Mind Over Magic

Where's my farmable rock candy irl >:[

Only the best magic-school-building wizard-colony-managing game out there! Okay, yeah, so that's a pretty specific niche... but the game is good! There's a very robust construction system, loads of resources to discover, gather, and eventually farm from mystical agriculture, gardening and animal husbandry of the distinctly weird variety. You get a lava pig that makes stone and iron out of wood. After that point, you can pretty much build as much as you want in any direction, including up! What's not to like? Well, the complexity might turn some people off. The concept of Room Keywords for one, like "Towered" which means no other rooms above nor to the sides of this room... but you CAN put rooms just beyond the outer walls, or the roof for that matter. A large part of the gameplay is figuring out how to work around the limitations like that. Or you can just sort of turn them off when starting the game. If that's more fun for you, go for it! "Freeform" mode supposedly eliminates almost all keyword requirements altogether, so you can focus on putting rooms wherever you want them... as long as you can muster the requisite furnishings, that is. See, if you want to make a classroom, obviously you'd need a practice area. Can't just cast fireballs at the floor, unless you're trying to cash in on the school's fire insurance. And if you want a [i]better[/i] classroom, you'll want a blackboard, maybe some bookcases, a bit of fancy decor. You'll also want lighting from windows or torches, or nasty mana-sucking mushrooms will grow. There's a lot to learn, but you've got to admire the dedication of putting this much stuff in a game, right? With research, you unlock new furnishings, refining beasties, key objects needed for useful room types - or to create advanced versions of your existing rooms. Your wizardly staff are somewhat basic at first, but they'll get the job done until you can get some initiates trained into apprentices, and then into [i]better[/i] staff; specialists in one element, or more versatile dual-element wielders, the choice is yours. Each combination has its own perks; fire and water for a hard-hitting steam wizard, for instance. With more skill in an element, your apprentices and staffers will become better at related tasks; fire magic for hunting and defence against invading entities, nature magic for growing and harvesting, water for cleaning (very necessary if you don't want a school full of slimes wrecking everything you've been building)... each element is useful, so you'll want to employ staff with a good variety of skills. There's a lot to do. A lot to keep track of. Much of it can, eventually, be stabilized into mostly automated patterns. Then there's the quests, which come in rather late and mostly consist of reading a bit and then sending some mages off - sometimes with a bunch of materials - to help people out. That's if you can find yourself a dragon to ride... and there is, in fact, an ending of sorts; a final objective, buried deep in the underschool dungeons. Best get your mages ready for combat! Did I mention relics? Yes, there are relics that alter and enhance the stats of the mage equipping them. These can be created through various processes, and enhanced to increase their max level through some quests. Some very powerful synergies are possible, which is quite nice considering what a pain the enemies can be while you're still learning the ropes. Payback is sweet. All in all: A game rich in content, high in complexity, fascinatingly magical and with some fun tactical combat. You should probably think about which difficulty sounds the most fun to you, if you play it. Fairly highly recommended!