The ethically-sourced wizard school life sim I've been waiting for finally has a playable demo and launches this year
It sure feels like a girl can't reach into her closet for the old wizard school robe and hat without finding several skeletons hiding in there too. I really thought I'd never find a fun wizarding school game to play that doesn't come with a boot full of baggage. Silly of me to have not heard of Songs of Glimmerwick before now, but lucky me that this actually-uplifting witch school life sim launched its first playable demo the day I learned of it.
In Glimmerwick, I'm a brand new student at the magical Etchery university. I'm quickly assigned to be caretaker of the school gardens, where I can grow ingredients for potions and learn to play a flute to cast magical spells that help me traverse the world or just do heavy lifting with my hoe. It's a storybook-looking sort of place with a pseudo 2D art style that reminds me of things like Mirthwood and Wildermyth.
The demo just covers my first couple days of school: Enough time to plant my first herbs in the garden, attend a magical flute lesson, and meet my hopefully-not-evil potions instructor for a 101 lecture on brewing. Each day I've got a limited amount of mana (read: energy) to use for tending the garden. I can walk into the nearby village to buy supplies or do comical quests for the locals. Daily letters and a calendar remind me which classes to attend or of events like a social hour my classmates have organized in the common room.
Glimmerwick isn't quite ready for launch yet, and the demo shows it in some ways: the timing on its instrument mastery rhythm game is a tad clunky and the controls for using my garden tools via magic feel just a bit fiddly. But the entire experience completely charmed me without (I think) casting a spell on me through my screen.
Conscientious spellcasting
The landscape of magical school games has felt bleak for a few years. I've never played Hogwarts Legacy because, despite being gorgeous, I just couldn't reconcile the J.K. Rowling of it all. What was supposed to be the antidote to that is the still-upcoming life sim Witchbrook. But Witchbrook still isn't out yet, years after its reveal, and that's made it hard for me to forget that Chucklefish and its studio head are still the same crew who allegedly exploited volunteer developers on their prior game, Starbound.
Glimmerwick, by contrast, does not make me plug my ears and yell "lalala" to avoid thinking about house elves or unpaid developers. It wears its values proudly on the sleeve of its robes, even if they are delivered in somewhat heavy-handed lore-drop monologues.
This is a world of completely egalitarian music-based magic—anyone can learn to play without being born with it—as the Headmistress tells me when I first arrive. It's not all rainbows, though, because Glimmerwick is a society newly recovering from 40 years of a faux-populist movement called The Silence, in which powerful witches convinced average citizens that repressing magic use was good, actually, and only they (the witches in charge) should be responsible for using it. All music was banned, so much so that one classmate tells me her grandfather was imprisoned for whistling a tiny magical tune.
The local village of Wisk, huddled up against the haunches of the castle-y Etchery university, is full of little stories of rebellion. One of the merfolk students recalls how his village smuggled away illegal instruments while they were being destroyed by humans on land. My dorm mate Clover professes embarrassment at her own parents being inclined to support The Silence, calling it a cult. Two old ladies in town who must have learned magic as girls before The Silence titter together that sometimes a witch knows better than the letter of the law. I love a civilly disobedient granny.
Songs of Glimmerwick is all but breaking the fourth wall to assure us that, by protecting each other and rebelling, societies do emerge from periods of regressive politics and oppression. Though I've not yet seen it, I suspect Glimmerwick also won't avoid confronting access to education as a power imbalance in magic, even in a world where it isn't controlled by bloodlines. It's a setting full of the kind of hope that comes from acknowledging darkness, not ignoring it.
A genuine sense of wonder
The weight of political disobedience could have made Glimmerwick come across dour, but despite the message it's relentlessly adorable. I've been faced with a (literally and figuratively) prickly sentient hedge. Some of my classmates are "mothfae" with delicate antennae. I've gone on a wild goose chase for the rude, inconsiderate, totally oblivious owner of an abandoned cart blocking a village path. I've watched my classmates talk into crystal balls like cellphones that emit a Charlie Brown-like "wah wah wah" from their parents. Oh right, did I mention the entire thing is voice acted? It is, with all the wry, soft-spoken humor you'd want from a fantasy British boarding school.
It's possible that I'll eat crow for singing Glimmerwick's praises after spending just three enraptured hours in a demo. Maybe Eastshade Studios is secretly evil and has achieved all that voice work by trapping the immortal souls of actors inside little bottles like sea witch Ursula. I hope not though.
Eastshade Studios posted a shockingly transparent video this week about the budget for Glimmerwick, funded without investors purely on sales of its "mid-tier indie hit" Eastshade. It has grossed $3.6 million to date, which it calls the "upper middle class" of Steam launches, allowing the studio's three primary developers to fund the seven years of work they've put in and pay for all that lovely voice acting. I'm reminded of how indie publisher Finji's CEO recently told me that an indie studio asking for a quarter million in funding wasn't a big deal kind of number in the past—that's just what games take.
Numbers and budget aside, Songs of Glimmerwick launched its first playable demo (agonizingly short though it is) on Steam this week. Eastshade Studios has not committed to a final release date, I imagine pending results of feedback on the demo, but is intending to launch a full release this year. Your save file in the demo will in fact carry over to full launch, Eastshade says.