Magic Wand

verily should be more game such as thine, ae magnificente gayme to be sure

One of my favorite games on steam. it's everything i love about indie games and i hope more people are inspired to fork over a measly four dollars to experience it

I don't understand this game nor will I pretend to. It is supposed to be an artistic experience moreso than anything else. It looks and sounds harsh and you will immediately be overwhelmed by it... but in fact its really just a very linear experience, sort of like a psychedelic picture book. Its honestly really gorgeous underneath its harsh visuals. The free camera movement elevates the experience and makes the world pop and come alive. The set pieces are seemingly thrown together without rhyme or reason- imagine if different blocks from all your favorite handheld rpgs were mishmashed together as if it were a Minecraft server. This is a unique aesthetic that I really like, though I will admit sometimes the color palettes utilized are quite ugly. Games like this can be taxing, because it is a natural inclination to try to make things fit and "make sense." But Magic Wand doesn't make sense and to enjoy it, you need to try not to pigeonhole into the idea of a game it is fundamentally not. There's "combat," but its not an action game. There is a health bar, but its not an RPG. There is a capsule gacha, but its not a collectathon. These are just concepts the game uses to make the linear experience more fun and interactive. Once you advance from one screen to the next, you are usually unable to backtrack. This will go against your inclinations to try and make sense of what you have just experienced- everything will be screaming at you to get a second look, to understand. But you don't need to. You just need to experience what the game wants to show you and continue along. Talk to the NPCs and they will make no sense. The "plot" is as freeform as the setting. I think its honestly a game where you don't need to interact with things at all, but this certainly adds to the immersion. There are no puzzles to solve, no items to collect, nothing. You just move around and experience this world. It is not without flaws. This is an experimental art project first and foremost, and as such, it does not enjoy the quality of life features we have so long associated with modern gaming. There are no options. The game is presented as is. This is the unfiltered artistic vision of the developer. Unfortunately, this can lead to some conflicts for the end user. There is no way to customize the experience to your own comfort. If something feels visually or audibly offputting, you must either power through or just turn the game off. Notably, there are times where very loud, harsh noise is looped ad nauseum. The only thing you can do about this is go to your computer's volume mixer and turn it down. Going back to that term "unfiltered," that is the best way to describe what you're getting here. You are being held captive to someone else imagination and experiencing it as they want you to experience, on their terms. This is a powerful expression of aesthetic. It is a beautiful pastiche of color and sound. It may not push the art form itself in a meaningful way, but it demonstrates the value of how games can be "experiences" and that their is serious merit to games as artistic expression. And it has an amazing soundtrack.

a fun little time, for those of the having-a-fun-little-time-enjoyer type. this game is like a colorful toy set, and i really love that about it!! the visuals and writing are chaotic but in a way that feels both very intentional and very fun, rather than messy and aimless

Beautiful art but too simple for it own good. It feels far too shallow, even at $3.99 your money would be better spent elsewhere.

Magic Wand likes to bill itself as a "capsule toy RPG", which is strange, since it doesn't contain any RPG elements. Instead it decidedly falls into the camp of "Exploration games", "Walking Sims" or whatever else you want to call it. While there is combat and even a boss fight or two, for the most part, interactivity is limited to walking around strange, surreal environments talking to the equally strange citizens. The game was made by thecatamites, better known for "Space Funeral" and "Goblet Grotto", and it certainly shows in both visuals and writing, the former consisting of enclosed isometric landscapes with a freely rotateable camera, alongside a look and feel similar to Minecraft, playing on an NES which had previously been thrown out of a window. Everything is heavily pixelated, with at times downright ugly color palettes and the level geometry often feels somewhat random, though never to the point of completely losing cohesion. The writing definitely recalls the style found in Space Funeral, mainly taking the form of short bits and pieces of dialogue, generally very bizarre and disjointed, with occasionally archaic terminology and weird spelling. Largely nonsensical at a glance, but still seemingly operating on some kind of bizarro-world logic, with recurring themes and characters. Unique stuff overall, but definitely an aquired taste. You can see pretty much everything the game has to offer in less than an hour, which may be for the best, since that falls inside Steam's refund window. Certainly a unique experience, but difficult to recommend without some major caveats. If you haven't played Space Funeral, maybe try that one out first, but if you already did and are hungry for more, then maybe give Magic Wand a whirl.

I fkn HATE pots!!!!! Also soundtrack hits so hard

Good game, I recommend. You can break pots and collect capsule toys.

Oh no, Bigdug's pot collection

This is the only game left