Mind Over Magic
Mind Over Magic is a colony sim set at the site of a cursed magic school. Build and optimize your own magical academy, train powerful Mages, and master mighty relics in order to battle through the Underschool, a mysterious underground dungeon that holds the key to liberation from a deadly curse.
Mind Over Magic is a early access, survival and building game
developed by Sparkypants
and published by Klei Publishing.
Released on December 14th 2023 is available only on Windows
in 3 languages: English, Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese.
It has received 2,250 reviews of which 2,019 were positive and 231 were negative resulting in a rating of 8.6 out of 10. 😎
The game is currently priced at 17.24€ on Steam and has a 25% discount.
The Steam community has classified Mind Over Magic into these genres:
Media & Screenshots
Get an in-depth look at Mind Over Magic through various videos and screenshots.
Requirements
These are the minimum specifications needed to play the game. For the best experience, we recommend that you verify them.
Windows
- Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system
- OS: Windows 10
- Processor: 2 GHz
- Memory: 4 GB RAM
- Graphics: 1 GB VRAM
- DirectX: Version 11
- Storage: 4 GB available space
- Additional Notes: Thanks to all the computers out there for making magic happen!
Reviews
Explore reviews from Steam users sharing their experiences and what they love about the game.
Classy! (Pun intended.) As far as building and managing a wizard school goes, this is the game. Forget Spellcaster University -- Mind Over Magic beats it in all aspects by a thousand miles. Like many others have said, this game is somewhat like a lite Oxygen Not Included. Klei even handed Sparkypants their "task management" code, as Mind Over Magic clearly uses the same logical structure as ONI's, while also having a very similar UI. Basically, this game is a non-headache-inducing ONI with magic. And also combat. And directed training for your wizards. And Relics to equip on them. And a strong focus on how you build your school. If you are as much of a fan of Oxygen Not Included as I am (got 800 hours in it), don't be fooled -- despite being a "lite" ONI, Mind Over Magic keeps you busy all the time, and hooked for hours without end. I've been playing this some 8 hours a day for 10 days in a row, and I'm just about to stop simply because I'm nearing the end of Early Access content. That "lite" doesn't make Mind Over Magic one bit less entertaining. This is an excellent game, the kind that is very hard to find nowadays. Now, to get into some details: School-Building: Building your school is not easy, or boring. Building rooms that fulfill certain requirements give your wizards some nice (and necessary) bonuses, but it's not just a matter of making a square room and randomly filling it with whatever needs to be in there. In Mind Over Magic, the shape of the room is also taken into account, as well as how many/which rooms lie beside, above or below it, what kind of roof it has, what lies on top of it, etc. You also can't build everything ideally right away, because you need to conduct a bunch of different research projects before advanced rooms can be built and, meanwhile, you need to have half-S'ed versions of everything up and running, otherwise your wizards will freak out and everything will go to sh!t. Even after you do have all researches unlocked, figuring out where to put each room and how, exactly, to build them is still a puzzle. You gotta put some thinking into it, pay attention to a lot of details, make mistakes, and rebuild stuff several times. The way Sparkypants did it, building your school is very interesting, engaging, fun and rewarding. And, after you succeed, it all also looks pretty damn cool. The Fog: You might have read some other reviewers complaining about the Fog -- a dark mist that constantly encroaches upon your school, which you have to keep repelling via rituals. I've seen people saying it keeps you constantly over pressure, as if you had a clock running non-stop and you had to rush through everything. That's bullsh!t . The Fog is very easy to handle. When it's nearing your doorstep, the ritual to repel it costs just a few of the most basic resources. And then, the farther away it is, and the farther you want to repel it further, the more and more advanced materials you need to do so. But, at least on Normal difficulty, it's not an issue at all -- I felt no pressure, managing to keep it away just fine, always repelling the Fog back when I felt like doing it instead of against my will. What the Fog really does, practically, is forcing you to amass higher-level resources to be able to push it further which, in turn, unlocks even more advanced resources for you to grab. It's a neat idea, and it works perfectly fine. As someone who hates a clock ticking behind my back, constantly rushing me, I can safely say the Fog adds to the game, not detracts from it. Combat: Something that ONI doesn't have but Mind Over Magic does -- thus surpassing its main inspiration, in this aspect -- is some actual combat. Your school will be assaulted every now and then by Rifts that, if not closed, will spawn monsters to wreak havoc in your personal Hogwarts. When exploring the Underground beneath it, rooms will also be protected by enemies. And more things will haunt you, which I won't spoil. The combat itself is JRPG-like -- like Final Fantasy's and the such. You take up to 4 of your Teachers and/or Students into battle; they take one side of the field while the enemy takes the other; each unit plays in turn, according to their Speed; you give a command for your units to execute when it's their time to act and, once one side is defeated, you either win or lose (winning gives you experience, spell-class experience, and items). Each enemy has certain strengths and weaknesses, and you gotta take an appropriate party into combat to exploit the latter. Battlefields can have special effects on certain tiles. You must put your beefier guys in the front row, to protect the glass-cannons behind. Potions can be taken into battle. Attacks can have area-of-effect. And strong enough wizards can even use Ultimate skills. Mind Over Magic uses a tried-and-tested combat style, and it works. It's not something poorly done, disconnected from everything else and thrown in there just to say combat is present. No. Like the Fog, the combat adds to the game, blending in perfectly with everything else. Schooling: Other than for your 3 starting Staff wizards, all the ones you'll get will start off as Initiates. These can be turned into Apprentices (when you get to pick a second spell-expertise for them) and both Initiates and Apprentices can then be turned into Staff (the Apprenticeship is optional, and not initially available). "Multi-classing" your Apprentices adds another layer of depth to the game, because each pair of spell-types you can combine leads to a different bonus. You have to consider what combinations you'll get, taking into account both the combat and base-maintaining qualities of each. (You must also consider your wizards' Race, their Quirks and Traumas, the types of Relics they can use, etc.) So, there is some nice depth to character-building. If you do things right, you can get some very strong battle-mages, as well as some extraordinarily useful wizards to do chores around the school. After 80 hours, I gotta say that I didn't manage to get a perfect Staff together. I made mistakes, and I'm still not entirely sure of what would be the perfect set of wizards to have permanently around. Rituals: There are several different Rituals to be conducted in your school. Mainly, you have the Fog Repel one, and the ones that handle your wizards: Hire Staff, Graduate, Retire Staff and Expel Student. But there are more, which you'll probably want to find out by yourself. Summing Up: Mind Over Magic is awesome. There's much more to it than what I described, it's completely bug-free (every time I thought I had run into a bug, it was because I messed something up), and it keeps you constantly entertained. Despite being in Early Access, there's already enough content in the game to keep you going for some 80 hours. This is better than the vast majority of AAA games and than the vast majority of EA titles. And it also costs way less than the vast majority of both. This is not a soulless, uninspired game made industrially to enrich some psychopath CEO further. Mind Over Magic is what a game should be like, and it far exceeded the best expectations I had when I purchased it. This is a no-brainer -- 100% recommended, at full price. My congratulations to the developers. Classy job.
Read more
Graphics are enjoyable, and the game seems to be forgiving. It is along the same lines as Oxygen not Included but a lot less critical; so far it seems easy to pick up but hard to master which is usually a recipe for a good game.
Read more
As a rule I don't buy "early access" games as they are not just unfinished but will NEVER be finished. They either sit in early access for 10 years or the developer straight up abandons the game at some point. Mind Over Magic is refreshingly different. The game play is solid, as in it feels almost like a complete 1.0 game already, with their updates feeling more like free DLC. Developer seems to have a solid road map and timeline that they are ACTUALLY FOLLOWING!! I very much recommend buying this if, especially if you are on the fence about it.
Read more
Put 30 hours in on release and enjoyed my time, but wanted to see more QoL and content. Picked it up after the Apprentices update, having seen how many updates they'd released in just 6 months and desperately needing dopamine, and I've already sunk another 35 hours in. Really fantastic game that can only improve from here, given how much work the devs are doing and how seriously they're taking community feedback.
Read more
Important context: I'm a fairly new gamer. What I love about this game: It's like Sims on steroids with wizards and a dungeon crawler aspect. You don't queue the tasks, you prioritise task types and the queue is somewhat automatic. But there are 10x more things that need to be done than in Sims. And you can have way more people. You don't get the character customization, but I think making it too easy to get the "perfect" mage would take something away from the game rather than add it. I like that the building requirements for special rooms change in Relentless mode, so it's not exactly the same if you do another play-through. Actually, I just like that there ARE requirements to meet. And so many different kinds of rooms. Looks like Isolated rooms aren't actually possible yet, so I'm looking forward to seeing that in the future. I like that there are so many things to figure out. I know others will have played a game like this before, but this is my first with so many things to fine tune. How many things do I actually need to plant? How do I make the layout so it doesn't take hours for my mages to walk from task to task? What research should be prioritised? What works best when setting up the groups? What factions and wand types make the best fighters? When is it useful to bar certain characters from accessing a room? Just so much that I've enjoyed toying around with, and I know I'll get better at it and discover more with each play-through. I love that the game doesn't give a hoot about gender. Had a student named Ruby who grew up to be a teacher with a magnificent moustache. And most of the students seem to be little gender-neutral lemmings, which is fun, but also sometimes confusing. Things I struggle with: I don't want to say these parts of the game are bad, because I might just not have figured out how to do everything correctly yet. But, with that caveat... The Scrivening Desk seems to be essentially useless so far. I can gain the scrolls WAY faster through battle in the underschool than even prioritising the research for the desk and the needed ingredients. I wondered with the update where it's a little easier to get thorntooths if it might make sense to try scrivening, but it's been a waste of time so far. Some resources seem to be so scarce. Even with a night work schedule and prioritising hunting croa, it's a grind to get enough brains and eyballs. Every night I'm selecting all the croa and prioritising hunting them, but when you sometimes have as few as 2 croa a night, it's two nights of hunting to get enough brains to make one item. The thornteeth are also a bit of a grind, though not as bad as when the game was first released. Storage issues: As great as it is to be able to say where you want things stored, I wish there was a way to make it more specific. I saw there was supposed to be an update where you could set limits for specific items in storage, but I'm not seeing that yet. I'd like to be able to set the pantries to have different food for students and staff, for example. Or if I end up with too much of something, I'd like to be able to trash them instead of dumping them on the floor, selecting each stack to move outside, choosing x priority for storing, and waiting for the rain to destroy it. Late game: I know there's more to come, but I wish there was more to the late game. You get all your fancy rooms built and all your gifted tier 3 mages and then... there's just not really anything more to do. Like, I could make up goals for myself, like have all staff and students at max conviction or try and get all level 10's, but I kind of wish the game had some more built-in achievements. It's a little anti-climactic. Overall, I'm loving this game, and I'm excited to see what new features get rolled out.
Read more
Similar games
View all
Data sources
The information presented on this page is sourced from reliable APIs to ensure accuracy and relevance. We utilize the Steam API to gather data on game details, including titles, descriptions, prices, and user reviews. This allows us to provide you with the most up-to-date information directly from the Steam platform.
Additionally, we incorporate data from the SteamSpy API, which offers insights into game sales and player statistics. This helps us present a comprehensive view of each game's popularity and performance within the gaming community.
Last Updates
| Steam data | 22 December 2024 00:39 |
|---|---|
| SteamSpy data | 20 December 2024 01:30 |
| Steam price | 23 December 2024 12:50 |
| Steam reviews | 23 December 2024 15:56 |
Online players
443
Developer
Sparkypants
Publisher
Klei Publishing
Release
14 Dec 2023
Platforms