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jp's Mages of Mystralia (PS4)
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| [July 20, 2020 11:25:43 PM]
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Finished it and I also spent a little extra time "cleaning up" trophies. This part actually helped me better understand the spell creation system which is definitely the most interesting thing about the game and, sadly(?) something that I don't feel I was encouraged that much to pursue/chase.
So, I did make a few "new" spells, but things don't get really creative until you're trying to collect all the things and in some cases you don't even know the things you're trying to collect (so it's hard to know if you should be experimenting with what you have or simply wait until later).
To be fair, and this is a great piece of game design IMO, there are some challenges (that you teleport to) that have a lamp that gives you clues. The first clue is free and is basically the lamp telling you if you have the right runes such that you could solve it. There were MANY challenges I thankfully skipped for later thanks to the lamp letting me know. I wish this was the case for other parts of the game (not that many, to be fair), but still.
So, the game has puzzle solving via making up new spells (and I wish that experimenting with this was encouraged more. Perhaps if I was playing on a higher difficulty setting?
The other form of puzzle solving involved moving these round pieces on a grid such that they lined up (and lit up). Mostly it was used for opening doors - but the final boss battle was a bit annoying because suddenly I had to solve some under a time constraint! I was surprised, but weirdly only failed once (maybe twice). So, it was an unexpected challenge that could have been annoying - but mostly because I find multi-stage boss fights annoying (when there aren't checkpoints in between stages).
Overall? Glad it was short - but time to move on. I'm not sure I'd recommend it other than the cool spell system which has more depth than you'd imagine, but it's also a hard thing to provide players with the incentive to experiment? (I'm now thinking I should try out Noita, since I've heard good things about it in this regard - the roguelike metastructure also favors experimentation, unlike a fixed/linear game where you can easily fall into the trap as a player of sticking with something that works...and never changing from that).
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| [July 16, 2020 01:51:57 PM]
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I think I'm getting close to the end and the game is fine - controls are a bit more fiddly than I'd like and the feel isn't quite right (there's a delay between casting spells and moving that I find annoying). By far the most interesting thing about the game is the spell design system.
You have 4 basic spells and as you progress in the game you find runes you can then slot onto a "board" to modify the spells (you can also change their element when you unlock those possibilities). There are also some "linking" rules that determine where you can place runes such that they connect to each other (if more than one) as well as the core spell. It's a neat system that has much more depth than I imagined. I thought that you simply added a bunch of runes for a determined effect (output spell) - but it turns out that HOW you hook up the runes and to what, also matters! This is pretty cool and the system for casting different versions of your spells works pretty well - it would be a real pain if you could only have one version of a spell or something like that. I know (from experience) that you can have at least 5.
While I'm not terribly impressed by the rest of the game (like I said, it's fine but doesn't stand out - it seems derivative in the art direction? Reminds me a lot of Spyro and other younger-age platforming games - I guess what I mean is that it doesn't seem to have its own strong visual identity)
Anyways, I think I'll finish it, just because it seems I'm so close - but I'm not sure I want to experiment all that much with different spells and such.
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jp's Mages of Mystralia (PS4)
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Current Status: Finished playing
GameLog started on: Tuesday 14 July, 2020
GameLog closed on: Monday 20 July, 2020 |
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This is the only GameLog for Mages of Mystralia. |
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