Magic Paper

I have a soft spot for the kind of game that fits on a single Steam page with room to spare, and Magic Paper by Teleportsoft is exactly that kind of project. It is a top-down hack-and-slash action roguelike built around one genuinely clever central idea: your spells are not picked from a menu, they are assembled. You slot magic pieces into a magic book, align them to complete a sigil pattern, and the resulting combination determines what fires when you enter combat. Stack two identical pieces and that magic upgrades. Hate the shape of a piece you just found? Swing by the magic altar and reshape it. It is a small spatial puzzle wrapped around a combat loop, and when it clicks, you feel it. The dungeon structure is familiar territory: procedural rooms, unique monsters, boss encounters that drop gems, and goblin traders lurking in the corridors selling potions and fresh magic pieces. A minimap lets you fast-travel back to rooms you have already cleared, which cuts down on backtracking nicely. The stated goal is to collect enough boss gems to unlock the Devil Castle and take down the Dark Lord, giving each run a clear through-line even if the path there changes. None of this reinvents the genre, but for a one-developer effort it holds together with more intentionality than you might expect. There are legitimate rough edges worth naming before you commit. The Steam community has flagged the absence of WASD movement controls as a friction point, with the game currently running as mouse-only for navigation. Controller support is also absent at the time of writing, which closes the door for Steam Deck players hoping to play from the couch. With only a small handful of Steam reviews to draw from, the sample size for gauging long-term depth or build variety is thin. What the existing player base does say, though, leans positive, suggesting the sigil-building hook earns its keep even if the surrounding dungeon lacks the density of bigger genre entries. Who is this for? Players who like the inventory-management side of action roguelikes, who enjoy the tactile satisfaction of fitting pieces together before a run even begins. Think of it as a lighter cousin to deeper build-crafters: less sprawling, more focused, and priced accordingly. If you need a rich meta-progression system or dozens of hours of unlockables, Magic Paper will run dry before you do. But if a compact, handcrafted loop with a genuinely novel spellbook mechanic sounds like a Tuesday evening well spent, Teleportsoft has built something worth a look.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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