Mage's Initiation is a fine tribute to the legendary Quest For Glory series. As a hybrid RPG/adventure game it almost perfectly captures the spirit of the first Quest For Glory game. It's not as humorous as its source of inspiration, but the game is very well balanced and does a couple of things better than its classic counterpart. No repeated spell casting is required to improve your stats. You gain xp points by solving the puzzles and once you cross a threshold, additional points can be assigned to your stats. I quite liked this mechanism.

You can play as one of four classes of mage. Each class adds a little variation to the puzzles throughout the game. Each class also has a class-specific quest which warrants a playthrough per class. Achievement hunters will have a field day with a wide variety of possible play styles: kill all types of monsters, kill no monsters at all, kill 1000 monsters...

The puzzles are decent and never get frustrating. Art is what you'd expect from a pixel-art type of game; although some of the cut scenes look out of place because the drawing style seems quite different than the rest of the game. The quality of the voice acting varies a bit; personally, I don't quite like the main character's voice but other characters really stand out.

All in all, I really enjoyed this one. Just like in Quest For Glory you can save your character for use in a sequel. Unfortunately, the developer has made it clear that a sequel is very unlikely to ever see the light of day. That's a real shame; I would have been a day-one-buyer.

[b]Mage's Initiation[/b] is a fine tribute to the legendary [b]Quest For Glory[/b] series. As a hybrid RPG/adventure game it almost perfectly captures the spirit of the first [b]Quest For Glory[/b] game. It's not as humorous as its source of inspiration, but the game is very well balanced and does a couple of things better than its classic counterpart. No repeated spell casting is required to improve your stats. You gain xp points by solving the puzzles and once you cross a threshold, additional points can be assigned to your stats. I quite liked this mechanism. You can play as one of four classes of mage. Each class adds a little variation to the puzzles throughout the game. Each class also has a class-specific quest which warrants a playthrough per class. Achievement hunters will have a field day with a wide variety of possible play styles: kill all types of monsters, kill no monsters at all, kill 1000 monsters... The puzzles are decent and never get frustrating. Art is what you'd expect from a pixel-art type of game; although some of the cut scenes look out of place because the drawing style seems quite different than the rest of the game. The quality of the voice acting varies a bit; personally, I don't quite like the main character's voice but other characters really stand out. All in all, I really enjoyed this one. Just like in [b]Quest For Glory[/b] you can save your character for use in a sequel. Unfortunately, the developer has made it clear that a sequel is very unlikely to ever see the light of day. That's a real shame; I would have been a day-one-buyer.