Mind Over Magic

The fact I'm writing this review with a not recommend makes me sad and mad. When the game starts there's the hard, standard, casual, free form options. I picked casual with 2x resources because I wanted a more chill playthrough while I learned the game. I enjoy management games, but I wanted to focus on the building a magic school aspect more than the common management mechanics. So, I started. It surprisingly challenging for casual (felt more like a standard mode of other management game). Any issue was because I didn't understand some game mechanic and as soon as I understood it then I'd unblock myself and progress quickly again. That was fine because I was having fun. And then I reached mid/late game where everything was limited by three key resources: brains, smokepearls, anemone cell. Suddenly all the unpolished aspects of the game start coming up. The Croa (a type of beast) farm wasn't producing much brains and required large amounts of food that had to be cooked with no automation (they have bots called quilts, but no cooking ones). It was strangely difficult to keep up with the cooking needs given the number of staff (because students can't cook??) and priority having to be given to it. Only students can care for beasts (not sure why?). Everything I needed at that stage needed Smokepearls.... which in turn required Anemone cell, but it's a slow growing plant (I have 20 planter boxes for farming). And pushing back the fog and other needed crafting items require it too. Then I started trying to raise a dragon and that's when I hit a breaking point of how many resources/food/potions I need with all of the above issues. Now, does there exist players who could handle this and enjoy the challenge? Absolutely. But remember, I picked casual. And suddenly the game wasn't fun. It was frustrating. I went to google to see if it was just a me problem and if there was magic solutions only to find 2 year old forums about people complaining about the resource balancing at the same point I was at for the same resources with on solutions other mods or toggledebug. So, I stopped playing. Because I didn't want to restart on an easier mode. There are people who can still enjoy this game, but in general I can't recommend.

This game had me really hooked for the first ~10 hours but once you reach the point where you have to build certain roomtypes and meet their requirements, the game because frustrating as hell. You start building your school and very quickly you will run into problems because your initial layout simply doesn't work anymore. You will then start to destroy half of what you build to meet said arbitrary room requirements - some of them being utterly stupid and being overused as hell (like private, skewed, towered) and from there on the game feels like: "Can I build this room? Oh, it has to be private and silent so it can't connect to a loud room (which are about half of the rooms you will need) and it can only have a single point of entry - so it can't be a room you walk through to reach another room ... can I put it here? No. Not there either... do I have to build something on top of my school to make this work? Nah, I can't it would clash with the towered rooms... so I have to build either another annex or delete and restructure half of my school - again? Fantastic!" and... that's not fun. Like... not at all. Also after ~15 hours the game starts to feel like you have already seen about everything there is to see. So either you enjoy the struggle and pain of the ♥♥♥♥♥♥ up room placement gameplayloop or... the game isn't for you. I guess it just isn't for me so I will cut my losses and move on. Sadly. Because the first ~10 hours were really good and engaging. After that, the game became a chore, not a challange. And I have enough chores in my life.

So I’ll start by saying that yeah I got swindled like many others thinking it would be like ONI in a magic setting. It’s published by Klei, but was developed by another company called Sparkypants, and oh boy… The game starts strong but you’ve basically seen all it offers within the first few hours. The rest is a slow tedious grind towards more grind and tedium. It feels like a mobile game and 90% of my hours were just letting it run while off watching paint dry waiting for something or other to progress. If there was a better fast forward speed I’m sure my playtime would be a fraction of what it is. The mages/students have zero personality and never interact with one another despite having social quirks. The combat is basically the same from the get go till the end of the game, and about the only challenge is making sure a trap vine doesn’t wipe out your team while they are on the way to a fight. I pushed through till the end hoping for a bit of a climax but was honestly left disappointed and regret wasting my time on it.

im bad at oxygen not included, tried this game because i think its more forgiving, and im wrong :)

This game is simultaneously too easy and too difficult. It starts you out with a few helpful tutorials only to throw you into the deep end with no sense of direction. I have a magic school. Neat! Why do I have a magic school? What do I do with it? What's my motivation? No idea... Once you have the basic structure built, you can bring in students and gradate them in a day or two. Great! But why? You get some relics and some materials. But what do you do with them? Good luck, figure it out I guess. And then you finally do figure out what to do with them and you're left thinking, "okay but why do I want to do that?" You find a thing. You struggle to figure out how to use the thing. You finally figure out the hows and the whys and then you look at your screen thinking 'now what?' rinse and repeat. This game has so much potential but it feels hollow. It plays like the beta version of ONI.

This is a mixed bag. If you only play the early game, the first 10-20 hours, it's pretty good. But the longer you play, the less polished the game is and the worse the QoL is. You want to build rooms? Manage students? Great! Stop playing once you build the Dragon Room (not a spoiler, it's in the building list from minute 1). One area in which the game sucks is managing Relics. Once you have access to a dragon, you can do quests. Many of those quests will boost the level cap on your equipped relics. This is great! However, they will often fully boost only relics of a certain type, and only certain mages can go on the quest. So you pick out all 4 of your mages. Does your first mage have all 3 (it's usually 3) of the relic slots that get boosted *available*? Find the mage in your list, click on them, open their stats page; no? Ok then, close it, check the next mage. Best case scenario, all 4 mages that you picked have the 3 slots. Excellent. Now... Are they all equipped with the relics you actually want to boost? Or do they have extremely low-level relics that a +2 level cap wouldn't really matter for? Or are their relic slots empty? Do you even have relics worth boosting? Click on the Relics screen, then click to sort by type. Find a relic you want to boost. Is it being worn? Ok, click on the name of the mage who has it. This does not, of course, open the Stats page of the mage, it merely selects the mage. Now you need to click on the stats page, then the relic, then unattune. Then deselect that mage. Now find the mage you wanted to have that item. Select them. Click their stats page. Now the relic slot, now the relic. Now click attune. And now you either wait for them to go attune the relic, or you manually direct them to do so. Congrats. That's the 1st relic done. Of ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ twelve. For this one quest. Or which there are many. The end-game is just such a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ micro-managing nightmare that what seems kinda like fun (quests) becomes a tedious drag to undertake, or else you just completely ignore a bunch of the benefits of the quests (which is also a drag). But wait, there's more! There are two dragons, one handling quests for 3 factions, the other handling quests for the remaining two factions. Each dragon can only handle 1 quest at a time, and there are 6 main quests for each faction (plus a couple of side quests). So when the first dragon is off delivering your first set of mages to deal with quests for the Vivified, you cannot send mages to deal with the quests for the Wolfkin. You have to way ***days*** for that quest to resolve. You also cannot see the details of any of the quests from the other two factions, so you can't deal with the relic ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ ahead of time; no you have to wait several days, then you need to send a mage to 'scout' the next quest (or the quests of another faction), and *then* you can start micromanging who is wearing which ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ relic to send off. The end-game ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ sucks.

The build system is just not up to the task. The devs designed a cool tiered system for rooms that encourages rebuilding and evolving the school. And then they slapped a haphazard build system on top that makes rebuilding such an incredible pain in the butt that you are essentially forces to pre plan the entire building and not engage with any tier but the last one. Sadly the devs also refuse to acknowledge this problem, let alone improve it.

Unfortunately for me, this is just too boring, it feels like the game is missing something. If you enjoy a grindy building simulation this may be for you. While ONI or Rimworld are just by default already quite funny, this charming feature here is completely missing. I still somewhat enjoy the building and room requirement puzzles, but it is way too grindy and just not very interesting anymore after ten hours.. another seven hours later, my recommendation is: read the other negative reviews, they summarize the situation quite well.. the grinding and weaponized complexity become even worse over time, bottlenecks everywhere and arbitrary restrictions make it really painful.. another seven hours or so later.. Without the Mod from Nexus, I would have rage quit this game and never ever touched it again. It has so much potential, but the developers focused on complexity and difficulty only. No character interaction, no cute events, no story elements, incoherent progression, almost nothing made sense to me and I have several hundred hours of playtime in ONI and Rimworld.. I hope they iterate on the concept and make it much better next time.. to lift the curse, only 2% actually finished the game, on the way there you navigate through a dense mine field of arbitrary requirement chokepoints that require much more grinding until you get the outcomes you need.. really no wonder nobody finishes this game... without Nexus, I'd never done this..

After sinking dozens of hours into this game, I can say with certainty that the gameplay loop is fundamentally broken. The entire experience revolves around desperately trying to prevent your wizards from having mental breakdowns and when they inevitably do, you get mere moments to revive them before everything spirals out of control. The conviction system is completely broken. Buffs expire almost instantly, while debuffs and traumas linger for ages. By the time I finally reached Tier 4 research, my mages were breaking down in a cascading chain reaction. I couldn't build anything because they were constantly having meltdowns and destroying everything around them. No matter how much I experimented with work priorities and schedules, nothing helped. Even +25 conviction meals and recreation activities barely made a dent in the problem. This entire playthrough was a complete waste of time. I wanted to build a magic school with reasonable, logical challenges and not engage in this nightmare of micromanagement and constant crisis control. I cannot recommend this game unless you're planning to play in creative mode. Otherwise, save yourself the frustration.