Getting Started in Garden of Witches

Garden of Witches opens in Sil’s cottage, not in a tutorial dungeon. The Thread Witch is sewing. Canele, her talking cat, is already unimpressed. A nightmare tentacle interrupts the quiet, and the contract is restated: once a year the witches must hold a tea party so Nahatra, the Dream Witch, stays asleep. Nobody else intends to host. Sil picks up scissors that are larger than she is and walks out.

That cottage is your hub for the rest of the campaign. In 1.0 you configure the run in the Armory before you leave. Early Access players used to reroll starting spells with Dice in the first two rooms. That loop is gone for later chapters — you pick Scissors, two Spells, and a Special Skill at the bench, then the map asks you to commit.

What you actually do on a run

Each chapter is a chain of rooms with a named witch at the end. Most rooms are combat. A few are shops, wells, elite fights, Relic rooms, or Imprint rooms. After a clear you choose an upgrade: a Scissors tweak, a Spell rank, a Relic, or a utility such as Dice. Right before the boss you usually find a fountain. Take the heal if you are one mistake from dying. Take the upgrade if your kit is still a pile of unmatched parts.

You always have a dash. The dash has invincibility frames. Until cooldown reduction is online, that dash is your real health bar. The controls page lists the 1.0 keyboard-and-mouse defaults, the older keyboard-only layout, and how gamepad prompts map onto the same four skill slots.

The video below is an Early Access overview. The room-to-boss cadence, dash i-frames, and “tea party as a seal” story still match 1.0. The tag synergy lecture does not. After you watch it, ignore any advice about stacking six of the same tag and read the combat system instead.

A Hitchhiker's Guide to Early Access: Garden of Witches

First Armory loadout

Do not wait for a perfect Relic. Your first job is to leave the house with tools you understand.

1. Scissors. The default pair crits on the last hit of a combo. Giant Scissors hit harder and play around Sharpness. Magic Scissors charge and fire piercing shots. Broken Scissors convert Sharpness into crits. Singing Scissors unlock after Maydel in Epilogue 1. For chapter one, default or Giant is enough. Rank them later on the scissors tier list.

2. Two Spells. Pick one gap-closer or panic button and one damage spell. Ambush teleports behind a nearby enemy and feeds Sharpness. Fireball is still a carry if you like Charge play. Counter spends a long cooldown to block, then dumps a huge hit if you catch an attack (the Book lists it around 1350% damage, 17 seconds, 4 meter radius). Shadow Surge and Butterfly Walk are the crow and flower generators. The spells page explains which ones fight each other.

3. Special Skill. These are gauge abilities, not a third spam button. 1.0 flattened their charge rules so Imprints matter more than the raw base effect. If the tooltip feels vague, skip it until you have a clear identity.

If you want a canned starter instead of experimenting, use the Armory planner. It is built for 1.0, not for the old synergy grid.

Difficulty, death, and meta progress

Garden of Witches is a roguelite. A failed run is supposed to happen. After 0.9.2 the gold-from-achievements shop was replaced with combat EXP and a level track (cap 70). You spend upgrade points between runs. That is why the first chapter can feel stingy and chapter four suddenly feels fair: the meta layer is doing work in the background.

Pick a lower difficulty if you are here for portraits and jazz. Normal is the intended teach. Hard strips comfort — older notes even mention dash i-frames disappearing on some hard settings, so read the in-game tooltip, not a 2025 blog post. Challenge Mode is not a first-week destination; it unlocks after the story beats and is covered on its own page.

Death is not a wipe of the campaign. Return to the cottage, spend levels, change the Armory, and walk back into the same domain with a better plan. Sil’s Book (the Status panel) is where Weapons, Spells, Special Skills, Relics, and Curses live. Learn to open it with Tab instead of guessing from icons.

First-hour mistakes

• Melee without a reason. Sil plants her feet on Scissors swings. If the boss is a bullet-hell, stop auto-attacking and use the dash. 1.0 made basic attacks matter again by giving each weapon its own crit rule, but they still lose to a telegraph you refuse to read.
• Hoarding Dice. A reroll that completes a kit is worth more than a stack you die with.
• Taking every curse for a Relic. Curses are real. If the Book starts looking like a horror menu, visit a well and clean up.
• Skipping the fountain heal at 20 HP. Twenty health is a full extra mistake. An extra 8% damage is not.
• Building three identities at once. 1.0 wants you to imprint a Scissors identity or a Spell identity. Mixed kits still work, but mixed kits with no Imprint plan fall over in chapter three.

When the first named witch appears, switch to the walkthrough and the boss guide. Fiena is the early story beat most players remember — Sil yelling that the tea party is already too late while Fiena smiles through a hookah haze. She is not the hardest fight in the game. She is the fight that teaches whether you dash on reaction or on schedule.

What “saving the Garden” means

The Garden is Nahatra’s dream. Nightmares leak when the tea party is missed. Your job is not to kill the coven. You beat them until they agree to sit down. That is why bosses have personalities, second phases, and post-fight scenes instead of loot piñatas. Read the witch roster if you want the cast in one place, and Sil’s page if you want the sewing-as-connection metaphor Team Tapas actually designed.

System requirements, Steam Deck notes, and the $18.99 price live on the system requirements page. Patch history lives under updates. If a Steam news post contradicts this guide, the news post wins — then come back and we will align the wiki.

You do not need a 100k Slash burst to finish chapter one. You need a dash you trust, one Spell you will actually press, and the patience to treat the first death as a loadout note. Then open the combat guide and start building on purpose.