Mages of Mystralia

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!

This game sat in my library for some time before I tried it, and it was a very surprisingly pleasant experience. It was a bit short for my liking, not in the sense that it wasn't long enough but in the sense that I didn't get enough time with all my spell customizations. With that in mind, the spell customization in this game is something wild that I wish there was more of in other games. By the end I was raining fire that exploded over the entire screen, making whisps of electricity launch out of a shield that pulled enemies and items in, creating pillars of stone that created walls to protect me while obliterating enemies. Finding the balance between powerful spells and MP management is difficult at first but once you understand it you can almost literally rain the heavens down from the sky and turn all your enemies into dust; but it takes time, which gives the player a sense of learning along with the character.

The story is okay, it's not going to keep you at the edge of your seat and it's pretty obvious who the big bad is in the first few scenes of the game, but it's not bad. It just clearly wasn't the focus of the development as the gameplay experience seems to be first, which is a good idea for a team this small. That said, the lore and worldbuilding is fantastic, significantly better than the plot, and the game is set up for a sequel which I hope we see, Borealis studios has an announcement coming up and I hope it's more of anything like this.

The downside of the game are few and far between, in my opinion the spellcraft learning curve is pretty big and enemy design is very basic, and in a game where your entire offensive kit is your MP, the enemies that block your MP usage seem cheap and unfair, but you are given enough at your disposal once you "solve" the gameplay that it becomes a nonissue, but for those that have a hard time figuring it out that can be extremely punishing.

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

Unique and interesting spellcrafting system, decent metroidvania gameplay, decent story and writing. My only complaint is that most of the fight difficult comes from huge groups of enemies swarming and preventing you from getting attacks off without constantly kiting around the room, which gets old. Boss fights were interesting enough, though.

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.

This game is absolutely delightful. The magic system is it's strongest feature by far: you make your own spells using building blocks provided, and you can make it do some wacky stuff. My personal favorite was making a statue that exploded about three times a second, destroying everything around it. I love this game, and I highly recommend it

Nice games,......very impressive spell system with fun and challenging puzzles....
far exceed my expectation.
Story abit short.........
Problem is when I mixed up all the spells creating an ultimate spell....my computer kinda freeze, cant handle all the mixed spell...

overall very very good indie game...