The Mage’s Tale puts a wizard’s staff in your hands and asks you to fight your way through ten dungeons, solve puzzles, and dodge traps to save your master. It is inXile’s first outing with virtual reality, and it leans fully into the format’s quirks: quick bursts of movement, a teleport mechanic for getting around, and a spell-crafting system that lets you mix ingredients to build your own effects. The result is a solid if uneven dungeon crawler that rewards patience and punishes haste.
Trailer, via Meta Quest .
The Dungeon Crawl
The core loop is simple: enter a dungeon, find the key to open the next room, fight past enemies, and move forward. Each dungeon is built around a central theme — fire, ice, lightning, water — and the puzzles within often tie back to that theme. Some rooms require you to melt ice blocks, others force you to redirect lightning to trigger a switch, and still others demand you use a shield to block a hazard while moving through a narrow passage.
The pacing holds together well in the early dungeons, where the puzzles are fresh and the combat is still exciting. Later, the repetition sets in. Ten dungeons is a lot of content, and not all of it feels distinct from one to the next.
Spell Crafting
The spell-crafting system is the game’s biggest draw. You gather ingredients — herbs, bones, gems, and more — and combine them to create new spells. Each ingredient affects the spell’s element, behavior, and strength, so you can craft a fire spell that spreads across the ground, an ice spell that freezes enemies in place, or a lightning spell that ricochets off walls. The system is deep enough that you could spend hours experimenting without running out of ideas.
It is also the game’s biggest weakness. Because the spell-crafting system is so flexible, the game itself offers little guidance beyond vague hints about what might work. You are left to figure out combinations on your own, which can be frustrating when you want a specific effect and the game does not tell you how to get there.
Combat and Movement
Combat is real-time, and you throw spells by making physical gestures in front of your face. It sounds gimmicky, but it works surprisingly well. Dodging is handled through a magical shield that you raise to block attacks, and the combination of gesture-based casting and dodging creates a rhythm that feels natural once you get used to it. The step-based movement helps too, since it limits how far you can move at once and cuts down on motion sickness.
The teleport mechanic is where things get tricky. The game uses a system where you can jump from one point to another, but the points are fixed and the game does not always make it clear where you can land. Navigating large rooms can become a matter of trial and error, and the lack of a clear visual indicator for where you can teleport makes the movement feel less precise than it should be.
The Story and Setting
The plot follows a young wizard’s apprentice sent to rescue his master, Mage Alguin, who has been kidnapped by the corrupt wizard Gaufroi. It is a thin premise, but it gives the dungeons a reason to exist. The game does not spend much time on character development, and the dialogue is sparse, so the story mostly serves as a backdrop for the puzzles and fights.
The setting is a fantasy world full of dungeons, and the art direction leans heavily on dark corridors, glowing runes, and flickering torchlight. It is atmospheric, even if the environments start to blend together over time.
Oculus VR Partnership
The Mage’s Tale was developed in partnership with Oculus VR, and the game shows the influence of that relationship throughout. The teleport mechanic, the step-based movement, and the focus on quick bursts of action all point toward a design built with VR comfort in mind. Whether you play on PSVR, PC, or the base PS4, the game runs smoothly, though the PC version offers the best performance.
Until you are able to wield every elemental power in the palm of your hand, evil remains ascendant!
What Works, What Does Not
The game succeeds when it trusts its systems. The spell-crafting is genuinely creative, and the combat is satisfying when you are moving through a well-designed room. The dungeons that balance puzzle-solving with combat are the highlights of the game.
Where it stumbles is in the later hours, where the repetition becomes noticeable and the puzzles start to feel like variations on earlier ideas. The lack of clear guidance for spell crafting can also frustrate players who want to experiment but do not know where to start.
Final Verdict
The Mage’s Tale is a competent dungeon crawler with a strong spell-crafting system and a solid sense of atmosphere. It is not a game that pushes the genre forward, but it executes its ideas well enough that the experience holds together. The VR implementation is solid, and the PC version performs well.
The game is best enjoyed in short sessions, since the step-based movement and teleport mechanic can wear on the eyes after extended play. Players looking for a deep story or a vast world to explore will find neither here. What The Mage’s Tale delivers is a focused, if repetitive, challenge that rewards creativity in spell crafting.
The Mage’s Tale earns a 6.9 out of 10.
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