“I’m dropping a healing circle. Oh, that buffalo monster just rammed into it and got healed to 100%.”
“Aaaaaaa, move out of my ice beam it is getting bounced off the shield of the red dude.”
*blink*
*blink*
“Oh, where did the snakes come from? What do I do? Hit them with my broom?”
*frantic broom flailing*
“I’ll send in a wave of lightning, hopefully, you’ll survive.”
*waves of electricity stunning and damaging everything*
“Okay, the snakes are dead, now resurrect me.”
Nine Parchments is a co-op, magic-heavy ARPG developed by Frozenbyte, who is also responsible for the Trine series.
According to the story, you are students at a wizarding academy, and someone stole spell parchments which you have to recover and return. To be honest, the story is just an excuse to go on a series of level-based arena combat scenarios, the narrative isn’t particularly well developed apart from going from A to B and getting object C.
However, the core gameplay is spectacularly developed. Everyone is a wizard in this game, so don’t look for barbarians or warriors, and you have to fight with spells. You start the game with three abilities, then you gather six parchments so that by the end you have nine spells to choose from. The spell system will give you some déjà vu. The game features eight elements: ice, fire, death, life, lightning, steam, physical, and shadow. The last three are pretty rare and only very specific characters can wield them, so during your first playthrough, you will most like encounter the first five types. Having different elements naturally leads to a resistance system, where let’s say fire creatures are vulnerable to ice but resistant to fire.
The enemies are also mostly spellcasters, using the same types of spells you have access to, and they will have elemental immunities/vulnerabilities which you can exploit. There is quite a variety of enemies, you have the small and fast ones, the large and slow ones, the not moving and ranged ones, enemies with auras, etc.
The gameplay will remind you a bit of Magicka, since this game also allows you to do some combos with your co-op partners (you can combine beam spells for added effects), and more importantly Nine Parchments also features friendly fire and frantic combat.
At the start of the game only two playable characters are unlocked, and you can unlock others as you progress through the game, along with powerful staves, and colourful hats. Once you finish the game, you can start another playthrough with the same characters to level them up even higher, or you can replay the game with a new wizard.
The spell roster is shared among all characters, however, each character has its own talent tree. For example, Gislan has talents enhancing her Life spells, so even though you could build her using only ice and fire spells, you probably won’t. This gives the game some replayability, since you can finish the game multiple times using completely different spells and playstyles.
The Good
The best thing about this game is the core gameplay, I can’t stress enough how amazing the combat is. It is frantic, exciting, strategic, satisfying, you will suck at the beginning, and will slowly become better, and pulling off nice combos by the end is just so rewarding.
The difficulty level of the game is great, bosses are challenging, especially the last two, and even as you get better at the game, you can never really relax and just play on auto-pilot because one or two wrong steps and you’ll die really fast. You always have to pay attention and always time your spells.
The friendly fire makes everything in this game hilarious. And it is not just friendly fire between the characters, the same engine applies to the enemies. They do the same spells with the same effects as you. If you can trick them into hurting each other, it will work. You can even combo your beam spells with enemies, or bounce off spells of their shields. If you put down a healing circle, and a non-death type enemy wonders into it, you will heal that monster. The engine is very compact, well thought through and works great.
The artwork and level design is beautiful, really versatile, the music is great, the game has a real magical atmosphere. Okay, I have to emphasise again how stunning the game looks, I mean, it has been a while since I could honestly say that this game is just artfully beautiful, like a painting. Almost every scene in this game could be a wallpaper.
For our Warhammer: Chaosbane review we listed out some things that make an ARPG good. This game checks most of them: great difficulty, we know the enemies, know what they do, and gaining a level is very satisfying. The only thing missing is probably the loot, this game doesn’t really have that, sometimes you can unlock a staff, but most of the time you’ll find a treasure chest that gives you 61 XP. I have no idea why 61 though.
The Bad
The first and most glaring problem is that the game crashes on our PS4 Pro every hour or so. I think it overheats the console, but I am not certain. Either the game is not optimised very well, or our PS4 needs cleaning. But then we just finished the Last of Us 2 without any problems, so I think our console is fine. But imagine how good this game is that we still finished it, given that it crashes after an hour of gameplay.
The next major issue is that it somehow doesn’t feel right how the game wants you to finish it multiple times. I would have loved a tighter story instead. Have four distinguished characters with very different talent trees and a better, more cohesive story, instead of this weird setting where you are supposed to play this game at least ten times, and I am not exaggerating, but in the end it just feels forced.
It is also strange that this is a 1 – 4 player game, but you only have two characters unlocked at the beginning. At least make it four!
The list of unlockable characters is also somewhat mystifying. You have nine types of wizards, and then each of them has four variations. The difference is some colouring and the three starting spells. However, the variations also share a skill tree, which you unlock when you unlock the new “skin” for the character, but the game never really tells you this. So now we have two level 34 characters, that only used their own skill trees without branching out into the alternative skill trees. Anyway, this whole shared skill tree mechanism feels weird and not very immersive.
I think they wanted to pad the replayability of the game, and in all fairness, I think we will play this game again because we absolutely loved it, but not ten times. And not because we want to unlock five more skins for our characters.
Oh, and the last minor issue, the camera sometimes acts up when you try to run into wildly different corners of the screen. Which frankly happens quite often when you panic.
The Co-Op
The co-op in this game is excellent, you constantly have to look out for one another. You’ll do combos, strategise on who picks what spell types to cover double-immune enemies, heal and revive each other, try not to kill each other, and laugh when you inevitably fail. The characters even talk to each other and have cute story moments.
The Recommendation
Definitely recommend it, for us this game represents the golden level of difficulty, but I have to admit that some of the bosses can be really challenging. Though if you play on PS4, prepare your nerves for possible crashes.
Info
| Release Year | 2017 |
| Genre | ARPG |
| Difficulty | Medium |
| Number of Players | 1 to 4 |
| Length | 10 hours |
Rating
| Overall | Great |
| Story | Mediocre |
| Co-Operation | Great |