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For the last few days, I’ve been playing a game called Low Magic Age (LMA). It’s a little bit roguelike, quite a bit RPG, and all together pretty charming. The game has been sitting in Early Access on Steam for quite some time, and is still there today. Usually I avoid games in this section because so many of them just wind up being abandoned, or generally don’t turn out all that great. However, LMA was on sale for about five bucks, so I thought, “Why not check it out?”

The big thing that LMA has going for it is a highly customizable rule set. Before generating a world to explore, players are taken to a big ‘ol screen with boxes to tick / untick, dictating how things will work in that playthrough. By the looks of things, the game’s creator has made sets based on various editions of the Dungeons and Dragons rules, as well as the Pathfinder table top games. Players don’t just choose massive presets based on one of these rule groups (although that is an option), but can customize their rules one by one, potentially mixing and matching things for greater variety. People who want to get in touch with their inner dungeon master can deep dive these rules quite a bit. Those who just want to hop in and get to adventuring can simply grab a preset and get down to business. It’s an interesting concept and I do wonder how easy it would be to implement in other CRPGs.

There is an arena mode for non-stop combat, but I can’t comment much on that as I’ve barely touched it. Mostly, I’ve been playing in adventure mode, so will be focusing my thoughts there. When embarking on a new adventure players choose from four difficulty settings: Explorer, Classic, Hardcore, and Roguelike. In Explorer party members don’t die, they’re just temporarily incapacitated. Classic difficulty has party member deaths, but they can be resurrected in towns with a temple inside. For Hardcore, all party members are subject to permadeath, although save scumming can help avoid this. For Roguelike difficulty, there is permadeath for individual characters, but if the entire party is wiped out, the game ends AND the save file is automatically deleted, so there is no way to save scum colossal blunders on this difficulty.

After deciding how tough of a journey one wants, it’s off to character creation for your main character. There’s a decent selection of fantasy races (humans, elves, dwarves, orcs, halfings, etc.), and there are some pretty standard classes as well (fighters, paladins, rogues, wizards, bards, and such). Once a character is made, players are dropped into the game world where they meet various NPCs and eventually can build their party by hiring mercenaries when visiting towns.

Questing in LMA is very light, lending itself more to the roguelike qualities of the game. The main story quest largely comprises of ticking boxes, getting things done, while smaller quests that can be picked up in towns are very basic with things like making deliveries or doing escort missions to other towns, killing X number of a specific monster, clearing out a given dungeon, et cetera. This is not a game for people who demand deep narrative in their RPGs, or even emergent gameplay for that matter. In a lot of ways, LMA is a game about going on lighthearted adventures after dinner while sipping a cup of tea and having a podcast running on the second monitor when it comes to storytelling.

About the only time things get serious is when it comes to combat. Here, the party and whatever enemies they are facing get slapped onto a grid map and battles feel vaguely reminiscent to those found in the old Dungeons and Dragons gold box games. They are turn-based with a timeline of who goes next (both party member and enemy), and get pretty tactical. A lot of baddies are quite trivial and can be whittled down to being little more than loot / XP pinatas. Sometimes players will come across elites in dungeons (or even random world map encounters!), though, and they are no joke, requiring a lot more thought to defeat. Screw up too much on those monsters and party members are going to die, which will be a big problem on the harder difficulties. Combat is really what carries the game in a lot of ways, especially when permadeath is a factor.

Of course, another big thing people look for in an RPG is loot, and there is a lot of that in LMA. Stats and abilities fixed to weapons, armor, and the like are fairly steeped in DnD conventions for the most part. There is also an MMO-inspired color coding to show the rarity of an item. On the whole, the game is pretty generous with its loot drops, sometimes even too generous. Rare items are indeed rare, but +1s, masterwork pieces, and the like drop left and right. Thankfully, inventory space is also pretty generous, so it’s hard to run out. However, players may be caught with their pants down if a particularly strong character dies in battle because there are also weight limits for inventory where the party can become overburdened. So, if a fighter or paladin, or some other character with high strength stats goes down, you may be in a situation of suddenly needing to dump a lot of heavy gear that could have turned a nice profit selling off in town.

Visually, the base game isn’t much to look at. Art design gets the job done, but it isn’t terribly detailed, and the over world map certainly won’t take many people’s breath away. The music and sound aren’t anything to write home about either. Thankfully, LMA makes use of the Steam workshop, so at least there is the option to swap out stock character and enemy models as well as character portraits. It will probably not come as a surprise to many that this has resulted in A LOT of anime girl options for these. Piracy also runs rampant here as folks have imported models and portraits from various other games and anime. There are quite a few options for fans of Pillars of Eternity and Queen’s Blade as far as character models and portraits are concerned. So, mute the audio and pay the workshop a visit before firing up the game if you want an experience that’s a little easier on the eyes and ears.

It’s probably best to treat Low Magic Age as a roguelike with a lot of RPG trappings built around it. Stories and quests in the game are extremely uninspired, the world feels like a heavily populated world map from an NES era JRPG, but the combat will really pull people in, especially if they have a lot to lose with permadeath turned on. The super customizable rule sets is also a big draw for the game. The developers are still tweaking a lot of stuff and there’s more that they want to add, but so far LMA is shaping up to be a really nice game for those who want something they can hop into for an hour or two at the end of a long day.