Mind Over Magic on Steam - User reviews, Price & Information
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 survival, building and colony sim game
developed by Sparkypants
and published by Klei Publishing.
Released on February 12th 2025 is available only on Windows
in 3 languages: English, Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese.
It has received 3,264 reviews of which 2,886 were positive and 378 were negative resulting in a rating of 8.5 out of 10. 😎
The game is currently priced at 17.24€ on Steam with a 25% discount.
The Steam community has classified Mind Over Magic into these genres:
System 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: 8 GB RAM
- Graphics: 2 GB VRAM
- DirectX: Version 11
- Storage: 6 GB available space
- Additional Notes: Thanks to all the computers out there for making magic happen!
User reviews & Ratings
Explore reviews from Steam users sharing their experiences and what they love about the game.
On a binary Recommend - Don't Recommend scale, it is difficult to give mind over magic a negative review, even though there is ultimate a promise not being fulfilled here. the game as it is is perfctly functional and acceptable, but especially once you get past the early game hurdles a stunning lack of content starts to rear its ugly head. tasks, crises and the core gameplay seriously lack enough variety to keep the experience fun and fresh. Unless you are a completionist like me who will actively force himself to keep playing games you no longer actively enjoy, just for the sake of beating it, **I can almost guarantee you will not finish a game of Mind Over Magic.**
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Oxygen Not Included (ONI) proved to me that I am not a very smart person. I enjoyed ONI, wanted to play it, wanted to be good at it - but I just couldn't really pull the complexity together to understand all the systems and advance very far in it. This game gives a form of that gameplay loop (though very different) that is a lot more accessible for me and very enjoyable. I am glad that I've played ONI and Rimworld, because without those experiences the learning curve for this game is going to be tough (specifically the systems around schedules and meetings needs). The tutorial for the game is bare bones and isn't doing much for you. However, the nested tool tips are well done and the descriptions are pretty clear. With all that being said, I am loving this game and enjoying the process of playing it. Clear objectives, lots of flexibility, great community management, good visuals, and consequently a great game. If you like games like ONI, definitely recommend it. If you are a player who finds ONI comprehensible and "simple" than this game is going to probably be boring for you. It doesn't have that same kind of complexity that ONI offers and this is definitely more accessible to a wider audience as a result.
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This is a really solid game and it really fills the light management niche quite nicely. It's fun to play around in if you like designing and the requirements for all the different types of rooms and spaces in the school vary enough to keep things interesting. It manages to offer a little challenge for those who like adapting on the fly while still being engaging enough for those that like to tear everything down and rebuild in a more organized, modular fashion. As opposed to Oxygen Not Included, the game doesn't require you to delve into the management of pipes and material transport systems (which was my least favorite part of ONI). There's basic farming and production limits and storage but that's about the extent of it. You can quickly craft little zombie bots to do a lot of your hauling for you which frees up your teachers and students to teach and learn and dance in a circle around an enchantophone. Staff and student scheduling is simple, though the grouping system is still a bit wonky. I also get the feeling that the devs intend that the 'best' way to play is to churn through your students and staff. Graduating and Retiring your staff is incentivised through the reward of relics which are used to upgrade subsequent students/staff, so if you are one of those players that gets attached to your characters you're going to be making the game more difficult for yourself. Overall I think this is an easy recommend. The developers have done a great job on the skeleton of the game, so depending on your options chosen it can play as a challenging, resource-scarce, base survival game, a light magic-themed school/base designer game, or anywhere in between.
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a cool twist on a rimworld/oxygen not included formula. low skill floor, high skill ceiling. keyword system keeps things fresh and interesting without the need to forever explore and expand. pawn stat randomisation and relics give something to chase for. events and difficulty are highly customizable, providing a range of challenge options. a very easy recommend.
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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.
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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 | 10 April 2025 19:06 |
|---|---|
| SteamSpy data | 07 April 2025 03:50 |
| Steam price | 12 April 2025 20:49 |
| Steam reviews | 12 April 2025 13:56 |
If you'd like to dive deeper into the details about Mind Over Magic, we invite you to check out a few dedicated websites that offer extensive information and insights. These platforms provide valuable data, analysis, and user-generated reports to enhance your understanding of the game and its performance.
- SteamDB - A comprehensive database of everything on Steam about Mind Over Magic
- SteamCharts - Analysis of Mind Over Magic concurrent players on Steam
- ProtonDB - Crowdsourced reports on Linux and Steam Deck Mind Over Magic compatibility
Online players
588
Developer
Sparkypants
Publisher
Klei Publishing
Release
12 Feb 2025
Platforms