In Jenny the Witch, a 3rd person hack n slash, you play as a young woman inside a witch-styled mech, complete with pointy hat and all, battling enemies with her booster-powered broom stick. Billed as a precursor to their upcoming, larger title Steel Carnelian, Jenny the Witch is a short experience about Jenny, the world she lives in, and the group she’s up against. Before you even select 'PLAY' the UI explains the backstory of your mission. You are a for-hire mercenary working with your brother to, presumably, make ends meet. Winning a bidding war, you’re given a job to explore a local understructure in order to find four missing workers that went in and never came back.
As you make your way further and further into this structure you'll find there is more going on than you originally thought. These sewers are completely filled to the brim with enemies and the workers are nowhere to be seen. Hack and slash, or perhaps more accurately, shoot your way through room after room of enemies. In your “down time” platform around rooms to make it to the next area. As time goes on you'll eventually be greeted with upgrade stations where you can purchase new moves, add them to your load out, and practice.
Continuing through the levels reveals someone is watching Jenny as she makes her way down the understructure. We’re treated to some plot here and there where we either learn a little more about Jenny and her brother as they talk about the mission ahead of them or we learn more about the villain of the story through similar means. Both plot threads are given to us via text and some still images on screen. While I don’t think this approach to cutscenes is necessarily bad, I’ve played plenty of games with static screens like this before, it did feel a bit odd and I wasn’t as invested as I feel I should have been. Not only do I think a lot of the writing was a bit too vague to latch onto, but I also found the fact that it goes from full 3D movement and voice acting in-game to silent, still cutscenes extremely jarring. This is to say nothing negative about the artwork here, as it is truly stunning stuff, but it felt much too different from the rest of the game. These scenes often took me out of the action while not delivering enough story to keep my brain engaged moving forward.
I also found that these scenes did much more to characterize the villain when given the opportunity than Jenny. Each time we have a conversation between Jenny and her brother they feel more like exposition dumps rather than characterization. This is, at least in part, due to the fact that there is nothing happening in these cutscenes; there’s no movement from the drawn models whatsoever, be it small position changes or even simple mouth open/close frame switches. In addition to no voice acting and very watered down music, these scenes leave much to be desired. This is too bad too, because I feel like there are things to be discovered about these characters. Jenny has witch iconography not only adorning her mech, but also on her person in the form of pentagram earrings or skull hair ties. Her brother, similarly, is adorned with a hoodie reading “Angst Boy” and cross earrings. There’s a cat figure sitting on his table in frame.
The reason I bring up the visual design is because it really feels like it was only a factor when visually designing these characters, not when writing them. Where is Jenny’s witchy flare when she speaks? Where is her brother, Conor's angst? Conor curses when speaking but that’s about it. Is that what makes him so angsty that he wears a hoodie proclaiming it? I truly have no idea. I know nothing about these two characters, even though they’re our protagonists.
Moving on from the cutscenes, I want to head back to the gameplay. There is melee combat, ranged combat, and platforming. Melee combat is performed with your booster-broom and a combination of unlocked abilities and moves. Platforming is executed by a jump or a dash, plus some timed switches you can shoot. Ranged combat is performed with a little gun Jenny has with infinite ammo and a special auto-firing missile that has limited ammo. There are health and ammo pickups throughout the game, but these seem kind of randomly placed and I didn’t find their inclusion to be well done, unfortunately. I was very often out of ammo despite grabbing every single ammo box. Meanwhile I found myself very often at full health and popping health boxes just for the ‘fun’ of it. Could this be because I was using my ammo and playing well? I suppose, but I do wish that the placement of these pickups felt more meaningful rather than random. I also had truly a terrible time picking up the boxes due to the auto-aiming, which you seemingly cannot turn off. (Note: my settings said auto-aim was at 0.00 the entire time, but it was absolutely still auto-aiming.)
This was an issue with all aiming, not just aiming at the health and ammo boxes, but it was probably the most frustrating with the latter. I cannot explain how annoying it was to be in the middle of a fight with 10 or more enemies on my tail and I'm just trying to grab more ammo and the bullets will not hit the box because they’re hitting an explosive next to it, a box next to it, a shelf below it, the literal wall next to it, and so on. This would also happen with enemies and explosives. I would be aiming at a large enemy and the gun would auto-aim at a smaller enemy next to him. I would be aiming at an explosive barrel to hit the enemy with explosive damage and it would auto-aim at the enemy instead. There were so so so many moments like this and it truly ruined much of the experience.
And why is that? Wasn’t the melee any fun? Well, yes and no. Melee could be fun, I think, if it were viable but as it stands the gun is absolutely the optimal way to play. Melee not only has a lot of end lag but there are also no movement options other than your single jump and your dash. Your dash is on a meter shared with your ability to melee, so it is a limited resource but one you have to prioritize due to the lack of any other movement tech. The enemies hit hard, frequently, and cover massive distance so you have to keep moving. There are plenty of attacks that track Jenny so you absolutely need to employ last minute movement to get away from some damage. However, in addition to the dash having a limit of 3(ish) charges and sharing those charges with your melee, it also has (from what I could tell) zero invincibility-frames. Often I would get overwhelmed with enemies, attempt to jump and dash out of the pile, and get smacked mid-dash back into the pile. It ends up leaving Jenny the Witch feeling extremely clunky, especially considering there is no double jump or run, so when the dash feels bad or runs out of charge you don’t have anything else to fall back on. There’s also the issue of meleeing an enemy too much and then being left high and dry when you need to dash away from their return barrage.
In addition to the dash and my issues with it, the melee just feels weak and half-baked more often than not. The hyper attacks (specials), which you can unlock at upgrade stations I mentioned earlier, feel extremely bad. Not only are they also on a limited resource that you have to charge up, similar to your dodge and special, but they often completely miss enemies.
Let me explain.
Hyper attacks cost 1 or 2 charges. Luckily these charges are on their own meter, separate from the dash and melee, but can only be stacked up to 3 charges so they’re extremely limited use. You charge up this meter by hitting anything with your melee, including debris and enemies. This meter does not charge up with ranged, only melee, so it is something that incentivizes melee combat over ranged constantly, which is nice. With that said, once you’ve actually charged up your bar enough to use a hyper attack you will oftentimes miss unless you’re ready to take damage before using it. This is due to the fact that not only do these hyper attacks have an extremely small hitbox but enemies also get invincibility-frames when knocked on the ground. Oftentimes I would knock a particularly aggressive enemy down, be surrounded by smaller enemies, use my special to kill them all, miss half the small enemies and do seemingly no damage to the big enemy because it was on the floor. Aren’t hack and slash games supposed to be about the combos and knocking enemies around? This feature in particular was highly baffling to me and added a lot to my lack of enjoyment.
I found myself bumping up against a lot of the gameplay in Jenny the Witch, actually.
There is no lock on, which I found particularly egregious in a game with large bosses that you consistently needed to move and dash around while shooting. This lack of lock on negatively impacts multiple points of gameplay, not just bosses. For example, it was extremely easy to lose track of an enemy while dashing through a room full of dozens of enemies because you're battling the camera at the same time. There were also a few moves I think didn't work very well in the final game that perhaps would have benefit from a lock on.
Platforming can feel like pure guess work more often than not. Sometimes you need to dash to get to a platform while other times you can simply jump and make it. The visual indication on whether you need to jump or jump and dash are basically nonexistent, at least to my eyes. Many times I would read something as being easily cleared by a single jump only to miss it by a hair. Other times I would read something as being just far enough to need to dash only to overshoot it by a mile and fall to my death. Death wasn’t particularly punishing, other than having to redo a segment here and there, but by god was it annoying. A lot of the platforming later in the game also has to be done on a dime, as you’re hitting timed switches that will send you to your death if not executed perfectly, so the lack of instant readability was a bigger issue than you’d maybe initially think.
While I’m talking about the platforming, let me mention the fans. Oh my, these fans. I don’t know if these fans went through many rounds of QA if I'm being blunt. The idea behind them is the same as many platformers before it; activate the fan, wait for an air trail, jump onto the fan and ride the currents to your next destination. Great idea, but the execution leaves a lot to be desired in Jenny the Witch. Time and time again I would activate a fan, wait for the gust of wind before jumping into it, and then be flung a completely random distance. I played this game for over 2 hours and across my entire playthrough I could not discern what I was doing right or wrong when interacting with these fans. I tried to jump right when it activated; random. I tried to jump at the height of the wind gust; random. I tried jumping on the fans from different distances away; random. As far as I’m concerned there is no rhyme or reason to these fans and what they will do to you and that led to me just throwing Jenny’s character model against the wall until something finally stuck (aka I made it through a room).
Map design seemed a bit like an afterthought in Jenny the Witch. While some areas were interesting, and there was absolutely a lot of thought put into the platforming side of map design, the rooms where you battle enemies were extremely flat and lacked not only gameplay diversity but also visual diversity. Every area was another dimly lit concrete box. Sometimes there would be a platform or two for enemies to spawn on and shoot you from, and sometimes you could maybe make it up to that platform, but it never felt like the room was designed for the player to diversify gameplay, approach enemies uniquely, or have more fun.
In addition to this, enemy spawns and AI were extremely janky. More than once I had to walk back and forth through a completely massive, empty room to find the last enemy alive or, worse yet, trigger spawns. In one particularly egregious moment I had completely cleared every enemy in the room but had seemingly broken the spawn of new enemies, so I had to reset the room and do it all over again. Another time an enemy was sprinting into a wall, stuck on a box. As I tried to kill him I broke the box he was standing on and he fell into the pile of boxes, becoming trapped and completely hidden. Perhaps this is what happened in the other room I mentioned - spawn not broken but an enemy completely hidden by debris and janky AI. There were plenty of enemies that were designed to lock onto you and then shoot after a period of time. More than once I would see this enemy aiming at a wall, nowhere near me, again and again until I finally killed them or got close enough to re-trigger their wrath.
I did not like how Jenny the Witch treated bosses. As soon as a boss was beaten it would be immediately added to the enemy pool and show up again and again and again and again. Maybe this is why bosses were never seen in unique boss rooms, because if a boss were designed around a unique room layout that layout would have to appear again and again, every time the boss was reused as some mook enemy. Perhaps, if a boss was designed around a particular room layout, this could have forced developers to design more unique rooms and really think about what enemies they were placing where, but as it stands bosses were put in seemingly random rooms that not only had no gameplay advantage but also no lore implications. When you fight someone like, for example, the Four Kings in Dark Souls 1 you are treated to a wholly unique boss room that is not only a visual treat for the eyes, but also has loads of lore implications. Jenny the Witch has no such depth, which disappointed me more than I can describe. Imagine if, when fighting Jeanne in Bayonetta, there was not the grandeur of the missiles flying around you. If, when fighting Scylla and her sirens, you weren’t on stage with them, surrounded by their fans. Visual storytelling is important and it feels like Jenny the Witch forgot this truth somewhere along the line.
All of this is unfortunate. I really wanted to enjoy Jenny the Witch. I had played this demo sometime in 2025 during one of Steam's Next Fests from that year and I quite enjoyed it. However, this fell far too flat for me to even complete the relatively short runtime of around 3 - 4 hours.
Despite my massive ripping on the game, there were enjoyable moments. Jenny’s mech design is wonderful, alongside all the other enemy mech and side character designs. While I didn’t find the map design to be particularly fun from a gameplay perspective, I did quite like a few of the rooms for their visual identity. In particular, there was a room with a massive road stretching into the distance with street lights that lit up as you walked down it, which I thought was beyond stylish and it made me wish the entire game had this sense of style to it. As I mentioned previously in the article, early on Jenny discovers she’s being watched by someone as she completes her mission. This is represented through an occasional shift to a fixed camera angle with a security camera UI layered on that will follow Jenny through certain sections, which I thought added a lot of personality and intrigue to the story. Platforming, while challenging and not really the type of gameplay I was looking for in a hack and slash, was satisfying at certain times. The music, while I felt was understated in cutscenes and downtime, was engaging during combat and made it very obvious when there was an enemy around; which helped me during certain sections when enemies seemed to no longer be present but were.
Overall, I found myself working through Jenny the Witch rather than enjoying it. There are absolutely cool moves, beautiful art, and an interesting story here but it all feels over encumbered with poor design choices at many turns. I’m still looking forward to Steel Carnelian, especially considering the team now has the ability to take all the feedback they’re receiving and implement it into that game, but my excitement is now capped due to negative experiences I’ve had with Jenny the Witch. I think turning the focus to fun rather than an attempt to create friction between the gameplay and the player is a solid first step in making their next game better because, while Jenny the Witch is not particularly hard for the more experienced gamer, it’s clear that some sense of difficulty was a deciding factor when bumping up against many issues within the game. From platforming being much too tight in places to every move you have being tied to a limited meter of some sort, more moments of player agency could really open up their next title to be something fantastic.
**Disclosure: A key was provided for this review**