Before I start, let me tell you what this game is about.
You play as young mage Zia in a world, where magic was banned. The game plays a lot like classic Zelda games. You have pretty much open world divided in smaller areas, with obstacles taunting you with treasures you can't get yet, puzzles and dungeons you have to clear to continue the story. The main gimmick of the game is spell crafting. You have 4 basic spells - electric melee attack, fire attack that you can put on the ground and that will damage anything that touch it, wind shield and ice platform that you can put on water. You can change how these spells behave with special runes, like making the fire attack into regular fireball, changing the wind shield into dash attack or creating an afterimage of yourself and so on. And you can even combine them, which is so much fun. I think I'll only mention getting runes in the main story, as majority is awarded for solving puzzles. And you can save all the spells you make and use them without the need to go to the menu and rearranging runes for different result. Right now I have a shield that when hit by an attack, will shoot 3 fireballs that bounce around for a while and explode into an electric explosion when they hit enemies. And dash that will shoot 3 bouncing fireballs that explode into several ice platforms on impact (all platforms can damage enemies).
Anyway, before starting the game, I decided to pick "Challenging" difficulty and didn't expect it to be so... challenging. Especially in first location, before I got used to the game. More than 1 enemy usually meant "hit and run" strategy and I ripped more times that expected.
Now, finally for the game... I, as Zia, am sent by my mentor to Haven, the safe place for mages, for my very own spellbook. But the bridge in forest collapses and I end up lost. Thankfully, I also find spellbook just lying on the ground. This one is talking with sinister evil voice (no other spellbook does talk), but who cares? Now I should probably mention one little fact from the lore of this game. Mages used to rule this world, but one of them went insane, burned some villages and so people decided to ban magic. So after beating few goblins, I finally made it to Haven and was quickly sent on my very first quest. Something evil is lurking in the forest and I have to find out what it is and get rid of it.
After a little bit of exploring, killing goblins and helping villagers that exiled me from the village before the start of the game, I found first boss of the game. A big goblin. Beating it was kinda easy. Its attacks couldn't be blocked with wind shield, but there were explosive barrels all over the place, that stunned it. So first boss is down and I got my very first rune to augment my spells. This new rune allowed me to shoot fireballs and I could get to new area in the forest.
This new area contained a bunch of goblins, skeletons and carnivores, but after single puzzle I unlocked another boss - huge cursed tree. This was more traditional bossfight. The tree had several phases that it cycled through. It shot cone of wind around the battlefield, summoned skeletons and carnivores, and just slammed its branches all over the battlefield. After each cycle, it stopped and rest for a while, letting me attack it.
And now I see a huge wall of text that I've written, so let's take the rest of this update quickly. At this point in the game a solar eclipse appears and good mages are sure that evil mages are behind it. So it's up to Zia and other mages to figure it out.
The forest was basically 1st dungeon, so 2nd dungeon was called Sky Temple. I was sent there to find Sky Shard - basically a huge lens that can be used to harvest Celestial Magic in this universe. I get explosive rune, which allowed be to clear huge boulders. I also obtained new wand to use. This wand powers up fire spells, which is nice, since Sky Temple is basically ice dungeon. The boss of this dungeon is ice lizard, that shoots ice shards, attacks with ice ball on his tail, drops icicles and summons skeletons. Was somewhat easier than the tree.
Another piece in the good mages' plan is obtaining spellbook of the mad-mage I mentioned above. It's located in the tomb under the capital city. So after going back to the forest and getting some side puzzles done and getting another wand... and after doing side puzzles and getting another wand in the capital city, I got to the tomb after bribing the guard with his own badge that he lost. I got duplicate rune in the tomb and that's when I saved.
This was quite a big update, but I apparently finished about 30% of the game. If you couldn't say it from the update, I'm really digging this game.
