Yes, this is my third post for my official review of Spells & Secrets (Alchemist Interactive). Why? Because I still have things to say about it. Here is the second post in my trilogy of review posts. This will probably be the last one, but who can say for sure? At the end of the last post, I was talking about the final boss. Also, about the stripping of artefacts in the boss fights for the harder versions of the school. Which, once I actually looked at the wards, it wasn’t that the artefacts get stripped, but the leveling of the spells? I think? It’s unclear from the description. At any rate, I’m not a fan.
Back to the final boss. Again, *SPOILER WARNING* for the rest of the post. I mentioned that the lock-on is one of the most frustrating in the game. Because of the physics of the game and how many things on the screen that you can lock on to, it’s really frustrating when you’re actually trying to lock-on to an enemy–especially a boss.
By the way, I’m crurrently doing a vanilla run (without the wards turned on) because I want to try to get the clothing for the fourth student faction. That’s the faction that is based on *sigh* parrying/deflecting. Which is another thing that irks me. That’s the thing that devs are taking away from Sekiro? That parrying/defelction should be the main combat choice? I really hope this trend dies out soon beacuse it’s my least-favorite FromSoft trend ever.
To be clear, I’m not mad about parrying/deflecting being a part of a FromSoft-like game. I am mad about it being the only combat option in a game (looking at you, Lies of P. No, it wasn’t stirctly the only way to play the game, but the other way was not fun at all). And I hate that it’s bleeding into my cozy games. Yes, this game is a rogue-lite, but I would still consider it a cozy game. Or cozy-adjacent. Adding a whole student faction based on it is, ah, a choice. Yes, it’s a lot more forgiving than Sekiro, but it’s still annoying as fuck.
It’s a spell that you need to cast as the boss is casting their spell. If you do it right, you will stun them, and then you have to attack them and kill them while they are under the spell. If you do so, they will go back to home base, er, the…uh…schoolyard? I think? And then you can fight the bosses in the boss arena in that student faction’s area. Which, no thanks. I just want the outfits. No idea how to get them. I’m assuming I’ll have to fight the bosses in the arena, which does not excite me at all. Sadly, the outfits for this faction are my favorite ones. Bleah.
Back to the game itself. In my vanilla run, I’m blasting through the floors. I have beaten the first two floors with very little sweat. I did not get hit on the first floor, and the only damage I took on the second floor was when I was trying to get the deflection spell to work on the boss. I don’t think I managed to do it, though.
Back to the final boss.
In the second phase, as I mentioned, I had to be up in the air most of the time in order to even get at the boss. And because of my bad visual perception/perspective, I often had a hard time knowing when I was successfully targeting the boss or not. You have to use LT to target the enemy, and I did not like having to hold it down while casting my spells. I don’t mind a challenge, but I do mind feeling as if the game was fighting against me. More than once, I sighed and rolled my eyes because I had thought I had done damage to the boss, but I hadn’t because I was too far away or there was something that was blocking my way.
Then, once you beat the second phase (which is where this boss fight ends on the other two ward levels), you have to follow the boss up and then do the third phase of the fight. I will admit that I sighed in annoyance when this happened. And I was infuriated on my first try because there was a trick to the third phase that I did not figure out until I was almost dead. Because of this, I died on the fight, and I did not feel it was my fault. Well, not completely my fault.
Once you figure out the trick, then the third phase is the easiest of all three phases. In fact, I feel like it’s not worth including except from a story perspective. I will admit that I had a tear in my eye as credit rolled, but that’s because I’m a sucker for stories that end in this way. And let me be clear. It wasn’t anything unique, but it was genuinely heartwarming.
I was going to write about how I felt I only beat the boss because of the free artefact I got before the run started. It allows barrage (the ice spell) to reflect projectiles back. So, basically, as long as I was using it, I did not get hit. I attributed this to why I won the first time without getting hit. Except, the game has glitched out and now starts a run without that freebie artefact, and I managed to win the next run without it. Got hit a bit, but not much at all. I don’t know if there’s something in this ultimate boss fight that allows for less damage to be taken? At any rate, I found the final boss to be ultimately easier than it’s previous iterations, but you have to have decent health before going into the fight because you can’t use the health fountain before it (it’s disabled for this fight for reasons).
With all that said, for all my frustrations with the fight, it really isn’t too bad if I have enough health to do it. I actually find the two-boss fights to be more irritating if I don’t have enough resources to fight it.
Overall, it’s a good cozy game with roguelike/lite elements. It tries to blend the two different genres, and it’s more successfulr than not. I know I griped about many of my issues about it, but it’s only because I like the gameplay and want it to be the best it can be. I would give it a 7 out of 10 overall and if they manage to fix the bugs and glitches, I could nudge that up a bit.