Magic Code

Genre: Puzzle

Players: 1

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Review:

Magic Code is a Puzzle Game released on Nintendo Switch in 2022. On the surface, this is a game about issuing commands to a wizard to ensure he moves properly on a grid-like board and activates all white energy points. In practice, this is a game exploring some of the fundamental ideas of programming instructions.

It’s a pretty decent idea, making a puzzle out of creating programming instructions, using a shorthand so players don’t even need to learn a programming language. This game wisely approaches the topic one step at a time too, gradually getting players acquainted with ideas like loops and IF/THEN instructions. The game is simple enough that it’s relatively easy to get a grasp of these concepts, but the puzzles themselves can require some clever thinking.

A few problems do pop up, however. First, the control scheme here is unintuitive, making it frustrating to input simple commands. This results in every element of the game being more tedious than it needs to be.

The other issue is the presentation. This game looks pretty basic, using simple low-poly locations and a low-poly wizard, without a lot of detail or anything interesting visually going on. In fact, if you told me these were bought assets, I would not be surprised. This is backed by a placid but forgettable instrumental soundtrack.

I should note that this game includes a level builder, and at least in theory there’s a way to share your creations with others online. Unfortunately, this feature is broken, and there doesn’t appear to be a way to save these levels (which is a required step to publish these levels). This is really disappointing, because this could have been an amazing feature, but it’s rendered largely worthless here.

Then, there’s the price tag. For a game this simple and basic-looking, the $12.50 price tag is simply absurd. This game does apparently go on sale regularly for $2, and if you can get it at that price it may be worth it to you, but I’m not writing my review based on the sale price.

Magic Code isn’t a terrible game, but it’s poorly-made in a way that really limits it. It looks cheap and it feels cheap, which is unfortunate since the game’s core idea is actually pretty good. If you want a Puzzle Game based on programming logic, and don’t set your expectations too high, this may be worth getting on sale. Otherwise, I suggest skipping it, or getting a better-executed version of this formula in a game like Human Resource Machine

tl;dr – Magic Code is a Puzzle Game where players direct a wizard to light up energy points. It’s built on a genuinely good concept of solving puzzles using programming instructions, but unfortunately the execution here feels cheap and poorly-made in a few ways. If you can get it on sale, it may be worth playing, but otherwise skip it.

Grade: C

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