omg im dying, just discovered this game - my new favourite game, the graphics and the art for the models, are just stunning,

i love the material and them crystal heads are just the cutest thing lol, i love any game like this, i love managing it all but this game seriously is on another level, ive never seen anything quite like it in over 20 years of gaming, seriously hats off to you,

the quality of the game, is just on another level, nothing was skimped on here, they have thought of pretty much everything, stunning game, fun, highly customisable, im just loving every second, the fog is abit annoying like cause i just wanna build my school but i can live with it, thank you for a wonderful game.

its quite complex, im still discovering things but wow, im obsessed.

sorry anyone leaving a negative review is hilarious, its an amazing game, probably just seen there arse cause they cant wrap their heads round the complexity.

i love magic anyway but this blows my mind.

I'm really impressed by how fun the game is. The school you build just gets complicated over time and the mages advance further. Look at the pictures other made of their schools. You are truly only limited by your imagination how insane your school build can go.

The combat becomes fun as your mages become seriously advanced. The idea that you can mix magical specialties is brilliant as well. Your mages suddenly become special to you as they pick up different combination of specialties.

Honestly, I couldn't say enough good things about the game. The developers did a great job. I would love a sequel.

This is a game that I really should enjoy but I'm just not having a lot of fun. Even after 10 hours I just don't get it.

Mind Over Magic is a combination of "build Hogwarts" with Rimworld. You recruit teachers and students, forage for resources, build crafting areas and over time ramp up your school to fend off and ultimately solve the bigger issue of a fog that's going to take everything over. The twist here is (1) everything revolves around magic and (2) you can explore under your school in turn based JRPG-style battles. It's a fairly interesting combination that should work for me. As someone who enjoys the genre enough to help give Tynan advice on Rimworld before it ever hit Steam, this should be a good fit for me. And who doesn't like magic?

Moreover, I really love the art style. This is one of my favorite recent games in terms of the art style. It's just perfect for a game like this - cartoony, bright, colorful, crisp, interesting - I just really adore the look of this title.

But mechanically I'm just about to throw in the towel.

Firstly, everything......takes.....so......long....to....do....in....this....game. I'm permanently playing it at 3x speed and I'm still waiting around for my characters to flick their wands 15 times to build something simple like a bed. Researching something would take about 30 minutes for one unlock in real time. And it's not like I have enough teachers to double up something like research. I tried playing on normal speed and - I'm not kidding - I fell asleep.

The combat mechanics are basically simplified turn based combat and all I'm looking to do is exploit weaknesses. Some magical areas like air have almost no use in combat, at least none I've found thus far. So combat is "stick the earth person with a ton of HP up front, cast armor every turn and let everyone else wail on the enemies until they go down". That's my only tactic. Since my dark arts guy is the main heavy hitter and he has to go back to the hospital after every fight (each spell of his does great damage but hurts him as well), the pace here is very slow. And forget trying to get my newer guys involved in a battle since they'd just get face-rolled in two turns. Seems that trying to "catch up" a new teacher or student quickly becomes impossible. But combat is the least of my worries and that was one of the parts of the game I enjoyed the most simply because I understood it and didn't have to wait on it.

The main issue is that the game is inherently unintuitive. In other games you have crafting concepts that make sense such as heating iron ore in a furnace to create iron bars. In this game none of what I'm building is familiar and I often don't know why I'm even building it. Conceptually almost nothing is explained and I'm repeatedly having to alt-tab out to try to figure out what some requirement is or what something means. There's a tome in the game but it really doesn't explain how to play or what you're trying to do. in Rimworld I could easily see the impact of not having enough food. In Mind Over Magic, I forgot to feed everyone for a couple of days and didn't really see an impact.

Task priority continues to bewilder me. I can tell the game to harvest trees on the left side of my castle and then the right side. It doesn't matter which one I click first, they always go left. In fact, they go left so often that those trees will be cut down and REGROW before the ones on the right are chopped.

They've thrown in things like gremlins which aren't fun and - again - aren't explained on why they suddenly appear. Same for the ghost birds. I finally figured that last one out (you can't have any real bird corpses around!) but why is that even a thing? And with all the stress of trying to figure out all of this unexplained stuff, there's the omnipresent fog mechanic. The game is on a countdown and I'm trying to figure out why room X seems to meet the stated requirements but won't upgrade only to find out by searching Google that "lofted" means the height has to be taller than the length. If the end of the world is coming, why would they care that much about the feng shui of where I'm doing my rituals? It just doesn't fit.

Also, there seems to be some busted mechanics. I had to cheat to get seeds for certain types of plants. No mandrake and honeydrop plants ever spawned, even with me running rituals to push the fog way, way back. What pissed me off even more was I HAD mandrake roots, picked up from delving into the dungeon. But no, you can't get a seed from a harvested plant. You need one growing to get a seed, which wasn't happening.

Finally, you have to tell your mages to do everything. This is a sim where if there was a toilet, the game would make me tell the wizard how to wipe their butt. There seems to be very little agency on the part of the teachers and students and while there's a schedule to set up on what they should be doing, they just don't make good decisions. They'll wander past 4 items to pick up one piece of wood, take it up 4 flights of stairs, go back down and get the next item. Or they just don't really complete things. Or they'll maddingly leave something 98% done to go sleep for 12 hours. In Rimworld it was pretty neat to see your little guys doing their own thing. In Mind Over Magic, they can't do much of anything without me babysitting them.

It's probably a decent colony sim, but it's nowhere close to being as interesting, deep or intuitive as something like Rimworld. It may be in a spot where it's too unintuitive and different for casual players to want to work through all of the unfamiliar concepts, items and mechanics while simultaneously not providing enough of a challenge to someone who takes their time to learn all of that stuff.

YMMV but I can't recommend it.