Maiden and Spell
Maiden & Spell is a one-on-one magical girl aerial projectile battler, featuring a colorful cast of ladies fighting with fantastic spells.
Battling with magic is simple! Fire your spells, hit your opponent, and don’t get hit yourself! Each maiden is color-coded and has a set of abilities unique to them, activated at a press of a button. There aren’t any complicated combos or intricate inputs or grabs or melee attacks or block buttons! Just a 3-pixels-wide hitbox, a lot of shiny bullets, and your own dodging skills.
You can fight against a friend in Versus Mode, or test your skill against a series of opponents and bullet hell boss attacks in Story Mode.
An abyss on the edge of the map, said to be the most dangerous dungeon in the world… The Great Circle. A group of young adventurers travel down into its depths in search of a powerful treasure.
Awaiting them are cute monsters, nonsensical architecture, and an ancient city once known as The Kingdom of Stars….
- A unique versus game with a whimsical fantasy aesthetic
- 8 cute maidens to play as, each with their own magical attacks, abilities, and playstyles
- Versus Mode, where you can play 1 v 1 matches against your friends
- Story Mode, fight against a series of opponents mixed in with 70+ challenging attack patterns to defeat
- Extra unlockables and optional challenges that will truly test your skills
- A JRPG-battle-theme inspired soundtrack by composer Steel_plus
- Online battling with lobbies and rollback
Steam User 17
Game of the year 2020
At first glance you may reckon this is just a niche Lethal League type shmupltiplayer game and completely overlook the fact that it has a superb story mode and it will exceed all of your expectations!
Steam User 13
Yes, I only really gave this game a chance because of the Rabbit & Steel demo.
Yes, I am a fool for waiting this long.
Very good, easily accessible bullet hell game that will scratch the Touhou itch without using as many painful implements you have to memorize. Normal mode is reasonably easy to beat with no continues, even for someone like me who has only barely scraped through two of the mainline Touhou games. You will have to care enough to try, but it's not designed to beat you the first few times... At least, not on Normal.
Steam User 17
a girl i like bullied me into playing this game, and it's great (the girl, the bullying, the game)
Steam User 14
I don't play hardcore bullet hell games because they're too hard for me. But this game is fun!
Steam User 10
look i love touhou and all but i'm pretty sure i love this more than i love touhou. and that's a tough ask. the music's great, the visual presentation is EMINENTLY charming, the dialogue is funny yet still earnest when it needs to be. lich of flowers is best girl and the collector of stars is eminently gender. the gameplay's fun and some of the patterns on very hard have made me pog out of my mind while clearing them. you should play maiden and spell if you haven't already. c'mon. it's even got netcode.
can't wait for rabbit&steel!
Steam User 6
Maiden and spell is a directly touhou inspired shmup or bullet hell game and i think would serve as a great introduction to them for anyone not super into the genre.
The gameplay can be split into many parts, ill talk main story first, the game is 2 phases, swordplay where you and another character battle to hit one another using various attacks at your disposal, they're nice breaks from the main chunks of the game: magnuses, they're an attack which you have to endure while shooting the boss to end that particular attack, they start simple and progressively get harder as the game goes on, the patterns themselves are fine tuned for each difficulty and character and they work super super well for what they are, the main story is awesome, then we have the extra bosses, there's 2 of them and the first one is pretty good, they turn up the difficulty a notch so expect a spike here, but the second one suffers from the games inherent flaws, the first one is that the difficulty balancing is a lil weird at times, the hardest 2 attacks of this fight are the last and 3rd to last meaning its backloaded and you have to clear 10+ minutes of each magnus to get back to them.
The true magnuses are 1 magnus that's intended to be super hard to clear, they're extras but required for completion and imo they're the best part, they're creative attacks, and push your peak shmup skill to the brim while still being very fair, i can safely say these are awesome and creative, even if they are slightly imbalanced.
Another flaw the game shows is in its attack and movement system, some are simply hold and you're attacking this should be standard for all attacks, having to constantly mash a button to fire a rally of shots gets tiring real quick and there's no real merit to having it in the game, just let it be autofire. The other flaw is that when shooting you're slower, this is standard for shmups and i've no qualm with it, but when you stop firing, you don't instantly get set to normal speed, there's a small delay and it feels clunky at times, it needed to be a bit snappier.
The graphics and music ill lump into one section, they're all very functional and touhou esque, the story is cute and nothing extreme although i felt it didn't really tell a story but sort of just nodded to one, still fine nonetheless, the character designs are clean, and took an artstyle which was simple and functional, and the music is fit for each fight and environment/stage you're currently in.
Overall maiden & spell is a shmup built with clear intention and good creativity, the design is a little shaky at times, but none of its flaws are enough to hamper the experience and i think this is a very clean and enjoyable experience for anyone who either wants to work their way into shmups or as a veteran, see what it has to offer, and given that it goes on sale often, give it a go!
Steam User 7
on top of being a really well-balanced bullet hell fighting game (extremely rare if you're familiar with the genre) it also has good enough single-player modes that i'd buy the game just for them! if you're into unique, casual-friendly fighters, and/or gimmicky bullet hell like touhou, play this gameeeeeeee