The Fool's Apprentice

So far a let down, game feels more like a beta version then a pre-release. Apprentice's need a lot more micro managing to keep from quitting or running out of motivation bar. Several game breaking bugs, try summoning a table and could not move it or access any summons. No save files, game remembers your research progress(partly) but everything else resets including tutorial. Game does not explain things well enough so time is required to figure it out, but you cant afford time to that when you're constantly micromanaging apprentice's. Very little customization and anything you could actually do, game would do much better if you started with an empty room and had to build up from scratch.

Edit : To reinforce this, the devs not only lied about what I said, but also community banned me for telling them that I was reporting their public lie because support can review the deleted posts and what the Developer is doing is in fact a targeted attack. Anyone who asks can see screenshots of my community post where the developer apologized for WRONGLY deleting my original post, but now accuses me of attacking them. I have seen at least five other reviewers who were banned for the same reason - pointing out game flaws and saying the dev needs to learn to take genuine criticism. TLDR for what's below : The Devs do not like criticism, the game does not explain itself well, and you will fail constantly unless you look for outside help. So, the devs delete valid criticism on the basis of not accepting its legitimacy or not liking the tone of how something is delivered when someone tries their best with limited instructions and gets reasonably frustrated at a failure spiral. They profess to be long-time professional DMs. I know thusly that they are either lying, or have ejected any player who has not accepted what they said at face value and without challenge. My complaint was this : In under half an hour, all of my apprentices got bored and left. I had bought one OR MORE of every unlocked station. I had more desks than stations, which I had more stations than apprentices at any one time. I only accepted Apprentices who had traits that were ++ or +++ (very interested) exclusively in those starting stations. They all refused to do anything and left, while my magic could not compel them to do anything but get bored and leave. I could not progress the game because they wouldn't even try to do the viewing.

I really wanted to love this game, the aesthetics and premise are perfect. Who doesn't want to be the mighty wizard heading up essentially a research university in a high advanced magi-tech technocracy while you lord over your apprentices? But, there are issues with the game-play and with the developer that give me pause. The game is single player, and you have control over the movement of workstations and decor, and limited control over the movement of apprentices. There is a tutorial that front loads most, but not all, and not enough of the gameplay mechanics. It is essentially a wall of text broken up into boxes with little interactivity or highlighting of each mechanic and then you are immediately thrust into the brunt of gameplay. The game is very text heavy, and there seems to be flavor and lore to every piece of text. However, you are unable to active pause the game, and the choice of font for the text is difficult to read as someone with an astigmatism. I would love to sit and read every text entry, I read fairly quickly, but several text pop up events on screen, expecting me to know the name of every apprentice under my control and trying to keep an eye on skills, traits, and blasting thieves while trying to do so makes that impossible. Aside from there not being an active pause, there is also no panel for an apprentice overview, and since you can't pause, you have to chase down each apprentice on the map and levitate them to look at their stats in real time while other apprentices are quitting or blowing themselves up. For a game about managing resources, not having a comprehensive over-view of those resources doesn't really make sense, and I can only imagine that it was a feature cut from early access. There is also no save button, and the game doesn't tell you what saves and what doesn't. For me, nothing has saved between 3 tries at the game (fully patched up to date). Neither the three currency resources at the top, not the apprentices, not the workstations purchased or the items unlocked. Now, for my frustration with the devs. I hope you don't have feedback on this game, because they are not good at receiving it. Their vision of the game seems inflexible and closed to change. Many threads in the discussion section are full of players pointing out issues with gameplay or accessibility and flatly being told they are wrong and the game is being experienced as intended. If this is the case, I hope they understand that many will choose simply not to experience it.

Stay away from this game. Just stay far away. First, I'll get to the obvious stuff for anyone who's tried the demo and/or watched any videos: the UI is hilariously bad. Feels like 1990-level basic quality of life levels. The UI does not react to mouse-over, so just figuring out how to start the game or enter the options is a pixel-hunt. It does not get better in-game. The boxes of text for the tutorial and encyclopedia obscure the entire playspace, making it impossible to actually see what you're doing, even if you knew where to click things. The mouse icon and many other icons look seriously like they came from the time of 2-d sprites before anti-aliasing was even developed. The fonts use weird script that is very hard to read, the list of basic problems with being able to figure out what you're even looking at just goes on and on. Then we get into basic design principles, like using the same word or symbol to refer to the same things on the screen. Turns out the basic resource elements are called different things at different times and places in the game! Good luck figuring out what your resources even mean, and god forbid you have bad eyesight, the symbols that are supposed to differentiate them are so complicated and tiny that the designs are indistinguishable from each other (and not even well-defined with any text! You have no idea what you're looking at!) Get yourself past those insane barriers, and find yourself in a brutal, unforgiving, no-pause simulator with very little control--you basically can move furniture. And it's not immediately clear how that fits with any defined game loop. What even is the goal, and how do you even figure out how to work towards it? Good luck with no breathing room as the game ticks along while you flounder. But if that wasn't bad, the real problem is this developer (and you can see for yourself as they try to desperately defend themselves commenting on every bad review): they are doing everything they can to hide bad press. Before the game came out, I played the demo and left a bad review, which mysteriously disappeared. I left another warning in the discussion forums, which was deleted and I was banned from the forums simply by trying to tell people the very obvious. The Reddit advertisements started out with open comments, where I made sure to warn people, and those got deleted and eventually later ads had comments disabled. They learned their lesson leaving an open comment space for anyone to be able to say anything bad. And now? Take a look at basically any bad review. Many mention the exact same experience. This developer put out absolute trash at an absurd price, has been burying bad press up until release, and has been banning any negative comments on the product or warnings to future customers because they know what they've thrown together is simply untenable as a game for $15 in the modern panoply of amazing indie games for far, far less. These guys are total scammers, and you should not purchase anything from them. Stay. Away.

Sadly I had to refund this game. The game looks great and has a very interesting premise and style but it felt unpolished and even frustrating. Your game doesn't get saved (except research), it's very text heavy and there is no active pause. It feels very hard to manage your apprentices because you don't really get the time to do anything with them. Their motivation drains too fast and before you can try to optimise everything they have already left. It feels like the game wants you to manage everything but doesn't provide the tools to do so. If this game wasn't a full release I wouldn't have written a negative review but the game doesn't feel ready yet.

I was originally leaning more toward "Mixed" on this, with the opinion that you should check out this game, but only if you're an existing genre fan and on a discount. However, by the end of my playthrough I came to the realization that you cannot save in this game - AT. ALL. In my personal opinion this is unacceptable for almost any modern game, not to mention a modern game on Steam with a $17 USD price tag. I would be upset if a free game on Newgrounds didn't save my progress, so when this game didn't I was beyond flabbergasted. Who on the development team thought this was a good idea? I would not listen to that guy very often if this is the caliber of ideas they're handing out - I'm sorry to say. This was an atrocious addition to the game and even though I didn't mind the issues I was running into while playing, this made me mind A LOT. That all said, not being able to save made every bad step the devs made up to this point stand out MUCH MORE. So basically: You're given an academy to raise the next studious minds in. You start with 2 (maybe 3, I forget exactly) rooms and you unlock the rest through resources you gain through gameplay. You also start out with a limited amount of furniture, most of which can be used by the students to study more or entertain themselves. Presumably you'd unlock new furniture or decor somehow throughout your playthrough. I unlocked all rooms in my playthrough, many of which came with furniture items I'd never seen before nor had the ability to make yet in them. However, despite this, I never once unlocked any new decor or furniture in my entire almost 2 hours of playing. I assume this is a glitch, however I have honestly no idea and since the game doesn't save (aka I'd have to unlock all those rooms again) I won't be finding out. This seems to make sense to me based on the achievement list and based on the fact that I didn't unlock 1 achievement passed the first one of the game. I could be wrong about how they unlock, but since there was literally no information at all about this gameplay element I can't tell you for sure. To me those are the main issues with the game, which are already enough to not buy as far as I'm concered (zero saving and a completely broken unlock/upgrade system); but there are more things wrong with the game. There's no way to reset certain apprentices, so if they get stuck in a certain task they may just be stuck there forever. I ended up quitting my playthrough when I had a queue of like 5 - 6 apprentices just stuck in line waiting to take the main "test" and because they were locked in a certain animation I couldn't reset them or make them move. How do these management games keep being made and devs never realize to make an "unstick" button for your people? It's honestly baffling. Apprentices are also just stupid. Like 100% just ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ dumb and I don't know why. They will constantly just throw their life away because they're bored or something idk. And when you see that they have a less than 5% chance of success and you suggest to them to study more before killing themselves they just go "waaaaah I'm bored and LEAVING!!" and quit. It's annoying. I've read the developer responses to negative reviews saying that apprentices are supposed to die, and I like that! I like the idea that the magic is just so dangerous and the thirst for knowledge is just so unquenchable that they throw their bodies at it like meat shields, but they don't. They want to take a test and die or they don't want to work at all half the time. I had multiples of everything I possibly could around the academy and every single room unlocked and they couldn't be less excited about it. A wealth of knowledge and items to use to study said knowledge and they're bored outta their minds. Why? There's also this unbelievable mechanic where goblins or people that look like apprentices (and maybe even sometimes your own apprentices???) come into your academy and STEAL YOUR FURNITURE??? AND THAT ALSO STEALS YOUR KNOWLEDGE (the little number you need to unlock things)???? What in God's name was this decision bros? This isn't fun, Imma be real. I am nothing but frustrated every single time I catch one of those robbers and, more often than not, they come in, steal my ♥♥♥♥, and leave without me ever noticing. Wanna know what that ends up doing? I go to a room that used to have 5 tables with stuff on them and now there are 2 and all my stuff is missing. WHAT DO YOU MEAN? Bruh if this was happening I would station guards outside to KILL these people or I would simply close my doors and lock them. How many people walk into Harvard University and then just walk back out with one of their computers? Or how about a desk? A white board? It was actually insulting how I just had to take this up the ass and there was nothing to be done to counter it until I was already being robbed. Hated the mechanic more than anything. To wrap things up I'm going to quickly go through a few more issues: - What do the personalities even do for apprentices? I always tried to get certain people but it seemed to mean nothing. - There are like 5 or 6 abilities, like levitate and disintegrate (classic spells) that you can cast, but I only remember the 2 because all the rest seemed useless, and disintegrate was only used to kill robbers from what I saw. Seemed like a useless mechanic. - I never figured out how to bribe, who to bribe, or even WHY I would bribe. I never needed to use it the whole time (which was nice since it seemed like it didn't even work) but again this seems like a useless mechanic? - There is no 'pausing' like you do in something like The Sims or other management games. You can pause the game in the main menu, but then you can't play the game. There is no pausing the world while you design, build, set things up, look over your apprentices, anything. This seems to be one of the most important features behind saving and it simply isn't present. I struggle to figure out why this was even made to be a management game instead of some silly 3rd person game like Secret Agent Wizard Boy and the International Crime Syndicate; that game isn't for me but at least it functions as intended. - Very little on screen warnings or indications for what is happening to an apprentice, where it is happening, or how it could be avoided in the future. Makes each apprentice death feel meaningless and fruitless. - Small "random events" would pop up on screen sometimes and effect your academy, resources, etc. I only saw 2 different encounters my entire playthrough and they repeated during my 2 hour playtime at least 3 or 4 times each. More variety there is important, otherwise it's something I would not mind removed. It was mostly just an annoying thing that would take my resources away from me with no out. I did really like certain elements of this game, especially the idea behind training students and them being expendable. I really loved the idea of a public opinion and needing to do right by the students, academy and the region in general or there would be riots and such outside. I love the idea of bribing a higher power when you do things wrong and trying to keep big mistakes swept under the rug. These systems could have been something really cool if they were focused on instead of the gaggle of other things I mentioned above that, frankly, feel useless in the game. I know this was a harsh review, but I implore the developers to take this review, along with others, very seriously. There's a lot of really beautiful work in this game, the programming and art design at the forefront. Please take this talent and our words and create even better games as you grow. I don't want to see you fail, that's not what this review is for - it's to hopefully see this studio make something way more complete in the future. Best of luck to the developers, but yeah until at least saving and pausing are implemented into the game I would not suggest it unfortunately.

The Fool’s Apprentice is a cozy little magic management sim where you’re basically the babysitter for a bunch of chaotic wizard kids. You run around your weird little academy casting spells, fixing disasters, and trying to keep your apprentices from setting everything on fire. It’s quirky, it’s silly — and it really wants to be charming. Pros ✔️ The magic system is genuinely fun to mess with - There’s a surprising amount of spell variety for such a small game. I found myself constantly trying new combos or just zapping apprentices across the room for the drama. ✔️ There’s a lot of heart in the visuals - All the little animated creatures, magical clutter, and soft lighting give it a world that feels alive — like your own slightly haunted Hogwarts-lite. ✔️ The esthetic style was great - Even when I was frustrated, I still liked looking at it. Cons ❌ The UI is... a mess - Basic stuff like selecting spells or checking objectives is way more awkward than it should be. I spent way too much time trying to find things instead of doing them. ❌ The tutorial explains almost nothing - It walks you through a few buttons, then just drops you in. I had no idea what I was doing for a good chunk of my playtime — and after my fellow stream family tried it, I wasn’t the only one. ❌ Apprentice customization is almost non-existent - Aside from a colour swap characters aren't very different from eachother, but that’s it. No style, no flair. For a game with this much personality, it’s weird how flat the characters feel. Conclusion I really wanted to like this more. It’s got such a cute concept, and there is magic here — it’s just buried under a clunky interface and half-baked mechanics. I kept thinking, “This could be something special with a few updates.” But as it stands, it feels like a beta version of a better game. I’ll definitely keep an eye on it, but I wouldn’t tell my friends to rush in just yet. Score: 3/10 Magic Mishaps It’s got sparkle, but right now it’s more apprentice than archmage — and it definitely miscast a few key spells.

Ужасный машинный перевод из-за которого ничего не понятно в обучении, а оно не самое простое. Еще и баг, когда магазин не открывается. В общем нужно ждать доработок и нормального перевода.

The game feels unfinished. There are multiple game-breaking bugs and there is not much of a tutorial. There is no way to save your progress.

There is a ton of really neat content and features in this game, and if it were an early access, I would have happily paid and left a great review, but here we are. This is not release. And I could even excuse game breaking bugs, if there were any save feature at all. I even saw another review calling a feature a bug, because there are so many, and that system isn't described at all. Very frustrating, and I will happily change this if they work on a BUNCH of this, but for now, eww.