I had tried the demo for Mind Over Magic (MOM from here on in) back during one of the Steam Next Fest shindigs and I enjoyed it well enough. This didn’t stop me from not recognizing it when it released it’s 1.0 version the other day; I looked at the screenshots and all of the numbers and stats and how much it looked similar to games such as Fallout Shelter and Oxygen Not Included and because it was on sale (it’s normally around $25 but with 25% off it’s only about $18 as of the time of this post) I thought I’d give it a shot, not having putting two and two together that this was the same game I had demoed a few months back.

Considering that this is a game about operating a school — a non-controversial school of magic, in fact — my math skills are up for a refresher.

Foundations of Education

The game starts off with two or three staff members (depending on how difficult you want your game to be) situated in a magical bunker hidden beneath a confounding Fog-with-a-capital-F. By performing a ritual, the academics can push the Fog back on both sides of the screen, enough to emerge and start building their future school.

The building can only be built upon the provided platform, and then needs to be erected wall-by-wall, floor-by-floor, and roof-by-roof. Walls are actually made up of square blocks that stretch all the way from front to back, and they need to be stacked high enough to allow the residents and staff to move (minimum of 4 or 5 blocks). Floors can be added as ceilings, but to prevent water and other environment from seeping in, actual roofs need to be added.

Once a “room” has been created, doors can be added to facilitate movement in and out, and each room can either be assigned an ad-hoc purpose, or can be designated for a specific purpose. In the former case, simply adding decorations and usable items allows for those items to be utilized, but in the case of the latter, a room must meet special requirements and any usable items placed there that fit the bill will get a stats and/or operational boost. This is a nice feature, because my first order of business was to add a research station, but I couldn’t devote the insane amount of space or build the room in the way that was required by the bonus effects. Still, I added a research station and set to work.

Part of the staff’s job is to go outside the “school” and harvest and collect resources. These come in a few varieties like trees, rocks, plants, and animals. Once these resources are cut down/mined/harvested/hunted, they lie around outside until they are needed for some construction project; later and through research, chests can be made which can store items to prevent them from wasting away outside during bouts of inclement weather.

Full-Contact Academia

In addition to building up high, the staff of the school can delve below-ground. Initially, there’s only one location to explore, but eventually more open up in sequence. Each exploratory location is a battle with whatever weird denizens live underground. These battles allow for the assignment of staff (and maybe students) and combat is turned based.

Doing this nets rewards like harder to find resources needed for building. Each battle has a recommended level requirement, increases in difficulty the deeper you delve, and the aftermath gets a little hairy should the participants survive.

Qualified Applicants

The staff (and possibly students) have a whole lot of crunchy numbers behind them. Each NPC is of a certain species like Human, Wolfkin, Vivified (constructed people), and eventually two other types which aren’t available at the start. NPCs also have an elemental attunement which determines which tasks they excel at, among other things. Everyone has a wand, and the wands are an important part of the game when inviting students into the school. These can be crafted using a special station and are awarded to students upon their arrival.

There’s also a “scars and quirks” system which contributes to “convictions”. Scars are obtained when bad things happen to an NPC (like dying or near-dying), and quirks are likes and dislikes that are revealed over time. For example, NPCs might discover that they like eating together in the dining hall. I’m not 100% sure what convictions do to or for an NPC aside from showing what kind of things they need me to build for them in order to “improve”.

School Vacation

According to Steam I have played about 2.6 hours, and the screenshot above represents how far I’ve gotten. I have a few issues with this game so far.

Speed

This is not a fast-paced game. It takes quite a while for NPCs to harvest materials and that may be a case of me not matching the right elemental ability of the NPC to the right harvesting task, but early on when I needed to get building, I couldn’t micromanage my few staff members like that and expect to remain interested in the game. Building takes a while as well, especially since a single wall is built in terms of blocks, and several blocks make up a wall. Same with floors. NPCs need to cart materials to the work site, and then use their wands to blast materials into place. I get the underlying implication, but what good is magic if you have to schlep plywood across the map?

Availability

Early on, there’s not a whole lot of things to actually do. My first run, I thought I had to delve into the Underschool to battle the creatures down there. After reading a bit online, I understood that such an approach wasn’t only unnecessary, but potentially bad. In a normal game, injured NPCs need medical beds as they won’t heal on their own. Unfortunately, medical beds are something that need to be researched, which meant I had to build a room, add a research table, and wait for the research to complete. Then I needed another room to serve as the infirmary (unofficial, since I couldn’t meet the room-type requirements). Then I had to build the beds. Thankfully my injured staff members didn’t get worse over time, so they were able to help with harvesting, collecting, and construction.

Guidance

On paper, the idea here is simple: build a school of magic, accept and teach students, and send them out into the world (or hire them as additional staff). How we do that is almost completely black box because the only tutorial information is presented in the form of an in-game “codex”. While this tells you what things do or what numbers mean, it doesn’t help you decide when they are needed. For example, the medical bed situation I mentioned above. I didn’t know what I didn’t know until after my NPCs were injured, and then starting from scratch to build the infirmary, research the beds, and build them cost me…something, maybe, as my injured staff members wandered around without respite.

I did some digging for off-site resources and found a thread on Steam which ended up in a flame-fest between people who were asking about a tutorial and those who thought the game was easy enough to not need one. While I agree that pushing buttons and pulling levers is a fine way to FAFO, I only found info on “best practices” from community members who played a lot in beta/the demo. I shouldn’t have to piece together information on your game; I haven’t checked, but I’m willing to bet the recently released Civilization VII has a tutorial system, and this is for a game series which hasn’t changed much in almost 40 years.

Right now, I’m still trying to get my infrastructure up and running, but I don’t know what rooms or resources are going to be needed to get my feet under me. I need room for students to live and learn, but in order to do that I need to build the building. I also need to build in order to take care of the staff I currently have, which means I need beds for sleeping, tables for eating, storage for resources, and, of course, the research table. I also have to keep the Fog at bay, which requires repeating the push-back ritual on occasion. I have no idea when I’ll “be ready” to start accepting students as there’s nothing in the game itself that provides any kind of guidance to build a successful school. On top of that, there are world events like rain, thunder storms, and mystical creature invasions that I believe will happen eventually, and which I assume I need to prepare for. I have already experienced rain and lost some resources I didn’t have storage for (because I couldn’t possibly make enough to house it all), so I dread the appearance of anything stronger than “bad weather”.

Student Bodies

As it stands, I have no students. I can’t even begin to consider setting up space for whatever the students might need — whatever that might be, since the game doesn’t tell me anything. I’ve already researched and created some prep items like the wand creator and the ritual circle which is used to graduate and promote students, but it seems like there’s so much stuff I might need in order to run this school, like dorms, dining, kitchens, meeting places, classrooms, and recreation facilities. Everything takes a long time and a lot of resources to build, and I don’t feel like I’m anywhere near ready to start actually thinking about making this pile of boards “a school”.

Take a Gap Year Before Enrolling

To be fair, if it weren’t for the pressures of damaged NPCs, the encroaching Fog, and the promise of more Doom on the horizon, I’d be OK with a free-build mode, which this game doesn’t have. Building and researching isn’t much of an issue aside from how slow it seems to be; maybe things will improve as my staff members level up.

The semi-good news is that games can be fairly customized. While I can’t turn the Fog off, I can slow it down and mitigate it’s effects. I can also turn off bad events, reduce damage, and start out with a few key research tasks unlocked. Currently, I don’t think there’s wide Workshop support, although I saw that translation packages were available there, and some folks on the Steam boards have said that people hack the YAML config files for various things; I looked at those files and they seem relatively straightforward, or would be if — like the game itself — there was some guidance on how to Make Things Work.

So maybe it’s a “me” problem, but I’d advise folks give this one some time to improve before jumping on it, although with a discount bringing it below $20, it might be worthwhile for folks who are hardcore into this kind of game and are willing to feel their way around a lightless room. YMMV. If nothing else, holding off might provide the Community more time to get those guides out there to fill the yawning chasm left by the complete lack of guidance or best practices.