Game review: Mages of Mystralia

Mages of Mystralia is so far one of the rare games to actually make it off of my Steam wish list and into my inventory after a year or two. Most of them either make it off my wish list sooner than that, or slowly languish until I forget why I added them in the first place and eventually remove them.

It's good and bad. I don't know if I can unreservedly recommend it, but there are definitely some enjoyable parts, and I'm sure some people will like those enough to bother with it. On the other hand, the slower parts will definitely drive some people away.

The most enjoyable part is the spell design system. Experimenting with the different modifiers and triggers to find out what they do is a lot of fun, and using them to create massively powerful spells that fill the entire screen with homing fireballs is even more fun.

This also, however, leads to the biggest problem: You start the game without any of the really interesting options, and are pretty much guaranteed to spend at least two thirds of the game spamming the same one or two combat spells in an effort to reach the puzzles that allow you to unlock those legitimately interesting options.

The story is a little bit of both. On one hand, the store page plays up the fact that it was written by Ed Greenwood; I enjoyed his work on many Forgotten Realms novels quite a bit, and he mostly doesn't disappoint here either. It's basically the classic sort of fantasy story about a young protagonist who slowly learns that they're the chosen hero and/or have some kind of special power - which is a classic for a reason.

On the other hand, there are one or two moments where it wasn't clearly explained what the next step was supposed to be, and yet the main character seemed to luckily stumble on the right idea anyway, which feels like a bit of an unlikely coincidence. It also ended at something that feels like the halfway point of a bigger story, and I don't see any evidence of a planned sequel.

Overall, it was definitely worth what I paid for it and fun enough for me to recommend it, but I do have to attach a few caveats to that since there are some flaws.