Professor of Magical Studies
By Stephen Granade
“There’s more to being a practitioner than that.” You look through the calendar. “Colloquiums don’t start until next month…aha!” You gesture Gabriel to join you on your side of the desk.
He looks at the event you’re pointing to on the screen. “Cookies?”
“Cookies.”
I’m in this story, and I don’t like it. Well, not officially… but there is a lot of academia trappings, understandably, and I just had to stop in for a thirty minute holiday party that did little but get me a donut, some imaginary kudos, and about ten more emails behind.
General Story:
Magic is real, and magical academia is real-er. Can you find your tenured place in the hallowed halls of your ivory tower, or will you buckle under the weight of ungraded papers? The voice in your head is telling you that you might not make it, but you just wish it would stop using your voice.
After a chapter spent interweaving your alma mater, hiring you to take the place of a missing professor, and remembering your time in your mystical major, the story starts working towards a mystery that gets more and more involved with each chapter. Disappearances and reappearances, possessions and cookies start filling your time.
This is well written, engaging and mixes in just enough minutiae to make it feel like you are really settling into a new career and new position. The only thing missing is multiple emails setting up access to a shared server, and constant requests for job training courses where you’ll print off the certificate, dash it to your boss in an email, and then never think about it again.
This story works for me, but I might be the target audience. You’ll deal with the political backbiting, deep betrayal, and the dry humor one might associate with campus life. The only complaint really is that the story changes from a slice of life to a dead sprint towards the finish line, and I found myself wishing it stayed at a slower pace. Maybe more ‘flashbacks’ related to the incident that happened at the end of your college career.
Format and Typos:
A few typos and coding errors, but I’ve reported them. Readability is exceptionally high. I want to make a joke about the title being a typo because I really liked ‘Advanced Studies in Pattern Magic’, but that’s just me.
Game Mechanics and Stats:
Accumulating skills, ingeniously gained in your ‘flashbacks’, stand in for your political acumen, capability in the lab, silver tongue and skill in the library stacks. Fairly standard opposed pairs determine your personality, and you’ll need to manage expectations of work progress. This is things like whether your classes get good reviews, or your student assistant does well in his final year. You are handed tasks throughout your time with the game, like working with an outside company to set up a conference and trying to convince the town to sell more land and buildings to the college for expansion (I can look outside my window and see a building right now that I’m sure my own university is trying to buy at this very moment).
Difficulty checks seem fair, and it was super easy to tell what I was picking in most cases.
Replayability:
There is a decent amount of replayability, first baked into the ending where it seems like there are three separate ‘big’ endstates. Along with that, you’ll find about five (and a half?) romance options… ranging from a backbiting professor from your past to a member of the town council.
There is a neat little bit of branching and variability at both ends of the title. Early on, you choose an activity, and it will change up the order you meet your classmates. Later, the relationships you cultivate essentially choose your ‘party’ for the final act. Aside from this, though, this is a fairly linear track where your choices will flavor the background but you’ll end up in the same place often.
Dislikes:
- I will not abide the oatmeal raisin hate. This aggression will not stand, man.
- The idea of synesthesia was cool, but often felt like it was never brought up unless it was needed for a plot point.
- I’m not personally sold on the redemption arc, and the payoff feels like it depends on you being the bigger person.
Likes:
- Deftly shows that high-school politics never really disappears as you grow older, you just have to be more discreet with it.
- Each character felt like someone who could really exist. Dialogue works, and swaps between the mundane and arcane with ease.
- I don’t know why it worked so well, but when your students were saying they really enjoyed your class… even though all I did was click some buttons, I felt that dopamine.