Overall most helpful review

Posted on: September 4, 2021

MischiefMaker

Games: 819 Reviews: 66

Random Phoenix Wright + RPG

The Magister is a procedurally generated RPG mixed with the logic games of Phoenix Wright. You play a traveling judge for a fantasy steampunk empire investigating the murder of a fellow judge. Like a game of Clue, the city layout and cast of suspects is the same every time, but the details of the murder and the motivations of the suspects changes every time. At first the suspects give you the run-around, but as you finish various RPG quests for them and gain their trust, they start opening up about the details, giving you opportunities to catch them in logical inconsistencies and forcing them to give more info. You have 14 days to figure out the murderer and gather sufficient evidence to make an airtight case. Carrying out the various quests to loosen suspects' lips is done through a variety of minigames like an old Microprose game ala. Pirates! or Sword of the Samurai. Combat is grid-based tactical battles with action cards based on your equipment and skills, negotiation is done by an abstract deck-builder game, stealth takes place in real-time as you avoid vision cones, and so on. Your character is randomly generated each run with skills in either a physical, mental, or cunning skill tree. You also start out with a serious character flaw that limits certain options. Even if you stick to a single skill tree, you will not be able to unlock every skill in a single run. The main downside of the game is the incredibly rough graphics. Especially combat on maps with gorges and other large impassible obstacles where it's hard to tell where exactly the gaps to squeeze through actually are. I hope this is successful enough to release an HD version with cleaned up graphics in the future It's a game that's more than the sum of its parts, something I didn't know I needed in my game collection but now I'm thankful to have it. If you like RPGs, deck-building, and Clue, you'll love The Magister.

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Posted on: November 16, 2021

thewatersupply

Verified owner

Games: 684 Reviews: 5

Clue: The Fantasy RPG

The Magister is a bit more simple of a game than it appears to be at first glance, but it's got a lot of charm. In practice it's fairly boardgamey -- the names may be different every run (which is actually a bit of a mistake if you ask me -- I end up just referring to all of them by their job and not paying atten to their names at all), but the characters and locations are always the same. A culprit is picked randomly from them and evidence is shuffled around -- it's like a game of Clue where you know the things you need to figure out in order to solve the murder. Each character generates quests -- after you've solved a couple of them, they're willing to give you further information that you can use to discover motives for the murder, clues to the killer's identity, and ways to poke holes in their alibis. Your investigation will always take the same basic path and require the same basic steps to solve and the differences between stories aren't any more complex than "Colonel Mustard with the rope in the conservatory" vs "Miss Scarlet with the knife in the kitchen," but the focus in higher difficulty levels becomes about efficiency. You're given a limited number of turns to solve the crime, and the challenge lies in beating your score, basically. Combat and character development is really wonderful and lets you go in a couple of different directions. There are two combat systems -- a more traditional, grid-based tactical thing and "tactical diplomacy" (aka talking combatants down), and they're both a lot of fun and represent two different angles on the same basic concept. Everything is card based, with combat starting with a large deck which whittles down as the combat goes on, and tactical diplomacy starting with an extremely small deck which increases in size each turn. It's casual, light, and charming -- it's going to be a fun one to revisit when I want to kill an hour but don't want to start anything big. Looking very forward to their next game!

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Edited on: September 18, 2025

Posted on: January 5, 2022

randomrob1968

Games: 203 Reviews: 22

clever little indie

a randomized mystery roguelite rpg that's like a breath of fresh air (rolling my eyes a little at a couple of the negative reviews). thoroughly enjoyed the writing and humor and little environmental details, esp. on repeat playthrus. the challenge definitely ramps up on the harder difficulties. really felt the love of old school games playing this. highly recommended!

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Posted on: September 15, 2021

Bawbie

Games: 82 Reviews: 2

Cool concept, very lazy execution

Love the idea, and was excited to play the game. However the actual mechanics of the game, in particular the Tactical Diplomacy, seem underdeveloped and very simplistic. On top of that, much of the art in the game is taken straight from free assets created by Ross at 2minutetabletop.com, with some crude 3d art overlaid on top. While there's nothing wrong with using those assets, using the raw files without changing them at all looks fairly awful, and certainly doesn't meet the standard you'd expect when paying for a product. If you want a procedural detective-style game, Westerado: Double Barrelled executed the idea with more polish and care, and there are countless deck-based combat/diplomacy games that are more engaging than what you'll find here. I'd love to see this idea properly fleshed out and treated with care, but this game was far from ready to be released.

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Posted on: February 11, 2023

shaiper101

Verified owner

Games: 102 Reviews: 9

game wont launch

Game wont launch. no matter what i tried

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The Magister

Developed by Nerdook

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