It’s amazing how quickly The Mageseeker pulls you in. Before you finish the prologue, you’ll have all the skills you need to unleash brutal combos with your chains, gracefully dance around your enemies’ attacks, and steal their magic to fling back at them. No matter how many hundreds of monsters and mageseekers I killed, I never tired of using those simple combat skills you’re taught in the first five minutes. There are ways in which The Mageseeker doesn’t quite reach its full potential, but after spending 15 hours waging bloody war against mystical fascists, my only real complaint is that it left me wanting more.

The first time you throw out Sylas’ chains, steal magic from one enemy, then unleash it on another, is a real aha moment. The weakness-resistance system surrounding spell casting gives The Mageseeker some strategic depth that’s rare in this genre. There are six types - fire, ice, wind, nature, mystic, and storm - and every enemy is resistant to their own magic, but weak to another. Your success in battle depends on your ability to identify weaknesses and target enemies by using the correct magic against them.

It sounds simple, but The Mageseeker fills the arena with so many enemies that it can be difficult to stay focused. The first spell pair you learn is straightforward: fire and ice. They are weak to each other, so the best strategy is to trade off stealing magic from fire and ice enemies and whittling their numbers down evenly. Every enemy has a cooldown period before you can steal their magic again, so there’s a lot of dashing around the arena to avoid damage and seize opportunities to move in for melee attacks. Mastering the rhythm of combat and using counter-magic efficiently is incredibly satisfying because success relies on your wits as much as your reaction time. The Mageseeker clicked with me in a way that Hyper Light Drifter and Hades never did because of the puzzle-like quality to combat. You’re not just trying to be faster than your enemies, you can win by being smarter than them too.

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Fire and ice is a straightforward pair, but as the game progresses I found the other magic pairings to be far less intuitive. The next one you learn is wind and nature, which don’t feel like natural opposites the way fire and ice do. What’s more, wind is also blue like ice, albeit a lighter shade. The next one is mystic and storm, which confused me even more. Its colors were yellow and purple, which are complementary at least. As a result I never got a firm grasp on the six spell types and how they interacted with each other, and even late in the game I found myself pausing to check the reference graphics to make sure I was using the right magic on the right enemies.

Luckily, the game tends to throw matching enemies at you fairly frequently. If one monster is calling down lightning bolts, there’s a good chance another one is making purple mystic circles, and you can usually use them against each other. Whenever Sylas steals a new power, he can unlock it as a permanent ability in one of his four spell slots. Using your own magic costs mana, which can only be refilled by dealing melee damage, so even though you can freely equip whatever spells you want, you’re limited in how many you can use.

Spells are expensive, and the more powerful ones can only be used once before you need to refill most of your mana gauge. For this reason, I found myself only ever using the shield and heal spells to keep myself topped up and protected. It felt like a waste to have so many spells at my disposal (over 30) and only use two of them, but they were the only spells guaranteed to be useful in every encounter. A spell that shrouds you in wind might be strong, but if you enter an arena with matching enemies it's worthless, and you never know what you're going to face until it's too late to change your equipped spells.

The story of The Mageseeker follows Sylas, a mage that was wrongfully imprisoned for 15 years until he one day escapes and vows to take revenge on his captors. As a League of Legends spin-off, The Mageseeker’s story may seem impenetrable to outsiders, but developer Digital Sun does an exceptional job delivering the essential lore and keeping the story focused on the characters. As a League orbiter I was familiar with Sylas, Garen, Lux, Jarven IV, and a few other characters that weave in and out of the story, but this gives the champions context and personality you won’t find in League. I love the way previous Riot Forge games like Ruined King expanded the world of Runeterra and gave life to its characters, and The Mageseeker succeeds in the same way.

After escaping Demacia, Sylas begins to form an army of mages to overthrow the Mageseekers that have hunted and oppressed magic-users in the city for generations. Each mage that Sylas recruits to join his rebellion unlocks a new progression menu that allows you to increase his stats and unlock new abilities. In between missions you can explore the camp, which expands as you collect reinforcements, unlocking new areas over time. There’s a lot to learn about the characters if you take the time to talk to them at the camp, and dialogue is interesting and insightful. Sylas, who is singularly focused on revenge, ends up being the flattest character in the game.

That’s a shame, because there are hints throughout the game that indicate it intends to tell a more nuanced story about betrayal and revenge than it eventually does. Sylas’ motivations are frequently questioned by his companions, and flashbacks reveal the moments in his life that made him a monster, as well as the experiences that reveal that hope still lives within him. That conflict comes to a head when he discovers Lux - the only friend Sylas ever had that he betrayed in order to escape - is leading her own group of magic refugees in an idyllic pacifist commune. In the end, Sylas slays his enemies just as he always wanted to do and becomes a hero for it. He’s never forced to confront his rage or reckon with his violent instincts because ultimately, an action game needs boss fights.

The shallow exploration of its themes is partly a consequence of The Mageseeker’s limited scale. At 15 hours it isn’t the shortest indie game, but it feels more sparse than a game with Riot’s backing ought to be. There’s a lot of repeated bosses - albeit with different attack patterns - and repeated maps, especially in the side quests. The progression options are largely limited to incremental stat increases, and it runs out of new systems to introduce half way through. The levels are linear but for a few hidden areas for collectible hunters, and despite the potential that Sylas’ God of War chains provide, there are no puzzles to solve beyond. It’s just fight, move to the next room, and fight again.

The combat is fantastic, however, and it alone carries the whole game. Alternating the triggers to sling spells - left to steal, right to shoot - has a natural rhythm that feels great from the first fight to the last. The boss fights are complex, multi-phase encounters that will put your skills to the test, and should be a treat for League fans. It’s also just stunning to look at. I was in awe of the detail in the backgrounds and the fluidity of motion that each animation possesses. The use of color and lighting here are like nothing I’ve ever seen in pixel art before, and I hope the artists are appropriately recognized for their work when award season comes around.

Riot Forge has an incredible track record of matching studios with the right project, and this is the best example yet. It is such a strong execution of an idea that it ultimately suffers for being underscoped. Had The Mageseeker had the full force of Riot behind it I can easily see it being a game of the year contender, but it feels like the publisher isn’t ready to go all-in on these outside projects yet. I don’t think Sylas’ story should end here, and I’m excited to see what Digital Sun does with the world of Runeterra next.

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