Mystical Mixing

Genre: Idle Game

Players: 1

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Review:

Mystical Mixing is a game that probably best fits the description of “Idle Game”. Released on mobile devices in 2022 and ported to PlayStation 4 and Nintendo Switch in 2023, this game has players using a magic cauldron to mix together various magical ingredients to create little creatures to work for them and uncover more ingredients.

The presentation here is mostly decent, with simple but sufficient 3D visuals, cute creature designs and bright colors, backed by a fittingly “magical” orchestral soundtrack. My one complaint here is that the creatures’ animations are all identical, and some of them are choppy and poorly-made.

For the gameplay, the premise here seems sound enough, but the execution leaves a lot to be desired. Depending on the ingredients you use when mixing your concoctions, the creatures you create can have a different type, color, and added feature like wings or horns, but none of these changes seem to mean or do anything. Nowhere does the game indicate that any creature is better at one thing than another, meaning that the only thing to differentiate the creatures seems to be cosmetic. And with all creatures having the same animations, even that cosmetic only amounts to a different skin.

With this being the case, what does it matter if you get a new ingredient for your mixing? You’ll just be getting a slight variation on one of the numerous near-identical creatures you already have. Getting more creatures means you can have more of them clearing the little areas you can plop them down into, but it seems pointless to bother with this when your only reward for doing so seems to be… more pointless ingredients.

Of course, the fact that this started as a mobile game is perfectly clear with the wait mechanics that are still in the game, that you can use a limited supply of potions to speed up. Clearly these potions were originally a way to push microtransactions in the original release, but those microtransactions are no longer present in the Nintendo Switch version of the game. But we still have the wait mechanics, naturally. Also, because this is an Idle Game, I should mention that this game doesn’t have any sort of clock that keeps things progressing when the game is shut off – to make any progress, you need to leave this game running in the background.

Because of all of this, Mystical Mixing seems like a waste of a perfectly decent premise. Using magical ingredients to create a menagerie of custom-made critters to dig up more ingredients for you to use seems like a great formula for an Idle Game, and the presentation for this is mostly good. Unfortunately, apart from cosmetic differences there doesn’t seem to be anything to differentiate your creatures, making this entire exercise pointless.

tl;dr – Mystical Mixing is an Idle Game where players use a cauldron to mix magical ingredients to create creatures to uncover more ingredients. Unfortunately, the creatures you create only seem to have cosmetic differences, and as a result everything you do in this game seems pointless. Skip it.

Grade: D

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