the 1.0 notes, Steam user themes, and coverage. It is not a hands-on playtest writeup.

The loop is Hades-adjacent without being a photocopy. Pick Scissors and Spells in the Armory. Push through a witch's domain. Learn a boss's tells. Die, keep the talent tree, come back with a sharper loadout. 1.0 wants each pair of scissors to play differently: combo finishers on the base set and Giant Scissors, Sharpness crits on Broken Scissors, charged shots on Magic Scissors. Imprints are the interesting lever. They do not just add percentages. A Fireball can become one fat charged boom or a spray of small hits. Relics are supposed to be the glue between skills now that synergy tags are gone.

That bet is why this is a 7.7, not an 8-something. Steam still likes the game. Players keep praising the art, the witches, the music, and the fact that 1.0 has an ending. They also keep saying it is short (around ten hours to credits and a 100% for people who are good at this genre), that some chapters are easier than the one before, that a few Scissors have obvious best-in-slot spells, and that the old synergy discovery high is thinner. One detailed 1.0 negative put it bluntly: skills do not talk to each other the way they used to. That is the cost of throwing out a system people had already learned to love.

Practical 1.0 extras matter. Mouse aim is the default, with Keyboard-Only still in settings (older "no mouse on PC" reviews are stale). German interface and subtitles are on the store. Full audio is Japanese, and only for the main five chapters, with a named cast led by Ikumi Hasegawa as Sil. Challenge Mode is endgame after Epilogue 3, not a toy you unlock on day one. Windows only. Minimum spec is 2014-era (i3-4160, GTX 650 Ti, 4 GB RAM, 4 GB disk). Also on STOVE.

Score 7.7/10. Garden of Witches is a distinctive, finished cute/creepy action roguelike from a mobile studio that was willing to rebuild its combat instead of shipping Early Access with a bow on it. Buy it at the $13.29 introductory price (30% off $18.99, through 11 September 2026) if you want Sil's tea party, giant scissors, German UI, and a story that actually ends. Wait if you were attached to the old synergy soup, if you need a 30-hour Hades-class meat grinder, or if you only play on Mac or Linux.