An Amazing Wizard

My first instinct when I saw the words 'two-person studio' and 'roguelike metroidvania' in the same sentence was cautious skepticism. Those are big ambitions for a tiny team, and the genre is littered with pale imitations of Dead Cells and Hollow Knight. An Amazing Wizard earns something rarer than hype: genuine surprise. The Kickstarter fell short of its goal, the pixel art occasionally betrays its scrappy origins, and yet the core of this game quietly holds together in a way that most fully-staffed studios struggle to replicate. The spell system is the real reason to care. You pick from seven elemental families and merge 120 spells in whatever sequence catches your eye, stacking effects in ways that feel genuinely experimental. Fireball folded into an Icicle changes the rhythm of how you fight. A Summoner build that calls forth skeletal allies who themselves fire your merged spells is a different game entirely from a Chronomancer run built around slowing time and weaving in between attacks. The 250-plus perks and 200 artifacts mean each run reshapes the character in a different direction, and the procedurally generated world ensures the layout never quite repeats. Five distinct biomes each carry their own enemy rosters and boss fights, and difficulty scales upward after every clear, rewarding players who want to push deeper. The dev estimates somewhere between 50 and 80 hours to see the major content, which feels honest rather than padded. The rough patches are real and worth naming. Platforming occasionally drags, with level layouts that ask you to trek back across a stage to activate a switch you already know is there. The UI still has that early-access rawness that reviewers of the Prologue flagged months ago, menus feeling mismatched against the otherwise charming pixel environments. Sound design is the other wrinkle: the jump audio in particular grows repetitive across extended sessions, and this is a game where you will be jumping a lot. None of these are deal-breakers, but they register as friction points in what is otherwise a tight, readable combat loop. Controls sit on the right side of responsive, and deaths feel instructive rather than arbitrary, which in this genre is half the battle won. What Tiny Goblins have built here is a quiet underdog that knows exactly what it wants to be. The visual presentation nods to classic GBA-era side-scrollers, the soundtrack reportedly fits the atmosphere with care, and the spell-crafting never stops asking 'what happens if I try this.' As an Early Access release the game is stable and content-rich enough to play right now, while still leaving room for the team to grow it. If you are the kind of player who spent an unreasonable number of hours in Wizard of Legend or Binding of Isaac chasing one more synergy, this will feel like home. Approach it knowing the UI needs polish and the platforming occasionally forgets it is attached to a great combat game, and you will find something worth your time.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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