How about that Deltarune? I played it, you probably played it, probably a good chunk of the internet’s played it – which is why I won’t be talking about it! I usually try to avoid talking about extremely popular indie games because I’m all about bringing attention to lesser known ones. So, I decided to take a look at something that was floating around during Halloween that I thought looked really cool!

For the Halloween season, Jocelyn Kim brought us Twinkle Witch ~Save the Sweets!!~, a cute em’ up. Twinkle Witch is sleeping in on Halloween when, alas, three fiends decide to take candy away from the local village! The kind witch doesn’t want the children’s Halloween to get ruined (and wants to make Crystal Witch happy), so she sets off to fight the monsters responsible!

The game is presented in a small window, graphics mimicking old shmup games. As a cute em’ up, the art style is bright and cutesy, with the standard monsters having this “ugly cute” vibe to them. Tying the cute Halloween aesthetic together is the jaunty chiptune soundtrack. It carries this mood of going out trick-or-treating with friends and just having a good time, which is a mood that I feel is underrepresented in Halloween media.

Twinkle Witch is divided into horizontal stage sections and vertical boss battles. The stages are super straightforward, with the stage’s local enemies charging at you. Aside from flight patterns, enemies don’t pose much threat, since they don’t shoot bullets. With each stage only having one enemy type, there is little variety.

The game does get harder if you try for score. For whatever reason, these fiends have stuck candy caches into clouds. Shooting clouds causes the candy to bounce out for you to catch. Suddenly those flying formations of enemies seem much more dangerous, blocking your valiant efforts to catch the candy. The game also gives you a shield that lets you ram through enemies, though you won’t gain candy from defeated enemies.

While the stage sections are super simple, the boss battles are more involved. While the enemies of the stage enemies seem to kinda be minding their own business, the bosses and the enemies they summon actively gun for you, making the game more frantic. Dracula in particular uses some unusual moves that makes for an engaging climax.

Twinkle Witch is a short and sweet time. I wished that there was more to the experience, but it’s good for what it is and it nails down the cutesy Halloween look.