Folly Of The Wizards

My first few runs with Folly of the Wizards felt like exactly what the title promises: bumbling, a little chaotic, and not entirely in control. UpFox Labs is a two-person studio, and you can feel the handcraft in every corner of this side-scrolling roguelike. The art is gorgeous, drawing obvious inspiration from Hollow Knight's silhouetted palette while carving out its own whimsical identity through warm, cartoonish character designs and biomes that feel genuinely distinct from one another. The soundtrack and atmospheric voice-acted introduction do a quiet, effective job of setting tone before the dungeons swallow you whole. The structure will be immediately readable to anyone who has spent time with The Binding of Isaac. You choose one of four wizard apprentices, each with their own spellcasting quirks and stat profiles, then descend through five floors drawn from nine possible biomes. Each run, you build from a pool of 130 relics, tomes, and scrolls. Relics provide passive buffs, tomes shift the elemental type of your basic attacks, and scrolls unlock spell cooldowns that can completely change how a run feels. The elemental system is the mechanical highlight: stacking fire, water, lightning, and earth scrolls means your shots cycle through elements in sequence, and learning which enemy types are vulnerable to which affinity adds a satisfying strategic layer. Layered on top of the combat is a relationship system where conversations with NPC wizards can make them allies or adversaries across the run, and seven different endings hinge on the choices you make. It is more texture than deep narrative, but the absurdist writing lands its jokes more consistently than most comedy-games manage. Where the game creates friction, it creates a lot of it. The control scheme is the most-cited complaint across reviews, and it is a real one: jumping and dashing are mapped to shoulder buttons with no remapping option, which runs directly against muscle memory built across years of platformers. The twin-stick aiming also feels loose in early runs, when your projectiles are slow and small and enemies are quick and evasive. The gap between a run that clicks, with a strong relic synergy and the right elemental stack, and a run that collapses under bad procedural luck is wide enough to be discouraging. Some bosses signal their attacks poorly, and at 22 total across the game, the variety eventually starts to feel limited once you have seen them all. Critics are split: some find the comedic chaos genuinely addictive once the controls settle into muscle memory; others bounced off the combat loop entirely. What Folly of the Wizards does well, it does with real warmth. The run lengths are short enough that a floor can fall in around five minutes, which makes the "one more attempt" pull feel low-stakes rather than punishing. The social mechanics and quest system give each run a secondary layer of objectives beyond pure survival. The writing mocks your failures without cruelty. For patient players willing to absorb the unconventional controls and lean into the build-crafting, there is a genuinely likeable small game here. For anyone expecting tight mechanical polish or a roguelike that immediately rewards aggression, the experience may stay frustrating.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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