Using magic is cool, but fusing magic is a whole lot cooler. In An Amazing Wizard, a new Steam roguelike from indie developer Tiny Goblins, you master more than 120 spells across seven elements, which you can then merge together to create all manner of weird and wonderful reactions. With Dead Cells-style 2D action and a veritable rainbow of potential spell interactions that remind me of those peak combos from The Binding of Isaac or Magicka, this is one roguelike you’ll want to watch – and you can try it right now in a new free demo.
The full launch of An Amazing Wizard isn’t due until 2025, but you can get an early glimpse of exactly what it has to offer with a special prologue version that Tiny Goblins has just put out as a free Steam game. In it, you’ll get access to 60 of the game’s spells and a dozen melee weapons, along with 120 artifacts and 100 upgrades – each totalling a little under half of the final planned number. You choose from wizards of five different elements and explore two biomes, the Ancient Desert and The Hell, on two different difficulty levels.
As noted, the core structure of An Amazing Wizard is not unlike that of Dead Cells – leap your way through various biomes, and take on challenging bosses, all with a hand-drawn art style that’s beautiful, colorful, and rather endearing. You’ll face biomes in a random order each time, with “a lot of secrets and mysteries to discover” as you progress through runs – Tiny Goblins says it estimates the full game should last for “50-80 hours or even more.”
The hook of the action, however, is the ability to combine the various spells you find in powerful ways. As just one simple example, take three spells: Icicle shoots rapid-fire projectiles, Fireball is a strong blast that ignites enemies, and Friendly Fire causes three damaging orbs to circle around you.
By merging Friendly Fire into the Fireball spell, those damaging orbs will now spin around the fireballs you shoot. Then, if you merge that new spell into your Icicle attack, these new orb-enhanced fireballs will fire out rapidly at the greatly enhanced speed of the icicles. Congratulations – you’ve just hand-made a devastating barrage of destruction, and that’s just a single possibility in a game packed with more than 100 such spells to fuse.
The free prologue for An Amazing Wizard is available now on Steam, with the full game set to launch in the first quarter of 2025. Just download the demo version if you’re curious. Tiny Goblins sums up An Amazing Wizard thus: “For us, it is a passion project we worked on for four years in our free time after daily jobs. For you, it is a side-scroller where you hit very different monsters by casting spells in their faces.” You can’t say fairer than that.
If you’re looking to jump into something that’s already finished, here are the best roguelike games on PC right now. For those curious if they’ve missed any other excellent experiences coming from smaller studios, be sure to browse the best indie games in 2024.
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