Borealys Games has a free demo on Steam for Echoes of Mystralia, with Early Access set for 11 August. The Montreal studio is doing the thing you would hope it would do with a follow-up: taking the spellcrafting system that made Mages of Mystralia interesting in 2017 and building a roguelite around it.

Spellcrafting, Reworked

The centrepiece is a node board the game calls the Watcher’s Heart, where you attach behaviours and triggers to a base spell. In the studio’s own screenshots, a spell called Cele Aer is described as a boomerang that returns when called back, listed at 60 damage, 0.24 seconds duration, speed 30, and Pierce 2 so it passes through targets. It cannot be recast until it comes home.

Then you bolt a trigger onto it. Furious Outburst, flagged as a rare trigger, fires on distance travelled and casts fireballs in random directions at 35 per cent damage, applying two stacks of Burn. The interesting bit is the fine print: trigger damage scales off the base damage of the spell or the first trigger above it in the chain. That is a combo system, not a modifier list, and it is where a build either compounds or falls flat.

The Watcher’s Heart spellcrafting screen in Echoes of Mystralia, showing the Cele Aer boomerang spell connected to a Furious Outburst rare trigger on a hexagonal node board
The Watcher’s Heart node board chains behaviours and triggers onto a base spell. Screenshot via Steam / Borealys Games.

The Roguelite Frame

Runs move across a node map divided into named regions, Old Woods, Parched Lands and Ash Forest among them, with currencies tracked in the corner and travel choices between encounters. It is a familiar structure, and that is fine. The structure is not the pitch. The pitch is that a spellcrafting system with this much surface area is a much better fit for run-based progression than it ever was for a fixed-length adventure, because the whole point is discovering a combination you did not plan.

The Echoes of Mystralia run map showing routes between the Old Woods, Parched Lands and Ash Forest regions with encounter nodes
Runs branch across named regions with encounter nodes and travel choices. Screenshot via Steam / Borealys Games.

Why This One

Mages of Mystralia came out in 2017 with a genuinely clever spell editor and a game around it that never quite matched the ambition. Nine years later the studio is having another go at the same idea in a genre that rewards it properly.

It is also almost entirely uncovered. There is a demo sitting there right now, free, and nobody has written about it. If it holds up, that is the good version of a discovery. If it does not, you have lost an hour.

Watch the trailer