Mandragora: Whispers of the Witch Tree is a sidescrolling Soulslike with parkour and menus

There’s a meme I keep tripping over lately, an edited Calvin and Hobbes comic that labels all video games as either “parkour” or “menus,” the perfect fuel for a pseudo-ironic discourse fire. Funnily enough, Mandragora: Whispers of the Witch Tree, a sidescrolling platformer-slash-Soulslike I’ve been playing a preview build of, is an earnest effort to be both. I’ve spent just as much time leaping, clinging, sliding, and rolling as I have clicking through menus, spending points to level up and charting my path through a massive skill tree.

Your character in Mandragora, which you get to customize in a fairly varied creator, is an inquisitor in a kingdom that has a really big problem with witches. So much so, you end an execution early with a mercy killing, much to the chagrin of the crowd and the king. As punishment, you’re sent off to find a different witch to replace that one, almost certainly a suicide mission. On the way you of course stumble into a mysterious power, start hearing strange voices, and start getting strong enough to make the task much more feasible.

The first thing I noticed about Mandragora is how full its animations are. Jumping into platforms or through floors and watching my character cling to an edge while their legs swing from momentum was captivating. I was doing fairly typical 2.5D platforming stuff, but with an extra oomph that gave me a sort of Mega Man X meets Prince of Persia vibe. I noticed a lot of depth and background details in each screen I ran through as well, coming away from the experience thinking: “Dang, this is a pretty-looking game.” Visually there’s a lot going for Mandragora, and is the department where it currently stands out the most.

When it comes to combat, Mandragora is a sort of hybrid of a Soulslike and Diablo-like action-RPG, but of course in sidescrolling fashion. Your actions are dictated by your stamina pool, you have a basic attack you can spam, then more complicated skills that operate on cooldowns. The full breadth of these combat systems will remain to be seen, but nothing I was asked to do in combat as a sword and board character felt counterintuitive.

And speaking of counters, the timing window for knocking attacks away with my shield was surprisingly generous. Perhaps the takeaway there for now is that while Mandragora borrows certain mechanics and vibes from the Soulslike space, raw difficulty isn’t necessarily the goal. There are even difficulty options when you first start the game!

Aside from combat and platforming, the third big pillar seemed to be customization. Alongside having various options for equipment, there’s a massive skill tree you fill out upon leveling up, instead of the usual Soulslike style of simply spending points on stats. The skill tree isn’t quite Path of Exile-sized, but it’s still pretty huge and varied. I noticed several major nodes offering substantive-looking skills, and options for build-crafting around side effects such as bleeding. Time spent here will definitely alter how you play Mandragora, despite its ostensible simplicity.

In a nutshell, Mandragora: Whispers of the Witch Tree seems to be exactly what it says on the box. It’s a sidescrolling video game mashup of elements from Soulslikes, action-RPGs, and platformers with an emphasis on giving lots of options to players, from a massive skill tree to difficulty settings. I only got to scratch the surface in this preview build, and it’s pretty clear there’s so much more to dive into for anyone willing to dive in headfirst. If this genre hybrid collection sounds like a good time, there isn’t much longer to wait until the game launches on April 17, 2025.

Mandragora: Whispers of the Witch Tree is available on April 17, 2025 for the PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S, with a Nintendo Switch version also planned. Access to a preview build for PC was provided by the publisher for this article.

Lucas White

Contributing Editor

Lucas plays a lot of videogames. Sometimes he enjoys one. His favorites include Dragon Quest, SaGa, and Mystery Dungeon. He's far too rattled with ADHD to care about world-building lore but will get lost for days in essays about themes and characters. Holds a journalism degree, which makes conversations about Oxford Commas awkward to say the least. Not a trophy hunter but platinumed Sifu out of sheer spite and got 100 percent in Rondo of Blood because it rules. You can find him on Twitter @HokutoNoLucas being curmudgeonly about Square Enix discourse and occasionally saying positive things about Konami.