Mind Over Magic
Sparkypants · 2025 · Survival, Building, Colony Sim, Management, Nonlinear
PC
Very Positive87% · 4,263180playing now
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About Mind Over Magic
✦ AI summary
Build and manage a magic academy by designing rooms, training mages, and raising magical beasts while preparing your students to survive the deadly Underschool below. Balance school operations, magical education, and exploration of a dangerous underground labyrinth filled with dark secrets and powerful enemies.
Mind Over Magic is a colony simulation game developed by Sparkypants and published by Klei Publishing.Build and optimize a magic school while keeping powerful mages alive and inspired. Prepare them to explore the horrors of the Underschool, a deadly subterranean gauntlet. Study lost arcana, grow exotic plants, brew potions, and raise undead servants. But don’t forget to stop the deadly fog from consuming everything in its path.
Conjure Your Own Magic School
Build the ultimate magic school, brick by brick. Design every room to fit your vision. Unlock new furniture, wallpaper, lighting, and decorations to personalize every detail. Experiment with layouts to discover hidden efficiency bonuses and create the perfect balance of design and function.Explore the Deadly Underschool
Beneath your school lies a mysterious labyrinth filled with dark secrets, deadly magic, and ghastly creatures. The deeper you explore, the greater the rewards—but danger doesn’t always stay underground.Raise Magical Beasts & Unlock Their Potential
Research and discover mystical beasts to serve your school and unlock powerful new resources. These creatures require food, affection, and magical care to grow into valuable allies, providing rare materials for crafting and construction.If you're truly ambitious, tackle the challenge of raising a dragon to aid your school. Dragons demand specialized students to become caretakers, but in return, they grant your mages the ability to embark on daring quests beyond the school walls—uncovering secrets, gaining unique powers, and shaping the future of your academy.Let Magic Do the Heavy Lifting
Bend the arcane to your will. Practitioners of Dark magic animate undead helpers known as Quilted—specialized constructs that gather resources, tend to plants, repair damage to your school, and mine valuable materials.Make the most of your day by reducing travel time in your ever-growing campus with the power of flight. Strategically place broom racks to make traversal a breeze.A Mage’s Growth is in Your Hands
Enhance your students abilities with powerful gear, such as potions, relics, and increasingly powerful wands, each granting distinct magical advantages. Customize their daily schedules and assign teachers to shape their magical growth.Magic isn’t just for combat—what your students learn and the tools they wield also determine how effectively they contribute to your school’s daily operations. Build a curriculum that fosters the ability to both survive and thrive.Teach And Master Magic
Shape the future of magic by customizing your students' education. Apprenticed students can multiclass to wield a diverse array of spells, or strive towards single discipline mastery to unlock devastating ultimate abilities, powerful enough to face the dangers of the Nexus.Reality is tenuous in the Nexus, a fractured realm of pure magic deep beneath the school. Your mages will need every advantage to battle powerful enemies, reconstitute its crumbling fragments, and break the curse for good. Train wisely, for only the most skilled mages can withstand the challenges that await beyond the veil.What Steam players say
Recent verbatim reviews from Steam — separate from playze.io community reviews below.
Really, really good hidden gem. 9/10
I can´t remember having a game that is so ANTI-FUN as this one. Sparkypants should play a bit of Rinworld for a chance and understand how a game can be hard and yet, fun.
abandoned for Klei's other games...interestingly, I only like this one, the others are kinda boring.
[h1]A unique gem of a colony sim[/h1] Mind Over Magic is a unique colony sim in the vein of games like RimWorld, Oxygen Not Included, and Timberborn. You slowly grow your magic school from your 3 starting staff members to a thriving population of students and staff. Even for this genre, this game is quite mechanic-heavy. Students, apprentices, battles, quests, keywords, relics, rituals, light, cleanliness, clutter, food, conviction, oh my! Starting out, you'll definitely need to read lots of tooltips and peruse the codex. On the flip-side, I think this game is more forgiving than the 3 games mentioned above. The main failure conditions are (1) starvation and (2) is letting the fog consume the school. If you build enough planters and repel the fog with a ritual every few days, you'll be fine. The main reason you might want to restart your school is the best/worst part of the game, discussed in the next section. [h3]Building the school[/h3] The building system is probably the coolest part of this game. This is a vertical 2.5D game with 8 tiles of depth. Like other colony sims, you must construct rooms that meet specific requirements, but Mind Over Magic's system is particularly rob…
Probably my favorite colony sim type game right now. Love the art style. There are some small annoyances - I wish I could plan things more easily, the combat challenge can be a bit too steep, and it starts to lag a bit after a few hours. But overall, really good, very atmospheric, lots of fun. 9/10.
I would conditionally recommend this game if you're already a fan of the genre of management sims where you can't control your little guys directly but can assign tasks and priorities. The theme is great, the style is charming, and there is plenty of interesting things to accomplish that, for the most part, make you want to keep playing. It is regrettable, however, that so much of the building system and the progression is based on your patience for tooltips and surprise rules and errata that you weren't expecting. There are so many keywords and statuses and conditional effects that it is frankly a bit much. Some things can only be harvested at night, or the materials needed the fog ritual change in proportion to how close it is to the school but it is not clear exactly what that point is. Some items like medical beds have optional abilities that you won't know about until 20 hours in because those features are buried in the manual. In short, it is a fun little game that needs some love in the intuitiveness department. Buy it on sale and go into it with a bit of foreknowledge and you'll have a great time.
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