The Wizard of Bug

Genre: Puzzle

Players: 1

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Review:

The Wizard of Bug is a character-based Puzzle game released on Nintendo Switch in 2025. This game puts players in the role of one of a pair of powerful magicians, Shirley and Ella, who have been tasked with taking out members of a resistance hiding from an evil empire. There’s a whole plot about how the main characters have themselves been enslaved and… yeah, this story isn’t great and the writing is poor. That’s not any reason to play this game.

As it happens, neither is the rest of the presentation. This game has some nice anime-style character art, but the actual gameplay is depicted using ugly, muddy-looking 2D pixel art with repetitive tile-based backgrounds and minimal animation. This is backed by a fairly minimal soundtrack that works to create a tense mood, but doesn’t do much more than that.

No, the reason to play The Wizard of Bug is its clever gameplay. The game starts with basic Sokoban-style block-pushing mechanics, except the blocks you’re pushing are the hearts that sit atop yours’ and enemies’ heads representing their health. Doing so, you can push a smaller number of hearts in place of a larger number to weaken an enemy before confronting them and trading damage, ensuring you come out the victor.

It’s a wildly inventive game mechanic, and one the game gradually evolves as it goes on, with some hearts that link to additional hearts while others don’t, golden hearts that cannot be depleted at all, different enemy types that behave differently… this game does a good job giving players fresh challenges and new ways to consider their abilities.

The Wizard of Bug has 100 premade levels, and promises 512 procedurally-generated puzzles after completing those, along with a custom stage editor (though sadly no way to send levels to others or see levels others have made). This should offer plenty of depth and replay for those looking for a meaty puzzle game.

I should note that the hint system here is… interesting. You essentially have to die and fail before getting a hint, and do so again to get a new hint. This seems unnecessary to me, and the hints that the game gives aren’t often super-clear.

Taking all of this into account, The Wizard of Bug is a very uneven game. The puzzles themselves are truly inspired, and there’s plenty of content here, but the package they’re wrapped in is pretty terrible, with an ugly presentation and a convoluted and superfluous story, along with a hint system that has its own problems. The result is a Puzzle game I would still say is absolutely worth playing for fans of Sokoban-style puzzles, but I think a lot of players will have difficulty getting past this game’s flaws.

tl;dr – The Wizard of Bug is a character-based Puzzle game in the style of a Sokoban game where players push around hearts representing the life of their character and enemies. it’s a brilliant idea that is well-executed here, but it’s wrapped in an absolutely terrible presentation. Fans of the genre should definitely give this a look, but I think many players will have a difficult time looking past the flaws.

Grade: B-

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