Witches of Ravenbrook

On the night of devils, treats, and trickery, the ordinary University of Ravenbrook campus is visited by a coven of witches. They're looking for new recruits, and they don't take kindly to refusals.

After a chance meeting with a strange girl, Chris Torres manages to escape with the help of a magical compass. They end up in the Pactrealms, the domain of the witch coven, and will need to explore, talk, and fight to stay human.

Witches of Ravenbrook is a dungeon-crawler RPG which places an emphasis on in-battle transformation. Your party descends into a dungeon, and whenever they run out of health, they are inflicted with Influence that will slowly transform them. Let their Influence get too high, and they might start to ignore orders. They might even join the enemies and force you to fight them!

Fortunately, you are not alone. The tricky shopkeeper Fluffs and the enigmatic Dahlia can provide some advice on how to proceed. You will have access to multiple playable classes with differing abilities and stats, a variety of items, and slottable modifications that let you keep you progress. Dying is not the end, you merely lose some of what you gained in the witch lair, and try again. Getting transformed is part of the fun, after all.

This release is a prototype. It contains three full transformations, five dungeons plus the tutorial dungeon, several playable classes, some rare items, a dozen enemies, four bosses, several "status effects" which are also transformations, three playable characters, and a mischievous shopkeeper. It takes place entirely in the Gardens realm.

The full game will include, by our estimate, three more playable characters, at least six more realms (and maybe secret dungeons, too!), a dozen more TFs, tons of classes, multiclassing, and more!

We also want to add: Grid-based inventory and equipment, 3D world navigation instead of the current flat backgrounds, more NPCs, more shops, and quality-of-life functionality. We've been working on this prototype for several months now, we expect the full game will take 9-12 more months to develop.

We will be launching a Kickstarter and supplemental funding options in 2025. A timeline of development will be decided on in the future. Bottled Starlight has already produced multiple games. You can trust that we'll see this one through with the same excellence as the rest.

If you want to be alerted the second it goes live, follow this project. We also post every Monday on our blog, keeping you up to date on what we're working on across all our projects.

Bottled Starlight has made Runes of Pandemonium, the free transformation-focused monstergirl game, as well as the battle-transformation game Witch Hunter Izana, and the survival-horror deckbuilder, String Tyrant. All are available here on Itch.io!

The artist and creative lead of Ravenbrook, InkyFluffs, also creates a webcomic called Covenstead, which you can read here. You can also find her art on Bluesky and can support her on Patreon.

Still want more stuff? Tales of Strings: Instruments was written by the lead programmer, Salty.

The musician, DurrDiss, has an adorable little bandcamp. It's so cute!