EARTHLOCK: Festival of Magic

EARTHLOCK: Festival of Magic is a turn-based RPG from Norwegian indie studio Snowcastle Games, built on an earnest love letter to late-90s JRPGs, the kind you probably played on a PlayStation that had a broken disc tray. The setting is Umbra, a world where a cataclysmic event froze the planet's rotation, leaving one hemisphere scorched and the other frozen, with a thin strip of habitable land caught in between. You start as Amon, a scavenger who stumbles into something much bigger than himself, and you build a party of six characters as the story unfolds. It's a familiar setup, and Snowcastle knows it - the game wears its inspirations openly. The combat system is where Earthlock earns most of its goodwill. Battles are turn-based and party-sized at four, but the core hook is the pairing mechanic: characters fight in warrior-protector duos, and fighting together builds a Bond meter that unlocks character-specific bonuses and charges a Super ability. Rotating your pairings deliberately, to hit the Bond level thresholds at levels 1, 3, and 5 that reward both characters with Talent Points, gives the formation management a light strategic texture that most JRPG clones skip entirely. Each character also carries two stances with distinct move sets - a fighter might switch between close-range brawling and long-range suppression, while a support character trades healing access for offensive pressure. Deciding whether to leave your healer in attack stance against a tough boss is the kind of small, tense call Earthlock makes repeatedly. Ammunition is finite, some moves cost more power than others, and the turn-order meter (think Final Fantasy X's CTB sidebar) keeps combat readable without dumbing it down. No random encounters either - enemies are visible on the map, and luring several at once into a single fight multiplies your experience gain, which is a genuinely clever incentive against avoidance. The problems are real and worth naming. The story is the weakest link: Umbra's worldbuilding is interesting on paper, but most of its depth is buried in optional lore text rather than told through the characters or events you actually experience. Amon's group is likeable but thin, and the main narrative is a fairly generic cult-versus-world escalation that never quite earns its dramatic moments. Save points are placed conservatively near area entrances, so a boss death means replaying a full dungeon corridor run, and difficulty spikes can appear without warning and demand grinding that the game's pacing wasn't built to accommodate gracefully. There is a hub island, Plumpet Island, where you can farm materials, craft ammunition and equipment, and tend a garden for crafting ingredients - it adds a quiet base-building loop, but the gardening mechanics feel half-finished rather than deep. Replayability is low once the roughly 10 to 13-hour campaign is done. For the audience this is aimed at - players who finished Chrono Trigger, bounced off modern open-world RPGs because they're exhausting, and want something compact and structurally familiar with a few modern ideas grafted on - Earthlock: Festival of Magic scratches that itch with honesty. It's not trying to be BG3. It's trying to be a JRPG your younger self would have stayed up too late finishing. It mostly succeeds, at the cost of a story worth actually caring about. Worth noting: this original Festival of Magic release was later superseded on Steam by a reworked edition simply titled Earthlock, so if you see both versions floating around, the reworked one addresses some of the rougher edges. Monika, Scout Team