Nine Parchments wants to be the game you play on a couch with three friends, yelling about friendly fire, and for a while it nearly gets there. Frozenbyte’s twin stick action RPG came out in 2017 for Nintendo Switch, Windows and PlayStation 4, with an Xbox One version following in 2018. It asks four players to shoot spells at mutated wildlife, collect hats, and try not to kill each other. The last part is harder than it sounds, and that is the point.
Trailer, via FrozenbyteGames.
Cornelius Crownsteed and the Astral Academy
The setup is a wizard school comedy. Cornelius Crownsteed and his friends — Marvek the Torrid, Carabel the Glacial, Rudolfus the Strange, The Mechanical Owl, and Nim the Cleaner — flunk another test at the Astral Academy. Professor Butternut is fed up. Then an explosion blows nine stored parchments into the wind, and each parchment holds a powerful spell inside it.
The students see a chance rather than a disaster. They sneak out to recover the parchments, which means traveling to different corners of the world. Along the way they fight flora and fauna mutated by magic spilling out of portals.
The story does not stop at schoolyard mischief. The explosion was masterminded by Anastasia the Lich, a former Astral Academy student expelled for running a dangerous arcane experiment. That experiment caused the magical pollution behind the mutated creatures. The students return to find the academy overrun by her minions, fight through the ruins, and beat her in a difficult battle. Professor Butternut then takes the parchments back for safekeeping, which annoys them, though they still call the trip worthwhile.
Twin Sticks, 32 Levels, and a Lot of Dead Wizards
Combat is twin stick shooting in a 3D space viewed from overhead. Nine Parchments supports single-player, but the real shape of it is cooperative play for up to four people, local or online. There are two modes. Adventure runs through 32 levels of enemy waves and bosses. Arena arrived in a later update and drops players into small areas to survive tougher waves.
Eight characters are playable at launch, with a ninth added in a free update. Each one starts with three spells of different elements. New spells come from collecting the missing parchments. Leveling up earns points for skill trees, and each character has three alternate variations with different color schemes and starting spells, unlocked through achievements. Hats and staves drop from quills and chests or from certain enemies.
The Friendly Fire Is the Whole Game
Here is the thing Frozenbyte built and then half-committed to. The wizards grab powerful spells without learning safety measures, so hasty progress causes deadly accidents. That is not flavor text. Your spells hurt your teammates, and the game is at its best when four people are trying to aim around each other in a small arena.
That design creates real tension in a genre that usually has none. A co-op shooter where nobody can hurt anybody else is a chat room with particle effects. Nine Parchments makes every cast a small negotiation. It is the most interesting decision in the game, and it is also where the game’s trouble starts.
Because the same system that creates tension also creates chaos, and Nine Parchments does not have the tools to manage it. The overhead camera keeps the whole party in frame, which is good, but it also flattens the space. Reading enemy tells from directly above is harder than it should be. When four players are dumping spells into a crowd, the screen becomes noise, and friendly fire turns from a clever risk into an unavoidable tax.
Hats, Staves, and the Loot Problem
The RPG layer is thin. You level up, you spend points, you pick up hats and staves. The hats are cosmetic and the staves are stat sticks, and neither changes how you play in any meaningful way. The skill trees offer choices, but most of them are percentage bumps rather than new options.
The spell system is the better half. Three starting elements per character means a party can cover different damage types, and learning new spells from parchments gives a sense of growth across a run. The ninth character added in a free update and the three alternate variations per character extend the roster without asking for more money, which is worth noting.
But the loot never builds toward anything. You are not assembling a build so much as accumulating numbers. The wardrobe of wizard hats is a joke the game tells once and then keeps telling.
Adventure Mode Is Long, and That Is Not a Compliment
Thirty-two levels is a lot of levels. Adventure mode has bosses and waves, and the structure repeats: enter an area, kill everything, move on. The enemy variety comes from mutated plants and animals, which gives the art team room to play, but the encounters blur together by the midpoint.
Arena mode is the sharper idea. Small areas, harder waves, no travel time. It strips the game to its combat loop and finds something better there. That it arrived later as an update rather than shipping at launch is a small tragedy, because Arena is closer to what Nine Parchments should have been from the start.
The tone holds up better than the structure. The wizard school premise, the bickering students, the professor who confiscates the loot at the end — it is light without being insulting. Cornelius and his friends are not deep characters, but they are good company for a few hours.
What Nine Parchments Gets Right
The best case for Nine Parchments is a specific one. Four people, one couch, one screen, and a rule set that punishes sloppy aim. That is a real thing, and not many games offer it. The friendly fire is not a flaw to be patched out. It is the identity.
The worst case is that the game cannot support its own best idea. The camera is too flat, the loot is too shallow, and the adventure is too long. Frozenbyte built a party game and then buried it under an RPG that does not pull its weight.
Where the Score Lands
Nine Parchments is a good co-op game with a bad solo game inside it, and the co-op is the reason to care. Played alone, it is a thin twin stick shooter with a lot of levels and not much to find in them. Played with three friends who will forgive the occasional accidental fireball, it works.
The published critical aggregate sits at 6.6 out of 10 across seven outlets, and that feels right. This is not a game with a broken core. It is a game with a strong core and not enough built around it. The spell shooting is satisfying, the friendly fire is inspired, and the progression is forgettable. Thirty-two levels of adventure mode is more than the ideas can carry, and Arena mode proves the point by being better with less.
Frozenbyte made a party game that peaks when everyone is shouting. That peak is worth the climb. The climb there is longer and duller than it needs to be.
Nine Parchments by the Numbers
- Title: Nine Parchments
- Developer and publisher: Frozenbyte
- Release year: 2017 (Nintendo Switch, Windows, PlayStation 4); 2018 (Xbox One)
- Platforms: Nintendo Switch, Windows, PlayStation 4, Xbox One
- Genre: Action role-playing, twin stick
- Modes: Single player, multiplayer, co-operative (up to four, local or online)
- Adventure mode: 32 levels
- Playable characters: 8 at launch, a 9th in a free update
- Published critical score: 6.6/10 (IGDB critic aggregate, 7 outlets)
What Ships in the Box
- Adventure mode: 32 levels of enemy waves and bosses
- Arena mode: added in a later update, survive harder waves in small areas
- Eight playable characters, plus a ninth in a free update
- Three starting spells per character, more learned from parchments
- Three alternate variations per character, unlocked through achievements
- Hats and staves from quills, chests, and certain enemies
Nine Parchments is at its best when four wizards are standing too close together and one of them makes a mistake. Everything else in the game is scaffolding around that moment.
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