Fictorum

My first hour with Fictorum felt like discovering a small, confident argument: what if a mage RPG trusted you to be powerful from the very first room? No farm-boy origin, no waiting thirty levels to feel dangerous. You pick a starting type, Firebrand, Tempest, or Frost-Bound, step onto a procedural node map that critics immediately compared to FTL: Faster Than Light, and start reducing watchtowers to rubble within minutes. That clarity of intent is the game's single strongest quality, and it earns genuine goodwill in the early going. The spell-shaping system is the mechanical heart, and it is legitimately interesting. Each spell carries up to three rune slots, and before casting you hold the trigger, time slows, and you tilt the shaping triangle toward whichever rune properties you want amplified. Push toward multi-shot and a single fireball becomes a spread of three. Push toward high-explosive and the radius widens to crumble a bridge under a pursuer. Lean into the knockback rune and soldiers fly off cliffs, which is, frankly, delightful. The runes are swappable on the fly, meaning you are always one quick menu away from rewriting your loadout mid-encounter. That real-time decision layer, choose a spell, shape it fast, fire before mana bleeds away, is the best thing Scraping Bottom Games made here, and it holds up. What does not hold up quite as well is everything surrounding that mechanic. The procedural maps recycle environments visibly, and reviewers across the board flagged that battle arenas start repeating before the mid-point. Enemy AI is blunt: most foes run directly at you, so under pressure you end up defaulting to the widest-radius lightning chain rather than experimenting with the rune combinations the game ostensibly encourages. The late-game power curve swings hard in the opposite direction, and once you have enough upgrades the destruction stops feeling earned and starts feeling frictionless. The story, told in scrolling past-tense text on the world map as if narrating an ancient legend, is a pleasant and slightly melancholy framing device, but it does not add up to emotional weight. The absence of a minimap and some building-interior loot placement that actively fights the game's destruction premise are small but persistent friction points. Fictorum sits at 64 on Metacritic and a 78 percent positive rating across its Steam user base, which feels about right. Critics praised the destruction physics and the on-the-fly spell adaptation while criticizing thin content variety, dated visuals, and combat that can devolve into a health-management slog in later chapters. If you have played Magicka and wished for a third-person roguelite version with physics destruction instead of co-op chaos, this scratches a specific itch nothing else quite matches. If you need a game to hold you for forty hours across multiple runs, it will run dry. The sweet spot is two or three focused sessions, long enough to master the shaping triangle and feel like a genuinely terrifying last survivor, short enough to leave before the map repetition turns meditative in the wrong way.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

Be the first to comment on Fictorum.