If you liked “Choose Your Own Adventure” books as a kid, Academagia is essentially the same thing, but one as big as the Encyclopedia Britannica. If you like to curl up and read a good game, or if “Choose your own Adventure” books strike a chord of nostalgia for you, Academagia might be for you.
Braving untold depths in the world of Indie Games, we decided to take a plunge into Black Chicken Studios’ Academagia. We’d never heard of Academagia, but the game’s premise, clearly inspired by Harry Potter, intrigued us enough to take brave unexplored waters of PC gaming.
You play the role of a young wizard-in-training that has been accepted to the prestigious Academagia, the best Wizarding school a fledgling wizard could hope to get into.
Character creation: This is your life
The game begins with character creation, which leads you through a series of questions and choices about your character’s life, family, and predilections that affect your starting characteristics.
There is no race or class selection, although there are tons of skills, advantages, and various perks. You can choose to be an only child loved and doted on by your family, or you can be the black sheep of the family. You can be good at athletics. You can favor athletic skills. There is no optimal selection or “min-maxing” to worry about.
The character creation process doesn’t take long, although there are a large number of options. You don’t select a “class” or race; you select life characteristics, skills, talents, and predilections. This is character creation that is all about conception, not about outfitting yourself to mug hapless monsters and steal their stuff.
Gameplay: Infinite choice, endless text
Basically, Academagia is a casual game that combines ‘life simulation’, role-playing, and ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ text-based gaming into a nigh-endless sandbox game.
Week-to-week, you assign how you will spend your time each day—going to class, going on adventures, socializing, training up specific skills, resting, etc. There are literally dozens of options (many of them with even more options).
There’s no driving plot line or story. Each and every virtual day in the game is rife with choices: do you spend Thursday evening practicing spells, adventuring, training a skill, or something else?
The choices and the results of your choices are seemingly endless. There are more than 800 events in the game, 100 different adventures, and hundreds of skills and skill-combinations—and since its release, there have been 4 DLC packs released, adding even more. Academagia offers virtually infinite re-playability.
As a simple example, after deciding upon our weekly schedule and how we would spend our week, a random event occurred: we were asked to take the lead on pulling off a prank in the cafeteria.
Taking the lead on the prank might earn favor with fellow students—or get us busted and sent to detention. (We chose to walk away and avoid trouble in this particular instance.)
The biggest technical complaint we can make against Academagia is its user interface, which needs an overhaul. The interface is unnecessarily cluttered, inconsistent, and just not well designed. A game based on text and making selections from menus really should have a pretty easy learning curve.
In addition, more options for adjusting the text and display characteristics would have been appreciated.
Overall
Academagia is a difficult game to rate. Because Academagia spins its tales in text, it’s a good thing that it is very well written. Academagia reads like a quality novel, and it’s suitable for nearly anyone ages 9 and up. (Young Harry Potter fans might quietly enjoy it if they have the patience for it.)
Text may not be an appealing medium to many gamers, but what is in the game is well and lovingly crafted. And there is a lot of content to experience in the game, especially counting the 4 DLC packs.
Our biggest problem with the game is its price: $25 seems like an awful lot for a game that would (or should) make an outstanding Facebook or mobile game. Either platform seems more appropriate for the game.
So we ultimately gave Academagia 3 stars with some qualifications:
- If you hate reading, subtract 2 stars and avoid this game at all costs.
- If you love reading and you’re a more casually-minded gamer, add a star. Consider Academagia an especially good game for a netbook or laptop.
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