Co-op always makes The WeekEndGame more fun, and Nine Parchments made it downright… magickal.
Blood Sugar Baby
I sometimes envy my wifey-in-arms her snappy decisiveness over video games. She either plays stuff to hell (just ask Starcraft 2 or Left 4 Dead 2), or declares a loud ‘meh’ over it and moves graciously on. The one case where it got slightly greyer than that, was Magicka. The first and the second.
More than the actual game, we loved the idea of Magicka. Comicky wizard buddies conjuring spells from seemingly infinite combinations of elements in a rather chaotic twin-stick brawl sounded like an absolute hoot. And it was, for a good while. Ultimately, though, it was its complexity that was its undoing.
The elements and their combinations were too many. The spell system and overly hectic controls weren’t in tune with the increasing challenge and what happened as a result was we simply started to use the same spells over and over again. Magicka was, sad as it now sounds, abandoned. But not forgotten.
We’re Magick!
It was my real-life match-make I thought of first when I saw TotalBiscuit’s little vid on Nine Parchments. And as I clicked ‘share link’ on my phone, I knew we were buying the game that evening.
Nine Parchments is, in essence, streamlined Magicka, and some. The with-time-redundant elements mixing has been replaced with a pre-assigned spells set, giving way to better characterisation, more meaningful RPG-like progression, and tons upon tons of unlocks. Forty hours in, we should know.
Despite the fact I’ve delayed 2017’s Race To GOTY quite significantly to allow myself for a catch-up with all things-of-interest, Nine Parchments managed to slip it. But that doesn’t make it any less awesome. Grab some friends. Buy this thing. Weekend away. Thank me later.
