Mind Over Magic

This game is what I wish the Harry Potter games had been. This is what I wrote to one of my friends about it: I think you'd like this game a lot. Definitely in the "filling boxes" vein. It's a colony game flavored as a Magic School. You train initiates, promote them to apprentices, hire them to your staff, and use the staff to fight monsters and ♥♥♥♥. All the systems are fairly thin, the deepest one is building the mages...once you start figuring ♥♥♥♥ out, it's really fun to craft a new mage that does exactly what you want them to. I've pretty much wrecked everything in the game by now, I'm like 200 hours in, and I still enjoy coming up with new mage builds.

I picked up Mind Over Magic because I’d never really played a management-style game before, and the idea of building and running a wizard school sounded fun. The trailer, especially the construction and base-building, looked unique, and that definitely pulled me in. Overall, this game just wasn’t for me, but that’s more about my personal taste than the game itself. The management systems are deep and intense, exactly as they should be for this genre. I had fun getting a few students enrolled, graduating them, and even retiring a teacher, but I eventually realized that this level of constant management isn’t something I naturally gravitate toward. That said, the graphics are great, the concept is excellent, and the idea of growing and shaping a magical academy is genuinely cool. I may even come back to it later with a different mindset. If you enjoy management sims and complex systems, this is absolutely worth playing. If you don’t usually like that style of game, it might not click, but that’s about preference, not quality.

If you like colony simulators. If you like a bit of a challenge. If rim world was too hard for you. If you like Klei games. If you want your colony sim to have turn based battles. I suggest you try Mind Over Magic. Your Lightning attuned guy will only want to sleep in a "gloomy" bedroom. Your fire attuned guy only wants to eat with that other guy. Everyone is needy. Make sure you bring a fire, earth, lightning, etc. mage to battle to match the foes that are strong/weak against your type. You have to constantly micromanage the gathering of materials topside. There is a Fog that is trying to envelop your school. You stop it by casting a spell to drive it back. The materials required to cast the spell depend on how far away the fog is. Oh by the way, the point of the game is to teach new Mages. so summon new students. teach them the art of magic. Send them off into the world or keep them on as Teachers to add to your personnel. The choice is yours.

Game feels like EA still but the devs stated they were done with content and updating the game in general as of September (after releasing in Feb of this year, no less) save for game breaking bugs, I would hope. Definitely wouldn't have bought it if I saw at release that the devs only planned to work on it another 7 months.

I really want to recommend this game, and the first 60% of it is great. Tight resource control and actively weighing if you can expand or not vs having the materials to repel the fog. Interesting design choices with rooms and battles were engaging. Then you hit the last 40% and its just a slog. Resources are plentiful, and the aegis means you never need to repel the fog anymore. You just wait for people to train and to collect resources. I looked over a few Reddit posts and agree that it feels the game is missing a core feature or 2 for the late game, something to keep me engaged. I ended up clicking on a quest then leaving the game on 3x speed and read a book while I waited for it to finish or a event that needed 30 seconds of manual intervention. I also discovered the information on both their official wiki and the fandom was either out of date or just missing. Either way, if they add some new content or features it may be worth it, but I feel the game drags on way too much towards the last half of the campaign.

Cute little colony sim where you don't control the characters, but give instruction and are responsible for direction... like Oxygen Not Included (love that game) only to then change into a turn based strategy game for combat??? Very jarring. Required combat for materials also, not something you can ignore or put on auto. It should have never been this. It should have just all been done in the same world. I was really disappointed with this revelation and it more or less ruined the game for me. One of my staff started having a psychotic break and I decided to close this game to play something fun.

+++++ Magical Academy Management Sim with detailed room builder +++++ Comes with a variety of Room difficulty options. Every room type can have a wide and varied selection of room keywords that are required to make the room suited for the job you require. Lofty? Taller than it is wide. Elevated? Nothing beneath the room. Towered? Nothing connecting to either side or above of the room? Grounded? Ground floor room. Skewed? One wall larger than the other. With pre-set school types and the option to shuffle the keywords for a unique and curious looking magical school. Encourages you to build imaginatively and not just a soviet concrete block school. ++++ A lot of varied content, an under ground dungeon to fight through with its own turn-based RPG mechanics. Late game quests and infinite dungeons with high stakes. +++ Quests encourage you to make unique mages to solve specific problems. Plague going on? Make high water mages with bonus levels in nature to save the day. +++ Complex build system for each mage. With a choice of Relic slots based on race and element. Relics gained through raising students to apprentices, staff or graduation. Multi element and subclass mechanics for dual element mages. For example Fire and Water gain a subclass that has water magic crit spells. ---/+++ Every mage has a conviction bar, this goes up or down depending on how fulfilled the mages life is. Food, sleep, learning and for higher tier wands a unique modifier for each element. For example Fire has a victory bar which goes down the longer the mage doesn't kill something. Or lightning which has introversion and goes down the more time they spend with other mages that aren't also introverts. This is a very complex system manage and can rapidly snowball out of your control if you do not maintain it. Mage eats a food it hates? -20 conviction can cause a break down unless you find a way to counter act the negatives. At break down something bad happens to the mage and they go unconscious and need emergency medical attention or they will die. This is the games main avenue of difficulty and it can be brutal until you understand and take account for it. Once you get it though, finding a way to managing them is possible with effort. - Even X2 speed feels too slow sometimes especially when you are just waiting for students to learn to ascend them to apprentice or staff. -- Getting end game relics feels a chore, since you have to raise students to level 12 and then graduate them or make them staff to get a level 24 relic. Which requires a lot of students to find the relics you actually want.

Absolutely amazing little management game. Another comment sold me on the "It's a bit like Oxygen Not Included, but simpler and with magic," and I have to agree. It's a lot more forgiving than Oxygen Not Included, which is really nice for when you just want to relax. The art is charming, the sort of puzzly way to create rooms is an enjoyable challenge, and there's a lot of depth in how you can create and optimize things. The breaks can be a bit of a cascade, but once you learn how to actually make people happy (instead of just expanding), it's not too big of a challenge. The best part of it is that you learn as you go, and I can't wait to start a second run at some point and use everything I learned to create an even more amazing school.

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