Hi everyone, and welcome to an exciting first look at Mind Over Magic, an upcoming game in development by SparkyPants and to be published by Klay. As a Klay ambassador, I was lucky enough to do an early playtest to give feedback, and I can also share my thoughts with you all too. Klay have asked us to make clear that this is not a sponsorship or a promotion, just a chance to give our honest feedback and all thoughts here are my own. So what is Mind Over Magic? Well I would describe it as a side-on 3D base building colony simulator, where you get to build a school for young witches and wizards, and then send them into dungeons under the school to fight monsters and keep the always approaching fog at bay. That forces you to keep moving, training and sometimes sacrificing students down below. That's right, expect some dead students. But the main focus of the game is around building the school itself, and there are loads and loads of options here. You start with nothing, and it's up to you to put in walls, floors and roofs, as well as lots of furniture and workstations. And you do all of this by gathering resources from the map either side of the school. That means you have complete control of your design, as you build your way through many room types that give bonuses to help your teachers and students. Students are summoned by making wands for them to use, and there's quite a bit of wand customisation in terms of tier and elements that will affect the student's abilities. Once they're ready then, they go into a graduation trial down below. This involves a lot of spells going back and forth until one side dies, and this is all automated. If they're successful, then they can become teachers and stay in the school to help build and run it. Or you can send them off permanently on missions, which basically caches them in for different levels of pages, depending on what dungeon tier you chose. The dungeon tiers unlock in order, which is the main progression in the game. Each time you beat the next tier of boss, more of the map opens up, and you get more room types and wand tiers. These wand pages are also the key resource in research, and the game already has a huge research tree with loads of cool options. This unlocks with the dungeon tiers too. So that's the core gameplay loop. You build up the school to train better students, to beat the monsters to let you build the school better, and around you go. Of course as this is a playtest, I definitely need to share my thoughts, and my overall takeaway is that Mind Over Magic is a really fun game. It's kind of like Oxygen Not Included, and it does share many similarities, so it feels quite familiar. And as YouTube loves lists, here are the top 5 things I like about Mind Over Magic. Number one is definitely the core gameplay loop. By that I mean the fundamental idea of the game is solid and well executed in the base building, training students and dungeon fighting, keeping things moving forward. It's satisfying when you win, or unlock something important to get that next rune type or wand. Progression is always kept in mind with the fog, and you very rarely sit still. It's very engaging. Next up is the art style, and there's so much to like here. It definitely has a clay-y vibe, and everything is so visually interesting. The school looks great, the items, characters, plants and animals are detailed and fit the style perfectly. Rooms are definitely a standout visually, as well as giving useful functional bonuses. You really do feel like you're building a magic school. Plus, the spell animations look great as your magicians throw spells about freely, including at monsters, which is number 3 on my list. The dungeon and fighting element is really fun, and an interesting twist on the base building elements. It's always fun watching the fights play out and the monsters and spells look great. If anything, I would like even more fighting and options for these dungeons. On the topic of options though, this is another one of the game's strengths. There are so many things in the game already for you to research that it always keeps things interesting. The building tools are quite intuitive, and you can be really imaginative and unique with what you build. It allows you to be very creative and feels like a true magic school. And number 5 on my list, the game is just straight up addictive. There's definitely a feeling of wanting to play just one day more until you realise it's one in the morning and you have work the next day. I think when you guys get your hands on this, you will really, really enjoy it too. Now I was going to include 5 things I didn't like about the game, but to be honest I don't really have any major ones to share. It's still in development and missing more of the end game content, but overall it plays really well. It did completely bug out on me once, but I'm sure that will be fixed long before it's released. And that's not to say the game is perfect, there are definitely a few tweaks and fixes I'd like to see for things like the UI, menus and tutorials to make the game more user-friendly. But they wouldn't really mean much to you all without having played it yourselves, so rather than try and cover them here, I'll submit them directly to the devs, and hopefully they get considered. So that's everything I wanted to share with you all, and of course I have to say a huge thanks to Clay for the opportunity to playtest the game. I'll say again just to be clear, that this was a playtest to give feedback, and not a promotion of the game. But it does have a steam page, and you can wishlist the game there if you want, and the link is in the description. Hopefully I'll be able to bring you more content related to this, and I'm definitely excited to see how development continues. If you have any thoughts or questions then please leave them for me in the comments, and I'll answer anything I can. If there's enough, I can even make more videos covering certain elements, but it is still in development, so of course things will change. I hope you enjoyed this first look at Mind Over Magic, and thanks for watching.