Japanese game studio Re;AER and their creative brand Acacia released the hit mystery visual novel Magical Girl Witch Trials in July 2025, to overwhelmingly positive reception. One year later, and the game has sold over 700,000 units across Steam and Nintendo Switch only in Japan and China, with English, Spanish and French localizations just around the corner.
In the wake of the title’s huge success, Japanese media outlet Dengeki Online interviewed Toshiyuki Hata, the producer of Magical Girl Witch Trials and CEO of Re;AER.
Starting as a scenario production company, Re;AER was founded by Hata alongside other fellow writers, and it mostly handled contract work for other game productions. However, Hata explains that he and his team still “had the desire to create stories we truly wanted to tell, using our own capital,” which is how their first ever original work, Magical Girl Witch Trials, came to be.
According to Hata, “always sticking to the concept” is one thing Re;AER is always paying attention to when creating its games. Throughout the development process, the team constantly makes sure all of the game’s elements are “connected to the emotions that can only be experienced throughout that particular work.” In the case of Magical Girl Witch Trials, the motto for the overall tone was “as terrible as beautiful.”
“Without making it a kind of horror that relies simply on cruelty, we were committed to achieving the feel of something quiet, beautiful, and ultimately spellbinding,” Hata explains. The team’s commitment to the concept even extends to the way CGs were made. Apparently, each of them were created and picked for the game on the basis of whether they offer a visually unique perspective that can’t be seen in other CGs, and the creators specifically avoided “safe” CGs that “only serve to highlight a character” without bringing anything else to the table.
On the other hand, Hata says developing Magical Girl Witch Trials wasn’t easy, especially considering that it would be the first time Re;AER was fully involved in making an original game project. “Making the in-house project, the true test for us was how far we could take something that we genuinely found interesting,” Hata notes, explaining that the creative process behind the game was “a constant cycle of self-doubt.”
However, thanks to the constant process of questioning their own ideas and solutions, adjusting and reworking them, the end product ended up being much bigger in volume than the developers had expected, with around 30 hours of gameplay and full voice acting.
When it comes to the game’s future, Hata says that Magical Girl Witch Trials won’t be slowing down anytime soon. As a team that focuses on making original works, Acacia will aim to expand its means of storytelling to media forms other than video games. According to Hata, they have already started working on preparing their next project for the series.
Other than that, Acacia is also planning new games, including Magical Girl Taboo Village and The Streamer’s Alt Account Labyrinth, both slated to release in 2026.
Magical Girl Witch Trials is available for PC (Steam) and Nintendo Switch systems.
