Day Five

• Game: Magicians & Looters
• Source: Groupees' Build a Greenlight 5
• Started: 05/12

Morgopolis Studios's Magicians & Looters is essentially the archetypal Indie SpaceWhipper. The humble SpaceWhipper, so maligned by the major studios that the two namesake examples are either on ice (Metroid) or have transmogrified into a regrettable series of God of War clones (the other one), is a genre most beloved by Indie developers after tower defense, first-person multiplayer survival-crafting-whatever-the-hell-that-whole-shebang-is-called, anything zombie-related and parody simulators. Oh and Indie platformers that aren't SpaceWhippers but have something to do with gravity or momentum in some way.

All right, so SpaceWhippers are still fairly rare even among the Indie crowd. It's a good thing, then, that Magicians & Looters can join the likes of Valdis Story: Abyssal City and Dust: An Elysian Tail and Aquaria as the newest example of an Indie exploration platformer that took several years for a small studio to develop. While a bit rough around the edges and not particularly remarkable graphically-speaking, the three distinct protagonists and its dumb sense of humor are at least promising, and I've been having enough fun with it so far to keep going. I have no idea how much more of it is left to go after the point I'm at, but it's far exceeded what meager expectations I had. Honestly, I just grabbed it out my library because it was a SpaceWhipper released this year and I need to keep this feature going for another two weeks. Integrity, I have it.

I'll go into more detail tomorrow, when I'll have perhaps completed it, but for now I'll just bring up the basic plot and the three main characters. The trio are apprentices at an exclusive floating school for talented wizards, though neither of three are particularly serious about their courses. In fact, they're pretty much typical detached teenagers who begrudgingly get involved with saving the teachers at their school after it is raided by the titular Looters. Nyn is a dual-wielding warrior who uses dodge rolls and slides to boost her martial prowess; Brent is a guy with a shield, and perhaps the one who takes his wizardry studies most seriously; and Vienna is an incredibly fast monk and gymnast who seems to have the lion's share of the exploration-enabling powers endemic to this genre. She's also my favorite. The three protagonists have slightly different experience trees and abilities, and only two can equip weapons (Vienna's fists are all she needs), but the most striking difference is the abilities they find. Nyn's slide, Vienna's high-jump and Brent's wall-jump all give them exclusive access to certain areas of the map, so the player is expected to switch between them fairly regularly. Unfortunately, it means going back to a save point each time, rather than the on-the-go swapping of something like Portrait of Ruin.

Still, Magicians & Looters is a competent Indie SpaceWhipper as far they go, and I'm happy to stick with it for the time being. Its silly humor is a darn sight more palatable than that of UnEpic, the last parody fantasy game I played in this genre. Let's hope this one doesn't end in an interminable tower defense sequence too.

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