Perhaps we’ve been playing too many of these Xbox indie games. Anyone else would probably find the gimmick in Tricks Magician to be a perfectly fine one. But it feels like we’ve been here before; whenever an indie platformer wants to bring a little extra sauce, they flip gravity. From Him & Her Collection to Rattyvity Lab, budget games like this love to let the player tinker with what is up and what is down.
Tricks Magician takes its cue from the Pixar short ‘Presto’ and makes a magician’s bunny into the bad guy. The rabbit hates the adulation that Tricks Magician receives when she’s on stage, so it nabs the magician’s magic hat and hops through a portal. Tricks Magician can only follow through a series of magic doors, hoping to find the cheeky rabbit and get her hat back.
As the name suggests, this is a magician who still has some tricks up her sleeve. With a wave of her wand, she can turn gravity up or down. If you’re going to have only one spell, it’s a decent one: it allows her to impale enemies on ceiling spikes and quickly flip out of the way of an incoming cannonball. It’s more versatile than you might think.
At first, Tricks Magician tinkers with that ability in a conservative fashion. She can jump, but not to a great height, so you need the flip-reverse so that you can walk past obstacles via the ceiling. Flames and spikes get added next, with flames igniting in a set pattern. Now there’s a little bit of timing involved, as you wait for a safe moment to make progress and then invert gravity.
Every seventh or eighth level, something new is shuffled into the magician’s deck. Enemies make an appearance, and they merrily walk about until they spot you, at which point they very slowly plod after. It’s when they’re alerted that you can have fun with them: they will happily walk into the path of fires, or stand underneath spikes for an unexpected lobotomy.
Laying traps for enemies should be fun, but it’s a little on the awkward side. The rules of what they will or won’t walk over are a little inconsistent, as is when they follow you or not. It’s unpredictable, meaning that we wanted the thrill of springing a flame trap, but too often got scuppered by our enemy changing course or the flames not quite lighting at the right time.
Still, enemies add a welcome degree of difficulty. Tricks Magician could have done with several more degrees of difficulty on top of that, if we’re being honest. It can feel like an idea that doesn’t get taken to its extremes.
That’s not to say that it rests on its laurels. Eventually, switches get added in, meaning you are now compelled to complete things in a specific order. Portals make the playspace a little more two-dimensional. You even get to pick up a hat which creates a mirror version of yourself, with the complication that your original self mustn’t be allowed to die, while your alternate version very much can. You’re the one who needs to get to the exit if you want to complete the level.
We refer you back to the opening paragraph. While these are nice, welcome additions to the indie platforming soup, they don’t half feel uninspiring. Switches and portals seem to be a requirement for puzzle-platformers nowadays, while the mirror-image mechanics arrive too late and offer too little. They only really get brain-scratching on one level, when the idea could have offered so much more.
Frankly, Tricks Magician is too nice. It rarely combines two or three mechanics into one level, possibly for fear of getting the player stuck. More surprising is that the arena doesn’t change with the gravity-switching. If blocks fell or moved, and the arena itself reconstituted itself with each tap of the button, then there might have been some fiendish puzzles here. It’s certainly what we’ve come to expect from the genre. But Tricks Magician is timid in this department. It’s got some flying enemies, walking enemies and the odd cannon, but otherwise the level solutions are self-evident.
We arrived at the fiftieth level with a shrug. Don’t get us wrong: it’s frictionless and charming, and we certainly didn’t feel like rage-quitting at any point. But we barely touched the sides, and we ended up with the odd request that Tricks Magician was a little meaner – that it beat us up a little more than it did. We certainly didn’t feel like we earned the 1000G which, as you may be interested to know, arrived after little more than an hour.
There is a baked in Hard Mode, available from the main game menu, but it’s got an odd idea of ‘Hard’. Instead of giving you manual control of the gravity, it switches on a timer, which is less hard and more frigging annoying. ’Frigging Annoying Mode’ probably wouldn’t have cut it, though. Often you are attempting the most banal and simple of maneuvers, but you’re at the whims of that timer, waiting – and waiting – for it to tick down. Whoever thought it would make for an adequate alternative to actual difficulty should probably have a rethink.
Tricks Magician is a frustration-free puzzle-platformer that will give you 1000 Gamerscore for very little challenge. But this magic show is full of tricks you’ve seen before, and it doesn’t have enough pizazz to make the repetition worth it. We can tell you now, with supreme confidence, that we won’t remember Tricks Magician a month from now. With the waft of a magical wand, it will be erased from our memory.
