I went to PAX EAST 2016 in Boston this past weekend and saw a TON of games, but one game in particular caught my eye that I had never seen nor heard of before: Mages of Mystralia by Borealys Games. I was even lucky enough to get to play it for about a half hour during the show.
Mages is an action RPG where you take on the role of a young girl who happens to also be a wizard. You lead her on a wild adventure with a narrative written by Ed Greenwood, the man behind the Dungeons and Dragons campaign setting Forgotten Realms. The game plays out much like other action RPGs. You navigate a 3d world that is full of monsters, traps, and interesting puzzles. In Mages of Mystralia, however, there is one significant difference. In this game you are able to design your own spells to attack each obstacle.
The way this works is simple on the surface, but will undoubtedly get more complex as the game progresses. You have four different kinds of spells that are each mapped to a different button. You have access to a grid for each spell where you can lay down modifiers like teleporting, exploding, and multi-shot. You can even keep stacking these modifiers on your spells to give them different effects on the battlefield.
This lets you customize your approach to every combat and come up with interesting ways to approach different puzzles. For example, you might need to light a torch with a fire spell, but it might have obstacles in front of it. In order to overcome the challenge you could create a fire spell that arcs to the right or left. Once the puzzle is done? You can wipe it out and create another spell.
The game is still a year away from release so we have a long time to wait, but you can count on Engaged Family Gaming to keep bringing you information about this very promising game.
