Theory: the game is playable at the current stage, it's just not meeting the hype

This is all speculation and theory, as I don't have any info from the devs or the play testers.

There's probably a playable version that was ready to ship around winter 2025. It played like Starbound + Potion Permit (I never played both games so I could be very wrong here). It was a shallow open world game, with beautiful art and music, but repetitive game-play and no meaningful story. Magic and witches are just a theme, and doesn't play a huge part in the actual game. The devs were delaying the game because they were worry about getting the same reception as Potion Permit, and they are currently busy enriching the game with more detailed story and game-play.

Going through all the videos and blog posts, there are surprisingly little about any type of game-play. What's confirmed in the game are the following:

• Foraging ingredient for potion crafting.
• Crafting potion to cure NPC.
• Use divination to help NPC.
• Crafting of some kind, and selling it at Sunday market.
• Dating with 4 potential partners.
• Renovation.
• Calendar system and holiday events.
• Some kind of fetch quest from a shop.

What's not shown in the promotion material, but you expect to see in a game like this:

• Game-play variety.
• Mini-game screen.
• Cut-scene of any kind.
• Mysterious, unexplained elements that hooks a player.
• Snippets of a story event. They've only shown character animations of datable characters, which are not stories.
• Skill tree, if it exists.
• Item crafting, or even enchanting items since this is a witch-themed game.
• Line up of all the unique characters.
• Inventory and showcase of item variety and artifacts.
• Any kind of spells besides moving a furniture or fruits.
• Magical beasts or familiars of any kind. There's a scene of a hatching drake, and nothing in the wild. Not a single crow or owl on someone's shoulder.
• Supernatural elements like ghosts or lingering spell effects.

And the above things are not shown probably because they either don't exist, or they are so bare-bone showing it will kill the hype.

My suspicion is that the game was originally designed as small simple cozy game that would be acceptable 10 years ago. But the game drew in too many people, built up too much hype, and players' expectation seriously misaligned with the actual game. If any element of the theory is correct, then the dev isn't lying about nothing went wrong in the development process. They are just adding more content to the game, essentially making a Witchbrook 2.0 without releasing the 1.0 version. The game could still be great, but I am not expecting anything earlier than 2027.