Mages of Mystralia

Final Rating 7/10

Pretty clunky in controls but overall solid game, the spell mix and match mechanic is a definitely a breath of fresh air and may possibly be unique on this game.

The combat isn't fun, and there's a lot of it. There's a lot of lag between your own attacks, and dodging attacks when my character moves so slowly means I often can't attack when one enemy is vulnerable because another enemy is hurling a javelin at me. So the combat ends up feeling slow and dragged out, even for early game enemies.

Perhaps I could overlook it and play on, but the graphics are only decent (they're not bad imo, but nothing amazing), the setting and all the NPCs are uninteresting...

If the game delivered on its promise of allowing me to design my own spells, it would probably make the combat more fun, but I'm about two hours into the game and I haven't unlocked anything that makes fighting all that different; I can take some potshots at enemies before they get to me with the fireball, and my melee attack is a little bigger. I tried making interesting combinations to make the combat fun, like using Homing on the Fire spell to make something like a proximity mine, but it takes too much effort for something that ends up being inconsistent compared to just hitting things with the melee attack.

Fun, short, combat and puzzle game with its gimmick being its spellcrafting system.

I would recommend this game for its dynamic spellcrafting system alone, but the visuals are beautiful also with its cartoony art style and the puzzles are pretty fun. I also feel like the world-building has a lot of potential.

However, the game has some pretty big game design flaws that take away from the experience. First of all, even though the spellcrafting system is amazing, you don’t really get access the tools to really start utilizing it until after the 3rd boss, like at least 4 hours into the game. Yeah, you get a rune here and there that helps you solve some puzzles, but overall it takes quite a long time before you can really have a lot of fun with it. As a result of not getting access to many good tools early, combat early on is pretty brutal and attack timings are too tight. You wouldn’t expect it from a game that looks as cartoony as this, but it’s actually pretty hard in the beginning and I feel that that could drive potential players away from getting to the mid and late game, which is really where it gets super fun. The fast travel system also is not that expansive, so travel is a little tedious, but that’s minor for me.

Since this is the studio’s first game, I’m willing to give them a pass on these issues. Especially because their next game, Echoes of Mystralia, looks really good and takes the good parts from this game.

I’m excited to see the studio develop their next game and explore another game in the universe of Mystralia!

100% Achievement Completion Perspective:
Very easy game to 100% complete, especially if you use the spellcrafting system to its fullest potential to create insanely powerful spells. Highly recommend going for all achievements.

It's a truly enjoyable experience. The standout feature for me was its unique magic system, which lets you create your own spells by combining different runes. It’s incredibly satisfying to experiment and find new ways to solve puzzles and approach combat.

However, one downside is the lack of a journal to track your progress. When I had to take a break and return to the game, it was challenging to pick up where I left off without any guidance or notes on previous objectives. That made it a bit harder to re-engage with the game.

Despite this, I unlocked all the achievements and enjoyed exploring every corner of the world.

Verdict: Having played from start to finish and unlocked all the achievements, I can confidently say it’s a magical and rewarding adventure worth experiencing.

Fun game! Nice puzzles and magic compositions.

I played through once on Archmage difficulty and did everything. There are some really great puzzles in here, and the spellcrafting allows for some really cool and powerful combinations in combat. The story is minimal but decent enough. Very charming, good game.

Short game, but good.

Would have needed a little more ennemy variety.

There are some good little puzzle. Magic and magic upgrade double has exploration and combat.

Imagine Magica but veeery slow paced, dragged out and without the funny jokes.

Not just boring, this game is bored. It practically sighs while going through it's own introduction.

great play-thru, and dynamic spell casting! loved the puzzle driven environment.

So far I am enjoying this game. The puzzles are cool, and the spell combos and everything are pretty fun to mess around with. Fun game worth checking out!

Bought this to tide me over until Echoes of Mystralia because that gameplay demo was brilliant. Loved the concept of spell switching in Echoes and assumed that enjoyment would carry over here, the game looked cute, and it was on sale for $5.

Honestly, while I can see why people enjoy the game, I don't think it's worth the money I spent on it. It feels less like I'm fighting enemies and solving puzzles, and more like I'm fighting the game itself to try to progress. The controls feel clunky, I've played almost 3 hours and still feel like nothing particularly interesting has unlocked, and enemy encounters are largely "throw 5 different creatures at you while you run around looking for a split second to let off a spell and desperately hope you didn't mistime it or someone's gonna CC you and you lose 1/3 of your health immediately." Given how clunky the movement is as well as both the length of your spells' cast times and an inability to animation cancel, you spend more time running around because the brief seconds you have when you open up some distance between enemies and yourself isn't quiiite enough to cast anything. I don't think I've actually died more than twice, so it's not so much that it's hard. I haven't really felt much challenge in these encounters. It's just tedious and a bit of a chore to deal with, which is IMO the worst sin a game with so much of its game time dedicated to combat can have. The exception to the general obnoxiousness of enemy encounters are the bosses, of which I've fought 3 or 4 by now, which I think are the high point of the game for me.

As to the puzzles in this game, there's been 2 or 3 times I've been sure I knew what the game was wanting me to do, but I just couldn't manage to make Zia do it. So I figured, hey, I'm probably missing something and trying to do this the hard way, let's check out some YouTube videos — only to see that, no, I'm doing everything right, the game just expects you to be pixel-perfect while Zia controls like a drunken panda. That's an exaggeration, but not as much of one as it really should be for a game that's so focused on it's puzzles and platforming. As with combat, it feels like the difficultly is less in the actual ingenuity of the puzzle — they're for the most part pretty basic — but with getting the clunky controls to actually respond in the manner you want them to.

To end on a positive note, I'm shocked by how much better Echoes feels to play than Mages, props to the dev team for really stepping up their game!! While this one isn't for me, I can already tell this is a developer to keep an eye on.

Good customisability with spells, only nitpick is that while the tutorial system for the magic system itself was good, the explanation for the resistances and damage information was lacking, but it's a very minor issue for an otherwise great game.

This game is astounding spell crafting system bundle into a fun little adventure. The story is okay, the world is interesting, the puzzles are fun, and the combat is entertaining, but this game really stands out will the freedom of editing and changing spells. Crafting a specific spell to solve a puzzle or just trying to design the craziest attack you can think of is a great time.

If coding engineers was mages. This is what unique in this game.
Experiment. Experiment a lot while playing.

A creative and fresh take on spellcasting in games. I love every minute of this game

A cute zelda-like game

It's an okay game, but definitely not worth the price tag. I honestly think even half the current price would be borderline okay.

This was a fun little gem of a game. The puzzles were satisfying, and each spell you craft is like a little logic minigame. These things tickled my fancy in just the right way.

Plays like a top-down Zelda game with magic spells instead of a sword, bow, and bombs, with puzzles, exploration, etc. One of the big twists I saw coming from basically at the beginning of the game (the protagonist has something in common with another certain redhead from a famous magic school book series insofar as she's learning a very similar, almost identical lesson, only she's not the one at risk oddly enough); kinda wish the game was bigger but oh well not a lot of logical room to squeeze in more areas.

Honestly? The game has all the hallmarks of a low production cost indie game, but if you're willing to deal with a couple glitches/bugs, occasionally frustrating gameplay, and otherwise, you are rewarded with a very compelling and engaging spellcrafting system, fun combat, and a neat little story :3

I loved most of this game. While the storytelling is imperfect and the balancing is occasionally suspect, the overall joy of carefully handcrafting modular spells is just incredible. For anyone that enjoys Path of Exile's support gems or Zachtronic's games that include linear "code" through symbols, give this a try!

Actual spell-crafting!