"Mika and the Witch's Mountain" (opens in new tab) has looks, aesthetics, and a premise that will captivate you at first glance. It's "The Wind's Tact" and "The Witch's Delivery Service" (opens in new tab) brought together to melt your heart, at least in the form of a 3D platformer.

You are a tiny little witch named Mika, and you have come to a distant island to apprentice with an elder witch. The elder witch turns out to be a bit of a jerk, and she kicks you off the mountain.

To that end, Micah takes on a delivery job, hoping to earn enough scratch to buy progressively better brooms and get closer to the top of the mountain. The game's demo includes only a simple quest sequence, and you're only trapped on a small part of the island, but it's already visible how developer Abraham Kozar has created a varied and exciting platformer out of such a mechanic.

In one of the demo's deliveries, Mica is supposed to deliver a lunchbox to a fisherman, but fails to deliver it when he falls into the water on the way and the lunchbox gets soggy! Mika must fly from the dock and land precisely on the fisherman's boat. It's a pretty fun and exciting platforming challenge that cleverly utilizes Mika's unique flying broom mechanism.

The next delivery requires you to scoop up a fish from the ocean and deliver it to a kindly old man's tank. Then the demonstration ends. It's pretty straightforward, but it sells the full game well; Mika's is already running there on Steam Deck - the animated cutscenes still don't run on Steam Deck, but the game itself can hold steady at 30-40 fps. The game is also aiming for a Switch release, and Deck's playable status seems fairly certain.

Mika and the Witch's Mountain is currently on Kickstarter (opens in new tab) and has surpassed its initial goal of $40,000, with over $225,000 as of this writing! Otherwise, you can also request to purchase Mika and the Witch's Mountain on Steam (opens in new tab), or check out a demo at the Steam Next Fest starting tomorrow.