I was so looking forward to an action roguelite in a magic school. In my first run through the castle, everything seemed perfect. Simple, intuitive controls. Vibrant art direction. Plenty of upgrade choices. Every room had new monsters, puzzles, and lore to discover. Then the second run started... and the rooms, monsters, puzzles, and lore were exactly the same, just in a slightly different layout. Third, fourth, fifth runs? Absolutely nothing new. It got to a point where everything leading up to the boss fights was completely mindless and repetitive. Most combat encounters can be solved by spamming magic missile, so all the cool spell combos available don't actually matter. Even after defeating the first boss, I keep having to trudge through the same opening levels before I can get to the new part. And the walking speed is really slow with no fast travel option...

Developers, if you're listening... there's a promising concept here, but could you please add more variety? Maybe learn from Hades how to reveal a new piece of the story in each run? Maybe also learn from Hades how to offer radically different strategic choices in each run? If I have to go through the living quarters again and again, I should have something new to look forward to each time.

Tl;DR: This game is NOT a cozy experience, in my opinion. It is roguelike, difficult, and healing is tough to find once you really get into the game. After a run, if you are not successful, you lose items and money found during the run. However, if you like magical Wizarding school games and you like tough roguelikes (Think crypt of the necrodancer, without the rhythmic part), then you may enjoy this game. but this game is advertised as cosy and chill and I do NOT feel either of those apply.

I came to this game hoping for, as advertised, a cozy and chill adventure where I learned spells, upgraded gear, joined essentially a "House", etc.

What I received instead was a more-stressful-than-enjoyable rougelike game. The spells were difficult to wield and the timing was tight to get spells and combos off. Healing was a difficult prospect as well, as items did not drop healing after a certain point.

If you like magical wizarding schools and you like difficult rougelikes, I believe you will enjoy this game. Gameplay reminds me of the combat from Boyfriend Dungeon, but you lose a lot of your items if you do not succeed in a run.

I've reported a bug that prevents me from creating new characters.
I've provided developers all detail requested, followed their instructions.
I've tried even reinstall completly, erase local files, disable cloud saves.

After a year, it was not resolved.
New bug is occuring for me which prevented me from playing entirely. Fortunately, I knoew from previous sessions how to erase local files and that helped.

Development team does no longer exist. No more content ot bugfixes can be expected.
This game is a cash grab with no real support.

Rokaplay is on my blacklist now. I'm never going to buy anything from them, not that I can't afford to lose couple of bucks, but I'm not going to support this kind of business.

It sadly just didn't grab me. I wasn't a fan of the enemy targeting and everything just feels sluggish, from no dashing to switching and charging spells. The NPCs also feel really lacking and stale.
I should have played the demo for more than ten minutes to get a better feel, that was my bad. I suggest giving the demo a full go before you make up your mind. It's not a bad game, just wasn't for me, I guess.

If you buy it for the multiplayer mode, don't do it before checking if you're fine with all the limitations. Co-op only works as 'couch co-op' or steam 'remote play together,' NOT online.
Remote play together multiplayer is as mess and isn't worth really being called 'multiplayer' imo:

There's no way for player 2 to play their own character in your game, you can only import the appearance. Player 2 has NO own progress (fractions etc), is not able to buy skills or atleast USE different skills, you basically 'share' a skillset and actionbar, which ruins the fun of a roguelite game. UI is a mess as any controller input is shared in UI. So if your friend presses a button right when you open the map, they can close it accidentally and so on. Your friend is basically a better, nice looking pet. Friendly fire also exists, so if you accidentally levitate your friend, they're stuck in the air for some time.
That alone wouldn't be enough for a bad multiplayer experience, but adding on top of all the other issues, it's annoying.

The game is pretty fine on it's own but since I bought it especially for the multiplayer, it's not worth the money right now for me. That's why I personally can't recommend it as long as there's no proper online multiplayer. I really hope the Devs consider adding one because I think that game could be a blast in multiplayer with friends.

I have been playing Spells & Secrets for the past month through the play testing, beta, etc. (even though this particular version of the game key says 3 hours I have mannny more lol) Overall this is a great rogue-lite game. If you want a Harry Potter alternative, you'll probably love this.

Although i will say to all you cozy gamers, this game is not easy. If you're looking for a very mellow, relaxing cozy game you may not like this one. It can be very challenging to say the least and very grindy. But some people really love that!

The atmosphere is cozy for sure, but the game play can be tough. If you're looking for a game with a cozy atmosphere, love wizards/magic, unique combat elements and need to add a good rogue-lite to your library I'd highly recommend Spells & Secrets. Its super fun and has that "let me try one more time" factor to it that keeps you playing.

After 22 hours, I have to say that I enjoyed this game despite it being "Roguelike". I'm typically not a fan of those types of games; However, the game hasn't been updated or anything in over a year, since its release so it gives me "devs have cashed their checks and abandoned it" vibes. Sad that this happens in games sometimes. Fun to play but becomes repetitive, so I'd give it a 3/5 stars.

At first glance Spells & Secrets looks like a cheap Harry Potter knockoff. And to be honest, it's exactly that but it also is a very fun and creative magic sandbox.
You play as a new studet at a spell caster academy which totally isn't Hogwarts. The school however gets attacked by evil spellcasters on your very first night. You manage to get to the safe zone on the school yard but other students and even some of the teachers are still missing. So you decide to go look for them because that's obviously the smart thing to do as a newbie spellcaster.

The game is in essence a roguelite, each run is randomized (because the school constantly changes it's layout) and you have to navigate through the different sections of the school to find the students and teachers with the endgoal being to find the headmaster of the school. On your way you will have to fight through monsters and make best use of your limited selection of beginner spells. These include some mundane abilities like telekinesis to move objects and enemies around, a basic spell projectile to do damage and the ability to push enemies and objects in front of you away among others. What is interesting here is how flexible the spell casting is. You can use them on a lot of different things and the game applies to your creativity to find efficient ways to deal with enemies. Each enemy type has a different kind of weakness that, if exploited, stuns them for a short duration and also let's them take double damage. An armadillo for example tries to roll over you but if it hits something else it will be stunned. You can either simply move to the side and avoid it. Or you can put an object in the way. Or, if you feel very michievous, you can even put another enemy in harms way, dealing with both enemies at the same time.
There are many ways to utilize spells this way, push allows you to knock objects into other enemies or let's you knock enemies into walls for damage. You can also combine spells for better results. Use levitate to immobilize an enemy by putting him into air, then freeze him for extended duration and then push him into another enemy as fast moving ice projectile.
Once you rescue some of your teachers, you can unlock new spells between runs. Unlike other roguelikes you won't have to find those spells during your runs, unlocked spells stay with you forever. You can also level unlocked spells to give them more power.
During your runs you can find different artifacts. These are the actual game changers. Each artifact relates to one of your spells, changing how it works. One artifact can change push that it now turns pushed objects and enemies into temporary bombs that explode after a short delay or they can change levitate to pull in other enemies close to the target, making it easier to line up an aoe spell.
The interaction between your spells, artifacts and the environment is what makes this game so much fun. You can just win by just chain casting spell orbs and do normal damage but that's boring, you want to turn enemies into bombs, lift them up and pull everyone to them before they explode.
But there's even another nice usage for your spells. Since this is a clone of Hogwarts, you can expect lots of hidden rooms and secrets. In almost every room in the game is some sort of hidden puzzle that you can solve. Doing so gives you a reward, gold, experience or even artifacts. But the game does rarely tell you if a puzzle is present. Which means the player has to explore and experiment around to find them. Some are more obvious then others and sometimes the game actually does give you a hint. And these puzzles are actually very good and very varied. Of course, once you know all of them, they become trivial but it's fun to figure out how they work for the first time.

Interesting to mention are the bosses. Bosses are always spellcasters which means they follow similiar rules like you do. They can cast the same types of spells as you, often focusing on a few that matches their personality. Since they mirror your gameplay, it feels very different to play against a spellcaster than the usual monster enemies. But I have to say, they are a little bit too easy since you can just pick them up with levitate like anything else (unless they cast the blocking spell, which they rarely do) and just put them in every harms way, often in their own spells. It's funny, sure, but not very challenging.

Besides that, my biggest criticism would be the lack of creativity, which is ironic in a game all about creativity. The gameplay itself is very creative but the story and worldbuilding not. The influence from harry Potter is a little bit too obvious. It's a magic school with four different houses, a bird animal as companion for the headmaster, the school is full of secrets and the main enemy faction in the game wears cloaks and masks. The shop is even mantained by a pair of twin brothers. Inspiration is good, straight up copying the source material isn't. While this does not ruin the game completely for me, it's something that does bother me a lot and probably other people too.

What an enchanting game! I just finished the main story, and I have to say I had a lot of fun.

• Wonderful art style - I love it when games are stylised and don't pursue realism at the cost of looking like every other game out there. The art style of both the characters as well as the environment gives this game its own unique atmosphere and it's really wonderful to look at. I love how all the clothing has physics applied to it and how cute all the enemies look.
  
• Fun gameplay - Most of this game consists of combat, and I have to say the spells really let you get creative. Being able to manipulate objects and other parts of the environment is amazing, and it makes it so that the core gameplay mechanics never get dull.
  
• Great character customisation - I really appreciate how many things you can customise about your character and how you gain new outfits for your character to wear throughout the game. The outfits of all the characters look amazing in general.
  
• Cozy feel - This game really does remind me of older RPGs I used to play when I was a kid. There's a bad guy with a gang of supporters who all wear colour-coordinated outfits, the game's acts have beautiful illustrations accompanying verbal summaries of what happened, and overall the game feels very familiar in spite of being fairly new.
  
• Great music - The music fits the game so well, and it's so fun to listen to.
  
• Stability - In playing through the entirety of the story, I never encountered any major bugs or glitches, which is a rare experience with games nowadays. The worst I saw was the wand your character carries occasionally vanishing or the occasional bit of clothing clipping through character models at certain angles, but for the most part, the game was stable and without any frustrating issues that would disrupt my experience.

I title it "the cons" but a more accurate heading would be "what I'd love to see" since I don't really have anything I actually disliked about the game.

• I'd appreciate a bit more enemy variety - As with all games of this genre, you end up going through the castle numerous times, and as the difficulty increases, the main mechanic that provides enemy variety is a scaling system where you have an increasingly larger chance to encounter bigger versions of enemies you're familiar with. While I get that keeping the enemies the same lets you memorise their attacks and deal with them better, I'd maybe appreciate there being higher 'tiers' of the same enemy that have new abilities on top of maybe having more health or dealing more damage. Alternatively, later ward levels of the castle could introduce new enemies altogether.
  
• Story presence throughout the game - The story is great and I like how each rescued classmate actually appears in the courtyard so you can talk to them. Having said that, I'd love it if there was more of it all - be it small quests to fetch something locked behind a challenging encounter on one of the floors, or just more story involvement here and there.

Overall, I definitely recommend this game. Magic schools are one of my favourite game themes and I think it's a shame that once we saw HP do it we have all seemingly decided to not attempt it again since it's already been done. I'll probably keep playing the game just to try out all the spells I didn't get a chance to buy yet.

It's a lovely game. The graphics are so sweet. Gameplay is also not bad but I hope the team would add more content and customization options to the game in the upcoming months. Only thing that disappointed me was the game being a local co-op but not online co-op. You could use remote play option on Steam but I personally do not like it. Overall, a sweet game.