Borealys Games built an action-adventure around crafting your own spells from base runes, and the crafting is doing more work than the story it's wrapped in.
Official art · via Steam
Borealys Games' Mages of Mystralia is an action-adventure built around a spell-crafting system rather than a fixed moveset, following a young mage named Zia as she learns to combine base spells with modifier runes to solve puzzles and fight her way through a fantasy kingdom. It released in May 2017 to a critical reception that splits fairly evenly around that core idea.
The rune-crafting system is the reason to play it, and reviewers agree on that point almost unanimously. Game Informer's review singled it out directly, noting that "reconfiguring your spells to overcome each puzzle and combat challenge is consistently rewarding," since every new rune reshapes both combat options and which environmental puzzles suddenly become solvable.
The reception lines up cleanly behind that hook. Steam holds it at 85 percent Very Positive across roughly 890 direct purchaser reviews (nearly 1,500 counting other storefronts), and OpenCritic's aggregate sits at 74 from 43 critics with a 67 percent recommend rate, a solid if unspectacular showing for a small studio's debut.
The story is the most consistently cited weak point. Reviewers describe it as serviceable rather than memorable, with plot turns that telegraph themselves well before they land, and it never becomes more than a frame for the spellcasting rather than a reason to keep playing on its own. Collectible backtracking, hidden scarabs and seeds tucked through already-cleared areas, draws its own complaints as padding that doesn't add much beyond a completion percentage.
At roughly nine hours for a full playthrough, Mages of Mystralia doesn't overstay its welcome, but it also doesn't leave much room for its thinner story and puzzle design to develop past the strong first impression the rune system makes early on.
Mages of Mystralia is a clever combat-and-puzzle system wrapped around a story that never catches up to it. The rune-crafting hook alone is worth the run time, and the unremarkable narrative and some backtracking padding are minor enough not to get in its way.