By William Chandler

Kickstarter and I are really not cool with each other. On the one hand, it can be a great tool for developers to bring projects to life that may not have otherwise found sufficient funding. For instance, I am quite stoked about the new Amplitude game. Even some of the best independent games from the past couple of years were crowdfunded; games like FTL, Broken Age, and The Banner Saga. That said, an absurdly large number of the projects that were successfully funded either produced less than stellar results, like the Ouya, or became forever trapped in development hell. However, sometimes it’s really hard to not be optimistic about a Kickstarter project. Witchmarsh is that project.

Set in the drastically under-explored time period of the 1920s, the game follows a team of detectives as they search for twelve missing townspeople in rural Massachusetts, and features a healthy dose of action RPG standards like loot, character customization, and even branching dialogue choices. But the real treats are in the ways that Witchmarsh differs, like its uniquely grim, pixelated art style, and jazz age stylings. It even has a lovingly crafted Jazz soundtrack from dope as fuck composer Francisco Cerda, who did great work on the soundtrack for Gunpoint.

Even my cripplingly jaded, black heart can’t help but hope that this game will be fucking amazing. But I refuse to give money to Kickstarter projects because that hurts my journalistic integrity or something.