Mind Over Magic

TL;DR: This is a better version of Oxygen Not Included, especially if you prefer a fantasy setting. There's so much to love here. MOM is part "factory" builder, part programming challenge with shades of Rimworld's excellent management UI. At it's core, you build a school to churn out wizards in seven different specialties. Along the way you'll have to deal with challenges every few days while working your way deeper and deeper into the Underschool to solve the crisis of the Curse and the Fog. On the "factory" side of things, and akin to Oxygen Not Included, you build various rooms to feed, house, and train your budding wizards. Rooms have shape and placement requirements (which can be randomized), and learning the tricks to literally supporting that construction is a massive part of the early game. As to characters, each of the seven types of wand has a specialty, but every Staff wizard can do every task in your school. With five species of character running around, plus relic slots and random wand secondaries, you'll have a bunch of interesting combinations, Likes, and Quirks to deal with among your students and staff. On the "programming" side, later when your school gets large enough you'll want to start creating Groups, Priorities, Meal Plans, and Schedules that take into account your wizards' Skills, Quirks, Levels, and more. The programming is both simplistic and challenging, but saves you weeks and weeks of micromanaging when your school needs to cycle through students and staff at a decent pace. Unlike Rimworld or ONI or Dwarf Fortress, MOM is really forgiving. Once you have a handle on [i]how[/i] to build a school using the room keywords, it's hard to lose. That doesn't mean it's easy to win, but the game will pull back from wiping you out entirely if things get truly hairy. That said, your people can, and do, enter death spirals that are hard to break out of if you haven't built your infrastructure properly. If you're unlucky, you'll get to watch a staffer go on a Rampage, get Trauma, then go on another Rampage and get more Trauma all because you accidentally Graduated their dinner buddy. Pulling them back from the brink is a rewarding feeling. Finally, the Underschool/combat is an integral part of advancement and necessary to improve your staff and students. Better wands, ways to complete Trials, and more are all locked behind kicking down the doors of the Underschool as you progress. All in all, it's a great city/factory builder. The UI is excellent, the game is [i][b]long[/b][/i], and there's a lot of replayability. This is an unreserved thumbs up.

Sadly unfinished game, couldn't even make a decent UI for it, it screams of being incomplete.

1372 hours, 100% achievements. Thank you devs, this has been a fun game and well worth the price. Best part of the game is the part where you build the school. The building mechanics is easily the highlight of the game, and it always feels rewarding when you figure out a new way to build a room or to take advantage of some mechanics to optimize something better. Worst part of the game are the dragon quests. Tedious mobile game style "quests" where you pick a few characters to send them on quests, and waaaaait for them to come back with no input whatsoever was never going to be fun. Frankly, the game is more fun if you ignore the dragon quests completely. The game had a lot of potential, and could easily have been one of the games that you keep coming back to. Sadly, it was let down by several factors- 1. The lack of any story whatsoever. You don't get attached to any characters, and a magic school which doesn't feel magical is a waste of the setting. 2. A lot of the UI is frankly balls. If you're going to make the creation, attunement and levelling up of relics a core and repetitive part of the gameplay loop, at least make it easy to locate the relic in the screen instead of lumping every relic in the game into one giant scrollable screen. And keep the screen locked on the same relic so that you don't have to scroll around looking for it again each time you exit the relic screen to check something. 3. A lot of time wasting mechanics. Why does your student need to spend an entire game day to attune a single relic? By the time it's done I've already forgotten what I planned to do with him next... 4. Lack of building/task queues. You can only do one task at the relic cube at a time, and there's no queue. Better hope your memory is good then, so you can recall what you planned to do next after that task is done. It's simply annoying. 5. Needs more rooms, more furniture, more research topics. The fun falls off a cliff when your school and research is complete. Despite all its flaws, and there are many, the school building portion of the game is fun and compelling. There's no other game quite like it.

前期：容错率高，有建有战斗，内容丰富，量大管饱，物有所值； 中期：建房子的时候一时裂缝，一时来瘴气化身，火法又失去优势了，乌鸦人又说不吃稻类食物。因为游戏的职位分工太细，导致工作效率极低。人走来走去看起来很忙，实际上什么都没干。又因为工作效率低，导致日程表无法正确执行，人经常会做出不符合日程表的行为。 后期：尼玛一个分形霉菌箱72个符木，一个鸣钟塔要60个焰铁。那我问你，我的资源是不是天上掉了下来的？你游陷阱藤箱收获一次才2-3个荆棘齿，一个焰铁要2个荆棘齿。你游又多久能收获一次陷阱藤箱？玩到这个阶段就已经是纯粹的在坐牢资源等收集，在最后阶段故意卡资源来拉长游戏的无效寿命。与其卡资源恶心人，不如把毕业的门槛降下来，这样玩家毕业还愿意继续经营自己的学院，而不是在等待资源收集的时候把玩家的耐心都消耗殆尽。

I love this game! Especially after the patch last September, the goals are a lot more clear for new players. The absolute depth that this management game has is incredible, in addition to such cool mechanics. Highly recommend for someone who really likes colony builders and likes the whimsy that magic provides.

It's *good* but it did feel like a job the whole way through. It has it's flaws. Sadly I didn't feel like I was running a school so much as I was running a construction site for an asylum. I'd recommend just turning up menu conviction related bonuses and not engaging with the conviction system at all.

I've tried playing many versions of this over the years of development, but inevitably it feels like work and another playthrough is abandoned. Now that the game is officially done and abandoned, time for a review. Mechanically it does many things in a novel or interesting way: limited 3d map, dynamic groups, room puzzle, turn-based combat. Difficulty tuning also seems alright: on easy you can mindless fast forward, on hard you need to think and micro but it's not impossible. Perhaps the reason why it'd so dull is that it cannot decide between being an efficient factory pushing back the fog, and a fun school full of memorable characters, danger and drama. On the efficiency side, even with groups, priorities, schedules and permissions it's still really difficult to just make pawns pick up nearby tasks instead of spending half a day walking to opposite sides of the map. It becomes an excercise in watching everyone constantly and manually telling them to not be dumb. On the character side, there is way too much churn through students to remember or care about any pawn. Pawns also have all the personality of quilted bots, seemingly on purpose, going as far as giving humans "body types" anticorrelated with the name pool. No random chat bubbles while walking past their supposed friends, instead you get "-15 sad" buried in the stats spreadsheet. Don't expect any of the Rimworld-style developing story here. Overall, feels like design by a corporate commitee optimized for inoffensiveness and a feature checklist. Ironic, considering the developer self-styles as "sparky".

[h1]Mind Over Magic[/h1] This is a game that I really should enjoy but I'm just not having a lot of fun. Even after 10 hours I just don't get it. Mind Over Magic is a combination of "build Hogwarts" with Rimworld. You recruit teachers and students, forage for resources, build crafting areas and over time ramp up your school to fend off and ultimately solve the bigger issue of a fog that's going to take everything over. The twist here is (1) everything revolves around magic and (2) you can explore under your school in turn based JRPG-style battles. It's a fairly interesting combination that should work for me. As someone who enjoys the genre enough to help give Tynan advice on Rimworld before it ever hit Steam, this should be a good fit for me. And who doesn't like magic? Moreover, I really love the art style. This is one of my favorite recent games in terms of the art style. It's just perfect for a game like this - cartoony, bright, colorful, crisp, interesting - I just really adore the look of this title. But mechanically I'm just about to throw in the towel. Firstly, everything......takes.....so......long....to....do....in....this....game. I'm permanently playing it at 3x speed and I'm still waiting around for my characters to flick their wands 15 times to build something simple like a bed. Researching something would take about 30 minutes for one unlock in real time. And it's not like I have enough teachers to double up something like research. I tried playing on normal speed and - I'm not kidding - I fell asleep. The combat mechanics are basically simplified turn based combat and all I'm looking to do is exploit weaknesses. Some magical areas like air have almost no use in combat, at least none I've found thus far. So combat is "stick the earth person with a ton of HP up front, cast armor every turn and let everyone else wail on the enemies until they go down". That's my only tactic. Since my dark arts guy is the main heavy hitter and he has to go back to the hospital after every fight (each spell of his does great damage but hurts him as well), the pace here is very slow. And forget trying to get my newer guys involved in a battle since they'd just get face-rolled in two turns. Seems that trying to "catch up" a new teacher or student quickly becomes impossible. But combat is the least of my worries and that was one of the parts of the game I enjoyed the most simply because I understood it and didn't have to wait on it. The main issue is that the game is inherently unintuitive. In other games you have crafting concepts that make sense such as heating iron ore in a furnace to create iron bars. In this game none of what I'm building is familiar and I often don't know why I'm even building it. Conceptually almost nothing is explained and I'm repeatedly having to alt-tab out to try to figure out what some requirement is or what something means. There's a tome in the game but it really doesn't explain how to play or what you're trying to do. in Rimworld I could easily see the impact of not having enough food. In Mind Over Magic, I forgot to feed everyone for a couple of days and didn't really see an impact. Task priority continues to bewilder me. I can tell the game to harvest trees on the left side of my castle and then the right side. It doesn't matter which one I click first, they always go left. In fact, they go left so often that those trees will be cut down and REGROW before the ones on the right are chopped. They've thrown in things like gremlins which aren't fun and - again - aren't explained on why they suddenly appear. Same for the ghost birds. I finally figured that last one out (you can't have any real bird corpses around!) but why is that even a thing? And with all the stress of trying to figure out all of this unexplained stuff, there's the omnipresent fog mechanic. The game is on a countdown and I'm trying to figure out why room X seems to meet the stated requirements but won't upgrade only to find out by searching Google that "lofted" means the height has to be taller than the length. If the end of the world is coming, why would they care that much about the feng shui of where I'm doing my rituals? It just doesn't fit. Also, there seems to be some busted mechanics. I had to cheat to get seeds for certain types of plants. No mandrake and honeydrop plants ever spawned, even with me running rituals to push the fog way, way back. What pissed me off even more was I HAD mandrake roots, picked up from delving into the dungeon. But no, you can't get a seed from a harvested plant. You need one growing to get a seed, which wasn't happening. Finally, you have to tell your mages to do everything. This is a sim where if there was a toilet, the game would make me tell the wizard how to wipe their butt. There seems to be very little agency on the part of the teachers and students and while there's a schedule to set up on what they should be doing, they just don't make good decisions. They'll wander past 4 items to pick up one piece of wood, take it up 4 flights of stairs, go back down and get the next item. Or they just don't really complete things. Or they'll maddingly leave something 98% done to go sleep for 12 hours. In Rimworld it was pretty neat to see your little guys doing their own thing. In Mind Over Magic, they can't do much of anything without me babysitting them. It's probably a decent colony sim, but it's nowhere close to being as interesting, deep or intuitive as something like Rimworld. It may be in a spot where it's too unintuitive and different for casual players to want to work through all of the unfamiliar concepts, items and mechanics while simultaneously not providing enough of a challenge to someone who takes their time to learn all of that stuff. YMMV but I can't recommend it.