[Disclaimer: I received a review key for The Mildew Children through Keymailer, a third-party website/company that connects publishers and developers with content creators. The game was given without promise or expectation of a positive review, only that the game be played and content be created through the playing of the game and the experience. Unless otherwise noted, all content in the following article is from my own playthrough of this game.]
Systems: Windows, Steam OS, Nintendo Switch 1 & 2, Linux, & PlayStation 4
Release Date: September 22, 2023
Time Spent: 10+ Hours
There are a lot of different directions I could go with this article, but the one I'm going to go with will be the simplest one.
I really, really liked The Mildew Children.
The Mildew Children is part point-and-click adventure game, part visual novel, part deep dive into Russian/Baltic occultism (that we're not going to do a deep dive into in this article, but maybe a future one), part multi-tasking, and part walking-simulator. I don't think there is one legitimate way to fit The Mildew Children into traditional video game boxes, and that's one of the many things I love about the game.
You play the game as the young witch Kyrphel, who is a member of a small circle of four witches living just outside of a small village. The village is populated only by children, and the fact that there's no explanation as to why this is, I find fascinating. Were all of the adults killed? Did the adults all succumb to an illness? There is an outlying area outside of the village filled with graves, so people have been buried there for years before our story begins. Kryphel even talks about her mother, who died years ago, but as we later learn through the story, the exact definition of a mother and a daughter can become murky.
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The game is played by having Kyrphel walk through the village and interact with specific villagers, often rebuking their sneers and side-long glances, but at the same time requesting her to perform simple rituals for them, often out of selfish need or desperation. Everyone hating on the witches until they actually need their help. Along with the other witches in her circle, Kyrphel is also close with the priestess Littlegrave, who walks around with a scythe and looks to be about 10 years old, and she has a brother who lives in the village who is a hunter, but her interactions with him in my playthrough were limited.
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Depending on the difficulty level (yes, there are difficulty levels for this walking-sim of a visual adventure novel) determines how the mini-games are played. The three mini-games often happen either during conversations, when Kyrphel is casting a spell, or fighting off ailments, often while in conversation or while trying to focus on spellcraft. There are times when you are button-mashing, other times when you are trying to center a slider that is being pulled either up or down, and a rhythm-ish-type game where you have to press the A-button at specific times to utter the correct words to a spell. I played on "normal" difficulty to get the experience that the developers intended, although there were two instances after dying more than five times that I highly considered lowering the difficulty, even as the game was asking me if I wanted to lower the difficulty; is it bad when you feel the game is taking pity on you?
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There are also several times over the course of the game where you have to select the correct conversation options, or you're likely to die. In one of these that became the bane of my playthrough, I ended up having to consult a walkthrough because I could not for the life of me figure out the correct combination of speech options to actually make it out alive. As it turned out, I needed to select 10 correct speech options to make it out when I found I was usually dying after only five, with no real indication that I could tell if how I was directing the conversation was correct at all. I honestly don't know if I could have gotten through this section without the assistance of the walkthrough. Just a heads up, that the next section is going to contain spoilers for the story and parts of the gameplay, so if you want to remain spoiler-free, I recommend skipping the next section and then coming back and joining us towards the end. I feel like I'd be remiss to not mention this, though, so y'all've been warned.
~SPOILERS~
For the first handful of chapters, I couldn't quite tell where the story was going. There was Kyrphel and Littlegrave, and then one of the witches in the circle was found dead, leading up to the ritual that needed to be performed on the shortest night of the year, the Dormition. This ritual can/should only be performed with a circle of four witches, and Kyrphel takes it upon herself to seek out a woman to become the fourth member of their circle. For the sake of not revealing everything in the story, I'm going to gloss over who specifically Kyrphel decides upon to join their circle and instead jump to the chapters dedicated to Kyrphel teaching Iva. During these sections of the game, Kyrphel imparts a lot of seemingly occult lore upon Iva, and you're often given the option to let Iva whisper to herself what was just said, ask her to repeat it back to Kyrphel to show retention, or just blow on through to the next topic. These lessons span multiple chapters and cover various topics, including recipes for witch dust, the purpose and symbolism of old coins, the differences between different types of red berries, and their significance in witchcraft. There is a lot of information, and had this not been a video game, I probably would have taken notes. Instead, I did the next best thing and took a lot of screenshots and videos.
All of these lessons come back hard when the game makes the absolutely brilliant decision and, through a mildly unsettling screen flicker following a ritual that would ultimately decide if Iva is capable of being a witch, you now take control of Iva and follow Kyrphel back to her hut. Here, you are quizzed on all of the lessons you learned from previous chapters. I love it! Absolutely love it because while you were playing as Kyrphel, there are multiple times that she chastises Iva for either not paying attention or not being able to retain the ingredients and specific order for concocting spell components. Some of the level of severity in how hard you had had Kyrphel scold Iva was left up to the player, and thankfully, I don't think I was too hard on her.
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In my first time casting a spell as Iva, I know that I forgot one aspect, placing a coin on a window, because I was told, as Iva, not to open a window because it would let evil spirits in. My brain registered the part about the window, so I ended up not doing anything with the coin. Looking over the walkthrough after the fact, I rediscovered steps that I didn't do or forgot about completely. And I may not have made the circle of witch dust in a counterclockwise direction, but I know for certain I ate two pale tears and gave Lyrida five to eat herself. Soon after, the night of the Dormition takes place, and I know that I must have messed something up before because Iva died soooooo many times. While in the process of writing this article, I discovered that Kyrphel can interact with more spirits in the days before the Dormition, which can make the challenges/mini-games more manageable, but I only inadvertently found one, which could also explain why I had such a hard time.
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There was another extended sequence after the night of the ritual that I'm going to gloss over, but it included an area where I again needed to look at the walkthrough; otherwise, I still might have been lost in that dense, unmappable forest; think The Lost Woods, but less obvious. That being said, either I skipped something during my playthrough that wasn't in the walkthrough, or I somehow ended up along a different path, one that didn't involve stabbing an entity, but it's one that I am ultimately happy with. I got one of the two possible endings (based on an AMA the developer did on Reddit) to the game, but it still felt appropriate based on the choices I made, both successful and unsuccessful. The story I played led to a bittersweet ending, but I'm okay with that. Kyrphel died, protecting Iva, whom she believed contained the spirit of her mother, possibly challenging the fate that had deemed Iva to die (again). Iva nearly died trying to find a way to help Kyrphel, bringing herself to the brink due to exhaustion, all through the choices I made, which I felt that Iva would also have made. I could see this being either a bad or a good ending, all depending on the player's feelings towards both Kyrphel and Iva, but I interpreted it as a good ending. ~END OF SPOILERS~
Welcome back, people who took the shortcut down to here from paragraph six. I guess the only other thing I want to mention is that I did have to turn down the difficulty one last time during a scene at the end. For whatever reason, the frame rate tanked, and the game became so laggy that I couldn't actually do the final mini-game, the one where you have to keep the slider as close to the middle while various elements related to the text push it hard either up or down. This specific game required the player to almost anticipate how hard the slider would jump, so you had to keep it hovering towards the opposite end you felt it was going to swing.
My only other criticism, if you even want to call it that, is that I feel like I missed a bit due to either localization or, more likely, not understanding finer aspects of how a culture works. And by that, I mean understanding what it means to be forcefully encouraging or being firm with them. In one of the teaching sessons between Kyrphel and Iva, I was supposed to not go easy with Iva and to drill home how important her lessons were, but the whole time I felt that I was missing something in my responses, and Kyrphel was coming across as either too harsh or too lienent and my meter that was tracking how well I was doing kept tanking into the red. While I had read some people on the Steam forums talking about having trouble with some of the dialogue trees related to cultural references, I didn't find that to be the case for me.
I do have plenty of questions related to the world and how in-depth the lore goes, but the fact that I'm putting so much thought into the characters and the world almost two weeks after finishing the game just goes to show how well the characters were realized and how well the writing and voice acting were for all the characters. Did I not mention the voice acting? I don't speak Russian, so while I can't comment on the authenticity of the English translation, I don't feel like I lost anything, but I could be wrong. But as I said all the way up there, I really, really enjoyed The Mildew Children. I could see Dr. Potts and Jane really digging this game/story.
~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
P.S. I just wanted to add here in the post script that while I was playing The Mildew Children, I broke out several of my Arkona CDs to listen to on my commutes to work. Arkona is a Russian folk metal band from 23 years ago that performs pagan Russian folk metal with amazing vocals by Masha Scream. Hearing her go back and forth between traditional Russian folk singing and intense growling is amazing. Hearing her do it live is something else. If you're going to look into them, I'd recommend both albums "Goi Rode Goi"* and "Slovo", or if you're looking for more Russian Folk-Black Metal, either "Kob' " or "Khram" will be your thing.
*Yes, I know I could've linked to the actual song "Goi Rode Goi," but I actually think that the video does the song a little dirty because it cuts out almost half the song, and you'd be better off listening to the whole song before watching the music video.
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