Spells & Secrets

The game isn't bad - and fine for the low sale price you can pick it up. It has some small design issues like most spells and artifact pickups being kind of useless, at best only for solving puzzles - clearly the intention is to exploit enemy weaknesses, but often it's better to just kill them. The bosses are extremely dull and in general, enemies are too bullet spongey - but maybe the game is balanced for coop, I played solo. What turns this from "cheap so recommended" to "not recommended" is the slow progression. Look indie devs, you have to have some self-awareness that you are not making the next Hollow Knight. Don't expect players to spend a ton of time playing your game, even if it's a roguelike. This game could have used the progression being at least twice as fast, so you can actually mess around with all the spells and their upgraded versions much earlier and easier. I got the true ending so not like I just bailed early either - but you can see from achievements that people stop after Act 1.

Think of it like Hades. You do a run and gather a load of stuff until you die and then lose it all, start again, but being able to upgrade your spells and stuff and get stronger each go. It's a fun game solo, however I specifically purchased 2 copies of this game because a) I wanted my husband to play with me because b) the reviews hyped that co op was so much more fun. Scrap that. You can't play co op on PC. My husband was only able to watch me play. That being said, this is a really cute fun game and for the sale price it's currently on is definitely worth it!

advertising your game as a cosy roguelite but making progression impossibly slow, the dungeons repetitive and boring to run through, and drip feeding a very basic story is not a good look </3 maybe play this if you're looking for a hard roguelike but there are waaay better options for that too.

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…

P good game. Have been looking for a game that that makes you feel like a wizard casting spells. This game scratches that itch well enough. And it's great if you have audio books you need to finish and you want something to do while keeping your hands busy.

It's a lukewarm recommend. It's likable, although you need to enjoy roguelites. The moment to moment gameplay just wasn't engaging enough for me - too clunky to appeal from an action/blast-em perspective, too fiddly to explore more innovative approaches to enemies. But if you like the milieu, you may fall in love with it and do run after run to improve your character.