Spells & Secrets

Cheap Harry Potter without its charm

Many reviewers talked about roguelite and balance, but I wanna discuss the story part of this game. "Oh, but it's not meant to be a story-rich game!" Alright, and yet the devs try to incorporate the story by: - leaving notes in each room (they do not get saved btw, if you want to connect the dots, i guess you gotta remember all of them individually) - saving schoolmates and like A LOT of them. and all they do is take up place in the hub, give you a single piece of advice and some exp - having some basic dialogue for each character, but for some reason, still pointing out how important they are for you to know for some reason (teachers = shops, club leaders = shops, clubs are initially just powerups and not, you know.... clubs). I'd be fine, if this game didn't try to include every character or piece of story at all... but like, the more of them I saw, the more I went "oh wow! there's so many fellas and details, there's gotta be SOME story arcs!". and then there were just none. like what's the students' diversity for if just you give them all the same lines and call it a day. For example, my best friend Robin is a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ piss poor loser who doesn't do ♥♥♥♥ and then says "WE did…

Bad marketing. No what they advertise.

Hidden runes await Young wizard learns forbidden truths Secrets shape the spell

It was a good game, but the bugs break the game. I cannot change the time of day and it makes the game pitch black afterwards if you are not need a light source. The door to start new runs changes the prompt to "Deactivate" and you have to close the game and open it to fix (happens multiple times now). If you do too much damage to a boss within a short amount of time, there is a chance to trigger a bug of the boss not triggering the end of the fight when at 0 health. This is a disappointment and would say do not waste your money. The studio closed down, so there is 0 support and no updates for this game to fix it.

In my eyes, Spells & Secrets is the perfect game for me. The visuals are so well made (the colorful variety of spells and artifacts!) and the world building of the Greifenstein Academy is just enough to keep me immersed. Each run has the right balance of cozy and hectic, and local co-op isn't hard to get into. Thanks so much to the dev team for bringing this hidden gem to life.