Academagia: The Making of Mages

Academagia: The Making of Mages

Black Chicken Studios, inc. · 2017 · Simulation, RPG, Indie, Adventure, Strategy

PC
Mixed70% · 275
Best price
$12.79-20%
$15.99lowest tracked $7.19
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Standard Edition · Steam
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$15.99
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Standard Edition · Steam
$15.99
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About Academagia: The Making of Mages

Academagia: The Making of Mages is a whimsical fantasy life simulation and role-playing game set at the renowned Academy of Magic in the rich and dangerous city of Mineta. As a newly arrived teenager in a strange, vast school, you'll embark on adventures great and small, train your familiar, make friends (and enemies!), and master the shining arts and subtle laws of spell-casting.

In your first year, you'll attend classes, build skills, compete for the glory of your College, and explore the history and powers of an ancient world of flying islands and fallen empires. What you choose to do - whether it be to create a new magical item, to butter up your instructors, or to duel with your bitterest rivals - will ultimately determine how your character evolves throughout the school year. With many secret skills to uncover and hundreds of unique actions to learn and bonuses to collect, character specialization is unprecedented in its breadth. You can explore the campus, research in the many libraries, help your friends, visit exotic merchants or cast powerful spells: the choice is yours!

  • Interact with over 80 Students
  • Maneuver through more than 800 possible Random Events
  • Set out upon any of over 100 Adventures
  • Explore hundreds of Skills
  • Cast Spells from the five Pillars of Magic, or learn the Forbidden Arts
  • Add new effects to existing Spells as you master the vocabulary of Magic
  • Discover and visit mysterious castles, ruins, shops and secret hide-outs
  • Teach, train and adventure with a Familiar from one of dozens of species
  • Enjoy nearly endless replayability and scope
  • Marvel at the improvements in the UI since the game build in our video


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Academagia, the world's first school for wizards. It's ancient and rich and it looms over the world of magic like no other institution humanity has ever made.

And this is what you need to know to make it through your freshman year:

Watch out for Mineta, the oldest, greatest, meanest city in the world. There are gangs. There’s a thieves’ guild – or maybe several, depending on how you look at it. There are conspirators trying to drive our good Captain out of high office, and there’s our Captain trying to drive conspiracies nuts. There are crazy wizards and bickering vampires and haunted restaurants and Gods only know what else. The city is a mess.

Also, watch out for the Imperial Reserve. That whole place was left to brew in its own shadows since the Empire of Man shook itself apart – and, honestly, it wasn’t exactly safe even when the Empire was at its peak. The old forest is full of monsters and trapped tombs and fey politics and more crazy wizards, and the old Imperial Palace… well, it’s the size of a city all on its own, and it’s still straining to contain all its ghosts and twitchy soldiers and skulking bandits.

And the Sphinx. Best you don’t even think about the Sphinx.

The skies are mostly dominated by air pirates on enchanted ships of war. All the other flying islands that make up civilization as we know it? Just as bad as ours, only with worse food. And, of course, off at the fringes are the Dragons: the scaly old creatures that enslaved humanity, shattered the first generation of Gods, and are now just waiting for the chance to pick up where they left off.

I’d say it’s safer to explore the Academy of Mineta itself, but let’s be real: the school’s seventeen hundred years old, and it’s been the center of wizard uprisings, undead invasions, and Gods know what all else. You have towers frozen in time at the moment of their collapse, you have professors plotting against one another, and you’ll have dynamic, incredibly complicated relationships between the eighty-some students themselves in your year – and every enemy you make is going to know how to make fireballs with just a stick and a bad attitude. Good luck with all that.

At least you'll have magic too. Incantation, the stuff of magical creation? Try not to entomb the city in a horrific magical winter, but otherwise have fun. Negation, the magic of deflection, evaluation, and stillness? Love it. Glamour, the work of illusionists and con artists and ambitious lovers of every stripe? It causes problems, but it’s legal enough. Revision, turning things into other things? Nobody’s going to complain if you fix a tear in your shirt or make your shoe the size of a house. Artifice, the art of enchantment – well, that’s what makes the city work. That and Astrology, the magic of turning the rules of the stars around for your own benefit.

Gates and Mastery, though? Don’t. Just don’t. We don’t want invading armies from other planes of existence. We don’t want deranged wizards making innocent people into puppets. Don’t do it, and beware of anyone who does.

It’s a great big world, filled with an incredibly vast number of things to do and places to go and people to impress. There are hundreds of adventures you can have, and literally thousands of abilities and actions and items you can pick up to improve your odds.

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Academagia is a 2D PC life simulation and role-playing game intended for audiences ages 9+. Our game rewards relationship building, research and knowledge over violence, and encourages the gamer to create their own unique story.

What Steam players say

Recent verbatim reviews from Steam — separate from playze.io community reviews below.

✦ AI summary

Players praise Academagia as a unique and deeply engaging text-based life sim set in a richly detailed magical academy world, with excellent character creation and rewarding roleplay for those who enjoy reading and strategic planning. However, a longstanding critical bug that corrupts save files has plagued the game for years without a fix, and the limited content of just one playable school year may disappoint those seeking a longer experience.

Not recommended May 10, 2025
Major known bug has made the game essentially unplayable unless a player is hardcore about never loading old saves and the bug can even affect them if their system crashes before they can save if the specific conditions that make old saves get corrupted are met. This has been known about for years, a fix was even suggested on the official forums a while ago, but no resolution has been had. As much as I love the game, this is just killing it for me. Gonna have to uninstall until they fix it, if they ever do.
9 found this helpful
Not recommended Apr 5, 2026
I bought this YEEEEEEEEARS ago and I've only just got around to play it. All I can say is: Wow. Wow in the sense that what they have here is something special for anyone that enjoys text-based games where you can control the development of your character as the story unfolds. By going to classes every day, except weekends and holiday, but choosing if you want to skip them or not. Making your own schedule and looking after your stress/vitality to ensure you don't get too overwhelmed or sick to end up wasting a day. Wow in the sense that there is a LOT of lore on this world, from little pieces that your character will learn by going to classes. Lore dumps, quotes, tiny stories from going to different places in the academy that you can see for yourself by going into the "Lore" bracket. Even at some point, you might even use a story you've learnt to help you come out of a blunder you've been mixed up in. Wow in the idea that you actually feel like you're a student barely struggling to get on their feet in a place that is super competitive. Blunder and accidents are bound to happen, and it's up to your in how you plan accordingly for when that happens again. Exams are comin…
5 found this helpful
Recommended Mar 28, 2026
At the time of this review, Academagia continues to be a unique game. For that alone (to experience history), I recommend it buying and playing it. Nonetheless, Academagia is also a *good* game. The world of the Elumia is exquisitely fleshed out within many pieces of lore throughout the game as well as the many adventures one can undertake. The character creation process is what drew me in initially circa 2010; I probably spent a few hours just going though the various boons/maluses one can assign to one's character. If you're the kind of person that enjoys reading and imagining the world presented to you within the texts, this game is definitely for you. If you're the kind of person that enjoys figuring out how this incredibly deep life sim works...this game is also for you. Even if you're the kind of person that just wants to play through everything without much reading, you can do that, too! Honestly, I feel like I grew up alongside this game like I did alongside a few influential books (i.e. the Earthsea series by Ursula K. LeGuin) that I've read and reread multiple times throughout my life, each time gleaning new/changing experiences and interpretations. First I tried to mi…
2 found this helpful
Not recommended Apr 21, 2025
never finished, only one school year is playable.
2 found this helpful
Recommended Apr 14, 2026
I love this game, I was looking for a magical school equivalent to Long Live the Queen and found it
Recommended May 24, 2025
muito bom

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