The Fool’s Apprentice Review – Magical Mishaps

The Fool’s Apprentice on PC

Management sims belong to a storied genre in gaming, and it continues to churn out gems with invested communities who are enraptured by the premises made available. More recently, the excellent Two Point Museum had us busy dusting off old relics, and with The Planar Danse‘s The Fool’s Apprentice, the idea of running a wizard academy under similar circumstances felt irresistable.

As the Arcanist Tharn, it is up to you to provide the best environment for your apprentices to study and learn. The management aspects lies in furnishing your Conservatory with arcane workstations and decorations, choosing which fields of Arcanoscience to study or to cover them all, and of course, running the rule over your new apprentices.

There are limited spaces to work with at the start, so it requires some forward thinking as you pick your field of studies. This is essential not just for the progress of the academy, but also for your would-be apprentices, who have their own traits and preferences that can determine if you should enroll them. The fields of study will affect how willing students are when it comes to staying long term.

The ones who are hardworking and have the right aptitude will graduate to better things, while those who have more trouble with the subject matters may choose to leave. These apprentices are free to do as they please within the Conservatory in The Fool’s Apprentice, honing their skills and building their knowledge. Their research also serves as a resource that players can utilise to summon new objects and unlock new rooms.

In addition, what players can do with apprentices is manipulate them through the use of spells. Levitation lets you move these students around, give them a boost using Alacrity, or use Disintegration to show them who’s boss. Even objects can be affected in the same way. The added layer of interaction keeps you more engaged with what’s going on around the academy, and that satisfying zap of thieving goblins always feels great.

The culimination of the schooling jouney in The Fool’s Apprentice is that of the Runic Viewing. Apprentices will all want to overcome this final test and graduate from the Conservatory. The more graduates you have, the better your reputation becomes, paving the way to more advanced workstations and magical features.

However, not all who are eager are gifted enough for Runic Viewing. You can accept their enthusiasm and see them die from their ineptitude, or refuse them and perhaps push them to leave the school in search of pastures new. Either way, this cycle will be the key to moving deeper into what is on offer from the entirety of the game.

Unfortunately, despite its core focus on the fantastical, playing through the game feels anything but. At this moment, the game has issues performing well even on powerful rigs, and many of the functions are not doing their job which ultimately affects the gameplay.

With just a few rooms where the action takes place, not being able to maintain steady framerates is quite unnacceptable. Switching down from the max settings does help a little, but optimisation is needed when other more graphically demanding games have no issues even in more taxing situations.

Moving around the world is fine, but interacting with objects and apprentices alike can cause problems to crop up. Things become unclickable, and apprentices will start having trouble using workstations, making them useless and frustrated in the long run. And for Runic Viewings, certain students will stay locked, waiting in line whether you accept or deny their request and with the only solution being disintegrated.

The supposed progression and even dilemmas where choices have to be made also feel arbitary for now, with no real long-term impact on what happens in the future for your Conservatory. Not to mention missing text here and there, which breaks the immersion immediatly. Usually, the easiest way to resolve such problems is to reload an earlier save, but The Fool’s Apprentice doesn’t have mulitple save slots that makes that possible, which is a bigger bugbear.

It is a shame, considering the foundational ideas behind the game. When the soundtrack amps up the mood for magical shenanigans and the underlying universe of Apollyon, Skulltide, and Spirit’s Almanac provides the flavour, that sense of a missed opportunity feels even more apparent.

Management sims do not always get things right, and The Fool’s Apprentice is proof of that. However, it is not without some interesting ideas to get players more involved in an experience that goes beyond the usual subjects. Perhaps with time, the affairs at the Conservatory will get better, but for now, this is a magical mishap that should be avoided.

The Fool’s Apprentice is now available on PC.