Mystik Belle - The adventures of the foul-mouthed witch

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Hello everyone! How are your adventures in the “promised land” going so far? Good? After a few hectic days redecorating my cave with some furniture I recently bought in a famous Scandinavian furniture shop, it´s time for a new entry. For this new entry I bring you an indie game develop by a single guy. Yup, one of those few chosen ones with enough talent to put together a whole game just by themselves, and a really good one I must add. The game is called Mystik Belle. Let´s see what this small tribute to classic adventures has to offer.

Mystik Belle was released in 2015 for PC via Steam, and is the baby of Andrew Bado, a.k.a. DarkFalzX, an indie developer with a large experience in the game industry working as a pixel artist for companies such as Gameloft, Ubisoft´s sister company and one of the most relevant companies in the mobile game industry, and WayForward, creators of the Shantae series (which soon will receive a new entry funded via Kickstarter) or the awesome remake of Capcom´s DuckTales, so we are talking about a guy that knows his stuff. To tell you the truth, it is a bit complicated to put Mystik Belle inside a genre, as the game is one of those hybrids that combines elements from different genres in a same title, but basically we could say we are talking about a Metroidvania, or at least for the most part of it, since the game also includes a strong element of point and click adventures. Yup, Sting guys are not the only ones whole like mixing up stuff, although compared to their titles, Mystik Belle is probably a much more “common” game. The story of the game puts us in the role of Belle MacFae, a freshman in the Hagmore school of magic and witchcraft who was the bad luck of being at the wrong place at the wrong time, on top of being also quite clumsy and foul-mouthed. One night, while Belle is practicing her fireball spell in the corridor of the school late at night, a shadow suddenly passes by really close by. When she turns around, she can see a silhouette escaping through a door, but before she has even time to react, one of the school´s headmistresses grabs her by the ear and brings her in front of the which council. The great council ignores all of Belle pleas about her innocence, and she is accused of spoiling the Walpurgisnacht Brew used to celebrate the yearly Night of the Witches, so the council gives Belle two options: find the three necessary ingredients to make a new brew, or start looking for a new school, and so Belle embarks on a hilarious adventure in which she will have to explore the whole magic school and its surroundings to obtain the ingredients, and while many might think that finding the ingredients inside the school shouldn´t be that hard, that could perhaps be true in a normal school, but not in the Hagmore school of magic and witchcraft where they have the peculiar habit of keeping all kind of dangerous (albeit extremely cute) monsters inside the school. I guess it must be witch thing…

As I was saying at the beginning, Mystik Belle is basically a Metroidvania with elements from point and click adventures and games such as the awesome classic Slightly Magic. We will have to take control of Belle and help her explore all the rooms of the map while we fight against all kind of looney enemies and overcome good old platforming sections in order to find the brew ingredients. However, as if often happens in the genre, many areas won´t be reachable right from the start, and we will need to obtain first the necessary skills that will allow us to access those previously inaccessible areas in order to proceed with our mission. The game has 8 bosses, and each of them will have their own weak spot we will need to discover in order to be able to defeat them. Once we defeat one of the bosses, Belle will learn a new skill that will allow her to reach new areas, all of them with their very own types of enemies. As I said, pure Metroidvania, but where Mystik Belle sets itself apart from other Metroidvanias out there such as Bunny Must Die of Valdis Story is in its point and click elements, which are an essential part of the game´s structure. In some of the rooms we will find objects marked with an exclamation mark, meaning we can interact with them in order to be able to solve some of the puzzles. The game will contain a big amount of puzzles that we will need to solve by finding first the necessary items to do so, or sometimes even finding several items to build the actual item we need to solve the puzzle just like we could see in many classic graphic adventures. The problem will be that our inventory will be rather limited (6 items). Belle will be able to pick up items and drop those she doesn´t need anywhere she wants so she can pick them up again later on, which means that many times, after investigating a puzzle, we will realize we don´t have the necessary items to solve it, and we will need to go back and pick it up and in order to solve the puzzle. Luckily the game includes a map that, on top of displaying the different rooms we visited, will also indicate in which rooms are the items we dropped (although we won´t be able to tell which one is it) thanks to the icons that will appear on the map to make the things a bit easier for us. The game also includes teleportation rooms that will allow us to go from one point of the map to another much faster (provided we previously unlocked the teleportation point), so perhaps it is a good idea to drop the items we don´t need at the moment near these points in order to be able to pick them back easily when we need them later on. Finally, the game includes also a level up system. Just underneath the health meter we will see another meter that will display the experience obtained when defeating the monsters. Every time this meter fills up completely, Belle will level up and her HP will replenish and increase as well as the power of her attacks. However, if we die, on top of going back to the council room right at the beginning of the map, we will lose all the experience points we gathered, although at least we will keep all the rest of the progress. The game includes also a secret ninth boss that will allow us to see the real ending once we defeat it, however, in order to be able to fight against this boss, we will first need to find 8 secrets hidden scrolls.

Finally, we have the graphics of Mistik Belle, which are just absolutely GORGEOUS and a probe of the great talent that DarkFalzX has when it comes to putting pixels together. Belle´s sprite is absolutely charming, with a pretty big size and displaying all kind of details that help to perfectly express the personality of the character, and the same can be said about the secondary character or the enemies and the bosses, all of them fitting perfectly inside the charming and goofy presentation of the adventure. Of course, all this would be useless if the stages didn´t keep the same level, but fortunately, they do, with the game displaying a wide variety of stages all filled with al kind of details that make the game screen feel alive.

If you like classic adventures and Metroidvania games, you HAVE to play Mystik Belle, for the game could hardly be any more charming than it already is and will surely please the fans of this kind of games with its addictive (and challenging) gameplay, and adorable design that makes of the game and instant eye candy. It is hard to believe a single person was capable to create all this just on his own, and I guess just because of this the game already deserves to be played. Enjoy it!


GAMEPLAY VIDEO: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=twNXQylpC40