Cult of the Lamb Analysis

Overview

Cult of the Lamb is a 2D isometric rogue-like and base management game. It was developed by Massive Monster, and published by Devolver Digital in August, 2022. You can find the video version here.

Dramatic Elements

In Cult of the Lamb, you play as the titular lamb. You are sacrificed to 4 powerful bishops, and immediately resurrected by "The One Who Waits," a being who was betrayed and imprisoned by the 4 long ago. He tasks you with building up your own cult, killing the 4 bishops, and freeing him.
Along the way, you will meet a small cast of characters, and get to know more about "The One Who Waits" and the four bishops who betrayed him. There are also procedural story events that occur: two cult members can fall out, become friends, and you can develop relationships with them yourself by completing randomly generated quests.

Formal Elements

Rules

Combat and Movement

Movement is confined to a 2D plane, much like in Hades. You cannot jump or climb on objects, and there are no inclined planes or stairs anywhere: combat all takes place on a single level. You are able to roll through any projectiles or dangerous areas.
Combat itself is similar in many ways to Hades or Dead Cells. At the start of a run, you receive a random weapon and a random curse. The weapons fall into 5 broad categories: swords, daggers, claws, axes, and hammers. Daggers are the fastest, and do the least damage, while axes and hammers are the slowest and do the most damage per hit. Claws fall somewhere in the middle, and are reliant on the last hit in a combo to deal effective damage. Different status effects can be applied by the weapons: enemies can be stunned, poisoned, or can sometimes be resurrected as a ghost that attacks other enemies after they die.
Curses could be AoE blasts, tentacles that shoot out of the ground to damage enemies, fire balls, fiery or icy sword slashes, or homing arrows that seek out enemies. These are tied to a resource called Fervor: without Fervor, you cannot cast a curse. Fervor is picked up from dead enemies and from enemies after you've attacked them.
Some enemies will shoot arrows, which can be reflected back by attacking them, while the regular projectiles can only be reflected using certain shield curses.
The rooms are randomly connected together in a grid pattern, but the interior layout is hand-designed. They are all square or rectangular in shape. Most contain a number of enemies, and sometimes more enemies will spawn in after the first group is defeated. The rooms can be freely moved between outside of combat. You'll have to carefully dodge, and time your attacks, because encounters can become very busy on the screen, with projectiles flying around, enemies leaping and flying, and pools of poison or outcrops of spikes to damage you littering the floor.

Enemies

Each of the four areas has several unique enemy types, as well as types that will appear throughout. The most basic types are dagger wielding cultists, but these also come in bow wielding and bomb throwing varieties. There are larger cultists who wield swords, and others that cast healing spells.
In Darkwood, you'll find bats, and different kinds of worms: some will shoot at you, others will jump at you, and others are spiky.
Anchordeep features sea-themed enemies, Anura has frogs, and Silk Cradle, of course, focuses on different types of spiders.

Making a run

Runs, called crusades in game, start with first choosing your area. On entering the area, you will be presented with a weapon and a curse. Each area will have between 9-11 rooms to start, and these will mostly be filled with enemies. You'll find some that spawn chests containing weapons and curses to swap out, and others that contain a tarot card. Upon completing these rooms, you'll be able to choose among several different paths leading to another group of rooms. You might find a room with resources, a follower, or an NPC offering a service. These other groups could also have different special buffs or debuffs: you might receive double gold, or have any empty hearts replaced with diseased hearts (these cause damage to all enemies on screen when you are hit), or enemies might leave a pool of poison when they die. Eventually, you will come to the boss area. Depending on how many times you've completed this area, you'll find different bosses. The first 4 times, there will be a unique boss - an underling for one of the bishops. After killing these four, the door to that area's bishop will unlock and you can defeat them. If you return to the area again, there will be another unique boss called a witness. Upon defeating the witness, you can start an endless run mode: there will be another group of paths leading to more rooms. The final room will be a randomly generated boss.
Unless you have the Fleece of Fates, you'll be able to find rooms that give you a choice between two different tarot cards, and also find them randomly in chests at the end of an encounter. Tarot cards are similar to boons in Hades - they could change the behavior of enemies when they are hit or die, they could give you extra hearts, increase your damage during the day or night, increase your attack speed or attack damage, or many others. Like the boons in Hades, these will be lost when you die and return to your base.

Inventory

There is a basic inventory system, but you never need to worry about carrying too much or about playing inventory tetris.

Base and Cult Management

As your cult grows, so do the number of problems and opportunities. In the beginning, you'll want to have enough grass sleeping bags for your followers, and you'll want a farm that can provide enough food for you to make meals at the cooking station. However, the basic meals all have a high chance of making your followers sick.
Soon, you'll find your base covered in shit and vomit. The shit can be used as "fertilizer" on your farm, but the vomit just serves to make other members sick. So, you'll have to go around picking it up. Later, you'll be able to build outhouses for them to use, manure boxes to deposit the fertilizer in, and clean-up stations so followers can remove their own vomit. If a follower should happen to die, leaving their corpse laying around will also make the base a bit dirtier and increase the chances of followers getting sick.
OK. So, now your base is clean, but your followers have extremely low Faith: maybe you've died a bunch of times in a row, and maybe some of the beds have collapsed, so there are not enough places to sleep. If Faith remains low for long enough, some of them might dissent and begin spreading the word that your cult is BS. This will cause some followers to lose even more Faith, and eventually cause them to leave your cult. Depending on how far along you are in the game, you have a number of different options to handle this issue. You could reeducate them directly. If you have unlocked the prison building, you could put them in the prison and reeducate them, which also prevents them from spreading their doubts to other followers in the meantime, or you might hold a ritual and sacrifice them. If you have the murder action unlocked, you can straight up knife them. You could tackle it indirectly as well: complete a successful run to increase your followers' Faith, or conduct a bonfire ritual or hold a feast, both of which have the same effect.
As I'm sure all cult leaders have done in history, you will find lots of uses for your followers. You can task them with tending the farm, cleaning up the base, chopping wood or mining stone for use in new buildings, consecrating these basic materials into sacred ones for more advanced buildings, and worshiping at the shrine to generate Devotion. Any unassigned followers will also help construct new buildings or decorations. Later on, you can send them out on missions to collect materials, or have a demon possess them, which allows them to accompany you on a run and give you a special ability - they might periodically shoot at an enemy, or drop a half heart on the ground to let you recharge your health. You can even marry an unlimited number of followers, which unlocks a kiss action you can use once a day to increase their Loyalty (each additional spouse also causes loss of Faith due to jealousy from the other spouses, so there is a trade-off here as well).
Furthermore, you can give gifts or bless individual followers to increase their Loyalty. Loyalty, as opposed to Faith, will determine how quickly they work and how much Devotion they can generate at the shrine. Unlike Faith, Loyalty cannot be lost, only gained. Necklaces are particularly interesting here, as they give your follower a permanent trait boost - they might move faster or they might no longer need to sleep, or they might generate more Devotion.
When a follower levels up their Loyalty, you will receive some bonus Devotion in addition to a commandment stone fragment. Once 3 fragments are collected, you can issue a new doctrine for your cult. These are arrayed into 5 themed groups: Afterlife, Work & Worship, Law & Order, Possessions, and Sustenance. Each group is divided into 4 tiers, and you'll have to make a binary choice at each tier. Usually, these are between two actions, rituals, buildings, or traits. For example, in Work & Worship, you'll have to choose between the faithful trait and the industrious trait. Being faithful makes your followers generate devotion 15% faster, while industriousness increases work speed by 15%.
Two final points to consider regarding your followers are traits and age. Your followers age as the game progresses and will eventually die, although you can resurrect dead ones in a ritual. Each follower also has traits. So, some of them might gain faith when they get sick while others lose faith when they get sick. Some are cynical, and thus do not level up quickly. Others are hard workers or lazy. It might be worth your while to sacrifice a troublesome follower and replace them with one that has better traits.

Leveling up

Many things level up in Cult of the Lamb. First of all, your cult. This is leveled up by collecting Devotion at the shrine, which will then spawn a Divine Inspiration resource at increasing amounts of Devotion. Divine Inspiration is used to unlock new buildings and new perks for the buildings. These are divided into different tiers, with a certain number of buildings required to unlock the next tier.
Some of these unlocks are upgraded versions of basic buildings - you can upgrade the grass sleeping bag to a tent to a luxurious hut that harvests devotion while the occupant is sleeping.
When you conduct a sermon in the Temple, you gain Devotion specifically for leveling up your character. This lets you unlock different types of weapons and new curses for a run, and increases your starting health.
As mentioned before, your followers also level up. They all start at level 1 Loyalty, and you can increase this by conducting sermons, giving them gifts, and completing their requests. Loyalty determines the amount of Devotion a follower generates at the shrine and during a sermon, and also changes their success rate for missionary work.
Lastly, you can unlock fleeces and Crown abilities. When you defeat one of the bishops, you obtain a Heart of a Heretic, which can be used to unlock a new abilities in the Temple. A fleece is unlocked by spending a Holy Talisman, which is obtained by completing different NPC quests throughout the game. Only one fleece can be equipped at a time, while all unlocked Crown abilities are active at once.

Boundaries

Although there are no limits to how many resources you can carry, you are limited to one melee weapon and one curse at a time. Further, in terms of base management, many of your boxes have a limited capacity: the fertilizer box, seed silo, and compost bin can only hold 15 items at a time.
There are also building limits: the base area is approximately 62 X 33 diamonds, or 2,046 diamonds large, but there is actually a large hole in the center of the area due to the Shrine placement. This removes at least 100 diamonds.
Some decorations and special buildings can also only be constructed once.

Outcomes

There are a number of different outcomes to the game. When facing The One Who Waits, you could decide to sacrifice yourself. This will end the game right there. On the other hand, you could fight against him. If you win the battle, you could kill him or make him a follower. Making him a follower unlocks several special quests.

Dynamic Elements

Engine Building

The engine building pattern occurs mainly in your base management. You have control over the number of followers who pray at your shrine, and you can directly and indirectly influence how much devotion they generate - by leveling up their Loyalty you can increase their devotion generation, and by researching the Shrine Flame upgrade, you can burn grass or lumber to increase their praying speed. Conducting certain rituals also offers temporary boosts to praying efficiency.

Dynamic Friction

The dynamic friction pattern makes several appearances. First, collecting Divine Inspiration to level up your cult requires increasing amounts of Devotion to unlock the next one. Further, each tier requires an increasing number of unlocked buildings before you can access the next tier.
Second, to level up the lamb also requires increasing amounts of Devotion collected by delivering a sermon. Similarly to the cult, each tier requires you to unlock an increasing number of abilities before the next becomes available.
Third, the enemies will become more difficult after completing an area.
Finally, the areas themselves require an increasing number of followers to unlock.

Converter Engine

Regular materials must be converted into consecrated materials, and you have control over which materials to convert, and over how many Refineries you've built.
You can also view your followers as part of a converter engine - you give them food, which they convert into shit and Devotion. The shit can be taken back to your farm and used to grow more food.

Trade

You can sell unwanted resources at your base, and you can buy new tarot cards, follower forms, and decorations at different vendors. Further, you can occasionally purchase new followers using gold coins from an NPC at different points in a run.

Stopping Mechanism

The stopping mechanism occurs in several places. First, your rituals all have different cooldowns, preventing the player from spamming them.
Second, your base actions can only be performed once per day: you can give a sermon, kiss a spouse, and reeducate a follower just one time per day-night cycle.
Third, your curses all use the Fervor resource, and you can only hold a limited amount of it. Since you collect it by damaging enemies with your melee weapon and you only get a small amount from each hit, you are severely limited in how many times you can use a curse.
Finally, when you sell items, you gradually reduce the price of the item. So, even very lucrative items will become devalued over time.

Worker Placement

The worker placement pattern occurs literally in Cult of the Lamb: you can place your followers in different jobs and this has no cost to you.
Another instance of worker placement is in your fleeces. Once unlocked, you can switch between any of them at will.

Play-Style Reinforcement

Play-style reinforcement occurs in several areas. First, you are sometimes given the chance to choose between different weapons and curses. This lets you choose between the high-damage but low hit rate axe, and the faster but less powerful sword, for example, or between an AoE blast and a huge crack with tentacles that damage enemies they contact.
Second, you can unlock different fleeces, each of which gives you different benefits. For example, the Golden Fleece gives you a +5% damage bonus per kill, but this resets when you take damage (you will also take double damage with this Fleece). On the other hand, the Fleece of Fates gives you 4 tarot cards at the start of a run, but removes all tarot card pick-ups for the rest of the run.
Third, you customize your cult to match your play-style. For example, if you make a lot of runs and you always try to pick up followers on a run, it might make sense to invest in the cannibal trait: the chance of sickness from eating minced follower meat is 0%, and your cult's Faith is increased by 5 when they eat minced follower meat. This means you don't have to keep them around and find a bed for them, or feed them, as they are actually the food. This could be paired with the Good Die Young trait. This trait gives +10 Faith if an Elder follower is sacrificed, murdered, or consumed (but you lose 20 if they die naturally). Further, you could invest in the murder action, which would let you murder a follower at any time, and then cook them up later.
Each player will probably end up with different combinations of such doctrines. To indulge a bit in the mathematics of it: since there are 5 categories and you must make a binary choice at each of 4 tiers for each category, that gives you 2*2*2*2*2*4= 128 different combinations of doctrines. Not a terribly large state space, but one that offers interesting options.

Conclusion

Cult of the Lamb is an absolute gem of a game. The story is dark and the developers don't shy away from giving the player a horrifying suite of actions when managing your cult. Further, due to locking out half of the cult management options each play through, you are encouraged to play through at least once more to see how those options open up other possibilities. The combat is fun, but not deep enough to support hundreds of hours of play. But, it doesn't need to do so.
The brilliance comes in managing your cult. The way that all the different elements tie together and interact is a wonder to experience. Basic actions like managing food and Faith, providing enough beds, giving sermons and performing rituals to harvest Devotion and level up follower Loyalty and your own skill tree link up to create interesting decisions. You'll regularly find yourself with an internal monologue like the following: Oh, my follower Alno just died: should I resurrect them? They did have level six Loyalty...I think I'll bury them in this empty grave, so others can grieve there and give me some bonuses to Faith. I'll resurrect them in a few days. Hmm. I was married to them! I'll definitely bring them back.
If you like rogue-likes, I recommend giving this title a look. If you're interested in how to design interlocking systems, pay close attention to how the developers have designed their base and cult management elements.

Hogwarts Legacy Analysis

Preface

This is an in-depth look at the story and gameplay elements of the game Hogwarts Legacy. This is not a political discussion about trans-activism, transphobia, or antisemitism. If you are watching this video hoping that I will spend the whole time dising J.K. Rowling for her personal opinions on a controversial subject, or that I will explore the supposed antisemitic slant found in elements of the game and books (it seems clear to me that the Wizarding World's goblins are a smash-up of dwarfs and goblins from Norse and European folklore - every artist gets their ideas from previous art - and are probably not the result of any Jew-hating tendencies), or that I will analyze the way that kneazle breeding reinforces heteronormative stereotypes, you've clicked on the wrong video. I'm not going to talk about being betrayed by a childhood hero, how words cause real world harm, or the alleged lack of diversity at the development studio. I'm just here to talk about the game mechanics and design in an effort to help myself (and hopefully others) understand what works and what doesn't.

Overview

Hogwarts Legacy is a 3D open world action adventure game with some RPG and simulation elements. It was developed by Avalanche Software and published by the owners of the rights to much of the Wizarding World media, Warner Bro. Games. It released on February 10, 2023. You can find the video version here.

Dramatic Elements

Hogwarts Legacy is a story-heavy game, but it suffers from the same issues that many of the books do: lack of original plotting elements.

Characters and Story

You play as a male or female 5th year student who is transferring to Hogwarts. Right away, your flying carriage is attacked and you soon discover that you have an ability to see (and use) an ancient type of magic that most others cannot. When you arrive at Hogwarts, you will take classes, learn spells, brew potions, raise fantastic beasts, learn to ride a broom, and many other staples and tropes of the Wizarding World. You will also be introduced to a rebellion led by a goblin, and get embroiled in that. You will uncover a wizard from the past who, like Voldemort, tried to transgress the appropriate bounds of magic and brought about a tragedy.
As you progress through the game, your progress in the story will be repeatedly blocked by a list of tasks that you need to complete. These might be attending a new class, completing an assignment for a teacher, or some other to-do item. Upon completing these items, you'll be able to advance and learn more about your connection to this ancient magic, and what Ranrok, the leader of the goblin rebellion, is planning. I purposefully call this a list of tasks because that is how it is presented in the UI, and that is what it feels like. When I'm hit with a set of things I need to do in The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, I don't usually feel like I'm being gated by the developers. The things I need to do feel like a natural projection from where I am to where I need to reach. In Hogwarts Legacy, you are being tasked by...a teacher that doesn't want you to go too far without completing their homework first.
You will complete several trials which reveal more about the backstory of the conflict. Eventually you will confront the dark wizard who is helping the evil goblin and defeat him. At the end, you will confront Ranrok and defeat him. There are "two" endings, but these both funnel into the same conclusion. You can choose to use the forbidden power, or keep it a secret, but Hogwarts does not become a dark, evil place after choosing the "evil" path.
As you play, you can stumble upon a good number of side quests from NPCs out in the world or from students or teachers at Hogwarts. These follow many of the tropes of other lackluster side content in other open world games: there are no real effects on the game world, the quests feature no surprising twists, and the design is very run-of-the-mill.
The characters themselves suffer from similar problems. Often, they are meant to evoke characters from the original franchise - such as Professor Sharp, the potions professor, being a member of house Slytherin, having shoulder length dark brown hair, and being arrogant and strict. He is clearly meant to stand in for Severius Snape. That said, although the characters are not, for the most part, poorly written, most are one-dimensional, don't have arcs, and are just not interesting.

Formal Elements

Rules

Combat and Movement

You'll be able to walk, run, and jump relatively freely in Hogwarts Legacy. Like most 3D action games, you can climb on specific rocky surfaces. You can even swim on the surface of bodies of water. You will also be able to fly around on a broom and on a hippogryph, although this is limited by area: you cannot fly inside the building of Hogwarts, inside caves or dungeon areas, nor inside the town of Hogsmeade.
The combat has received a lot of attention. You have a basic attack that you can spam over and over. Your other combat spells each have a cooldown and different color: red, purple, and orange. Your magical enemies will periodically cast a color-coded shield, and you must use a spell of matching color to break the shield. You can use different fire and ice-based spells, together with some physics-based push, pull, slow, and slam spells. These are all flashy and fun to use, and they can be combined holistically: use Levioso to fling an enemy up into the air, juggle them a bit with basic attacks, then use Accio to bring them up close and personal before crisping them with Incendio and smashing them into another enemy with Depulso. You can "parry" many magic attacks using Protego, and you can dodge others that are not blockable. Holding the parry button will trigger a Stupify counterattack.
There are two last twists - potions and combat plants, and ancient magic. Potions, such as Focus - which reduces cooldowns; or Edurus - which increases your defense, can be drunk in a pinch. Combat plants are things like Chinese Chomping Cabbage (bobs around and attacks nearby enemies), or Venomous Tentacula (shoots poison at enemies). These are selected from the same ring-based menu and triggered by the left bumper. As you attack, dodge, and use Protego, you will build up your Ancient Magic meter, which lets you unleash a devastating attack against an enemy. There is a secondary use of Ancient Magic, which lets you fling environmental objects into your enemies using the right bumper. These could be explosive barrels, rocks, or the disarmed weapons of your enemies themselves. This is totally context dependent - if there is something flingable, you'll be able to fling it.

Enemies

There is a good variety in the enemies - you have dark wizards, poachers, goblins, mongrels, spiders, and trolls. In each category, you have several different classes and types.

School Simulation

This is for the "I get to be a student at Hogwarts!" fans. There are a number of classes you can attend, and most of these are based on scenes from the Harry Potter books and movies. There are a few minigames related to using Accio, or mixing a potion.

Animal Raising Simulation

This is for the Fantastic Beasts fans. You can "rescue" different species in the wild, release them into the microcosms inside the Room of Requirement. You can decorate these areas, feed your beasts, groom them, and if you have a male and female member and a breeding pen, you can breed them.

Inventory

There are six gear slots: handwear, facewear, headwear, neckwear, cloaks and robes, and outfit. As you explore, complete quests, and kill enemies, you will pick up a lot of gear. Many of them can be upgraded by using different materials harvested from rescued beasts. There are also traits, such as increased damage against mongrels, or reduced damage from trolls, that can be unlocked through completing challenges or found in the environment and applied to your gear. Lastly, there is a transmog system which allows you to change the appearance of any piece of equipment.

Collectibles

There are tons of collectibles and activities in Hogwarts Legacy. There are bandit / poacher camps to clear out, hot spots of Ancient magic to find, Merlin trials to complete, field guide pages to collect, Demiguise statues to find, a house chest to unlock by slapping flying keys, combat arenas to clear, broomstick races to complete...I feel breathless just saying this many, but there are more.

Leveling up

Leveling up is tied to completing field guide challenges. As you unlock these different challenges, and as you progress through completing one of them, you will gain XP. From level 5 to level 40, you will be given one talent point to spend at each level up. There are 5 skill trees, with 10 (Spells), 10 (Dark Arts), 16 (Core), 4 (Stealth), and 8 (Room of Requirement) skills, respectively, that you can unlock. These are mostly tweaks to how spells work: as examples, you can unlock a shock wave that will spread out when you use Descendo to smash an enemy to the ground, or you could increase the amount of time that an enemy will remain stunned by Stupify.

Boundaries

There are limited slots for your gear, such as masks or glasses, scarfs, robes, hats, and regular outfits. Let me say that again: in Hogwarts Legacy, part of the Wizarding World, the same franchise that features tents that are bigger inside than out, bags of essentially infinite capacity, and the microcosms inside briefcases from Fantastic Beasts, has limited inventory space. A question to whoever designed this: why?. And you regularly encounter new items which you cannot pick up, cannot even check the stats on, until you destroy an item you currently have. This happened to me quite often on main quests and during side quests, both of which feature areas which you will not be able to enter again, leaving you with no choice but to destroy one of your currently held items. Oh, and you cannot sell ingredients (herbs or materials harvested from animals) to vendors, meaning that selling gear is almost your only source of income for most of the game, yet you are still forced to destroy these items.
The only way that you can increase your inventory capacity is by completing set numbers of Merlin Trials, which are magic based puzzles scattered around the game. This makes no sense at all. I have have no idea why this is in the game, but, there you have it.
In the Room of Requirements, there are also limitations for each category of item: potion tables, growing tables, breeding corrals, etc.
I'll just reiterate the limitations on the use of your broom here. These usually appear as a text warning "Landing is not available" or "Cannot enter while riding a broom," and you will encounter some kind of magical shield going around the map borders and the town of Hogsmeade.
One last boundary is enemy scaling. Each region of the game has an enemy level range - the enemies will try to scale to your level within that range. So if you are a level 5 but the scaling range is 10-30, the enemies will scale to level 10, whereas if you are level 35, they will scale up to 30.

Outcomes

There are a number of different endings, but these trigger a few minor cosmetic changes. No matter what, you will have to confront the dark wizard and the leader of the goblin rebellion. After you reach level 34, it is possible to take your O.W.L. exams and to receive the yearly cup through the intervention of one of the professors (just like Dumbledore's intervention in the books).

Dynamic Elements

Dynamic Friction

The dynamic friction pattern makes its usual appearance for character leveling and for challenges. Each level requires a larger amount of XP than the previous one, and each challenge requires you to execute the action more times than the previous one.
A second instance of the dynamic friction pattern is in enemy scaling. As mentioned before, enemies will try to scale to your character's level, as long as your character is within the area's scaling range. If you are over or underleveled for the area, the enemy will clamp to the upper or lower limit, respectively.

Static Engine

The static engine pattern occurs in the Room of Requirement plant resource spawning and in the beast resource harvesting. These are on timers of various lengths, but you are guaranteed to receive the resource after waiting.

Stopping Mechanism

The stopping mechanism pattern mainly appears in the cooldowns for the various magical spells in combat. This prevents the player from spamming them.

Worker Placement

The worker placement pattern appears in your spell selection pad. You can equip up to 4 spells at a time for quick use, and you will eventually unlock up to 4 sets of these for a total of 16 that you can switch between at will. That said, you can swap out any of these 16 for any of your spells - a potential of 23 different equippable spells (not counting your basic attack, ancient magic attacks, Alohamora, Petrificus Totalus, Revelio and others that are always available or are contextual available).
Another instance of worker placement is in the potting tables. You can swap out what plant is being raised at any point.

Conclusion

I turned 40 years old a few months ago, and it struck me that one of the reasons I never got into Harry Potter originally was that I was already 15 when the first book was released. At that time, I was just getting into slightly more mature fantasy series, like Wheel of Time and A Song of Ice and Fire. In any case, I bypassed Potter-mania, and when the movies started to come out I was pretty underwhelmed and stopped watching after the Prisoner of Azkaban.
Two years ago, I decided it was high time that I start studying Japanese again, and I randomly decided that I would read Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone in Japanese. It took the better part of 7 months, but I was able to read it, out loud, in Japanese. I'm currently about 100 pages into Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. I have finally watched all 8 of the Harry Potter movies, and the first movie of the Fantastic Beasts series. I say this to give you some background into my relationship with the franchise. Whatever you might think of J.K. Rowling's political opinions, she is not a bad writer. She is not amazing either, but she is definitely competent. She knows how to plot a story, write decent characters, and describe scenes without tripping over her own feet. That already places her in a class above, say, Dan Brown or E.L. James.
Hogwarts Legacy belongs to the same class: competent, but not amazing. The world itself is gorgeous, and has clearly received hours and hours of love and care to make it look the way it does. The music evokes the atmosphere of the movies wonderfully, and there are hilarious bits of lore scattered everywhere. Most of the puzzles make varied use of your magical abilities, and although not mentally taxing, provide a welcome diversion from the combat. And the combat is solid - it is fast, fun, and frenetic.
As an open world game environment, however, the developers have copied many of the same elements that gamers have grown tired of over the course of the last 10 years: lack of dynamic world events, collectibles that are there more for filling the massive space than for any meaningful purpose, copy-pasted bandit camps, side activities that are included for sake of completeness but never fully fleshed out, non-reactive characters and environments, and much more. Just like the exploding red barrels in Ghost of Tsushima, Hogwarts Legacy has included a lock picking minigame. You have Alohamora, for fuck's sake - what is the point of the minigame if you have the spell? No other spell works this way! And even worse, the lock picking is just a window dressed version of finding the correct angles on the twin sticks (the same activity as decrypting passwords in the Arkham series, or focusing on Elvish runes in Shadow of War, which makes me wonder if Warner Brothers Games force their studios to include this...). This is not the same level of phoned-in game design as recent Ubisoft titles, but it is just a few steps above.
And speaking of Ubisoft, the horror of the UI deserves special mention here. The left stick controls a cursor, which must be manually moved over to the element you want to select. There are almost no situations where the bumpers or triggers can be used to switch between menus, and none where you use the D-pad to switch between menu items. Buying and selling requires holding the A button on the Xbox controller for a second, which disincentivizes going to the shops. I'm not sure of the logic of this, but it makes for a painful experience any time you need to go through several menus.
The "RPG" elements of the game also leave more to be desired. In terms of RPG mechanics, you are technically limited to 35 talent points versus 48 unlockable skills. I cannot imagine many players investing in the 4 skills in the Stealth tree, so let's go with 44 skills. None of your skills drastically changes the effectiveness of your different spells, so you can freely choose among the skills and you will probably end up playing the game in a similar way to much of the rest of the player base. The particular spells you use in combat don't matter so much, as long as you have one Control spell (coded yellow - Arresto Momentum, Glacius, Levioso, Transformation), one Damage spell (coded red - Bombarda, Confringo, Diffendo, Expelliarmus, Incendio), and one Force spell (coded purple - Accio, Depulso, Descendo, Flipendo) equipped, you will be able to go through most combat encounters smoothly. The equipment also amounts to playing dress up. There are only two stats - offense and defense, and you just have to equip items which have the biggest of the those numbers. Having traits and upgrades tied to the beasts in your vivarium is a nice touch, but it is still quite shallow.
In terms of RPG narrative elements, you can't become a superevil character, despite slinging around unforgivable curse after unforgivable curse. I don't really want to hear that we are roleplaying a Hogwarts student, and clearly no Hogwarts student would become evil - just hand-wave about Draco, Voldemort, and all the rest. Further, the NPCs will not really react to what you do or don't do, either. Again, this feels the same as many of the other open world RPGs of the last decade - I'm looking at you Bethesda.
Regarding the sim elements, we have the same problems. You can customize your wand and broomstick, and the game developers have lovingly recreated scenes from the books and movies (such as the mandrake scene in herbology class, or the first time you ride a broomstick), but there are no consequences of class attendance or performance, or your wand choices. Long wands are not slower, for example, and flexible wands do not increase crit chance. The different cores have different descriptions, but they are just window dressing. There are cut-scenes where the teacher will say "Well done, Harry McLightingFace! Points to Hufflepuff." However, you can't affect the points for the different houses by your actions. You can't make Slytherin the masters of the school by answering questions in class or by following the rules, you can't sabotage other houses, and there is no affect of getting these points. These scenes are just there for show.
The other main sim elements, taking care of the beasts, are similarly shallow and facile. You brush them and feed them, and you periodically get some resource from them. But they never eat each other because they are starving due to your lack of care (since you've been busy riding your broomstick and zapping goblins and haven't stopped by the Room of Requirement in ages) nor just because one animal is clearly a carnivore and the other is clearly its prey - you'll never come back to your vivarium to find your kneazles with potbellys and your puffskeins nowhere to be seen. They don't get sick. They don't have life satisfaction meters related to the type of environment in the vivarium. They don't escape or attack each other, unlike the dinosaurs in Jurassic World: Evolution. The system is there, but it does very little.
The Room of Requirements, as a whole, however adds some much needed complexity. The different ways you can set up your plant stations, fertilizer stations, potion stations, etc, are sure to keep some players busy for a time. The way that beasts tie in to upgrading gear is sensible, and the fact that you can breed beasts and sell them for extra money is useful since in the early and midgame money sources are limited, but this also created a lot of dissonance for me - like, how is this different from the poachers? In any case, I found potions mostly useless, with the exception of the Wiggenweld / Healing potion, and I only made other potions to complete task objectives. The combat plants were occasionally useful, but again, I mostly only used them to complete a combat feat or task objective.
To wrap things up, Hogwarts Legacy is not a 1 out of 10, the opinion of sex toy reviewer specialist Jaina Grey over at Wired not withstanding. It is not a 10 out of 10, either, whatever Angry Joe would like you to think. If I were rating this game, I'd give it a solid 7 or 8. It is competently executed in many areas, but has some serious design problems in others. Many of the design problems stem from copying the open world play book that many developers have been using for the last decade. Others stem from trying to stay true to the feeling of the Wizarding World franchise, which is not very well-thought out and makes very little sense in and of itself. Still others are just bad choices made by the developers. Should we give them some shit for their bad choices? Yes, of course. Should we praise them for the areas where they have excelled? Definitely! Should we be fanboys and give them a free pass? How about no. Should we go all political and barely talk about the actual game at all? Again, no.
Hogwarts Legacy has undoubtedly benefited from the controversy surrounding J.K. Rowling, but that does not mean it is not worth your time. There are many moments of wonder and fun to be had here, but there are a lot of confoundingly poor design choices, too. Hogwarts Legacy is not an evil game created by a team of evil developers based on an evil franchise written by an evil person. It is a mostly fun piece of entertainment that I'm sure fans of the Wizarding World franchise will love. Even as something of an outsider, I enjoyed a lot of my time with Hogwarts Legacy, while I found the story pretty lackluster and many elements of game design shallow. I can say much the same about many other open world games - Watchdogs 2, or Days Gone, or Fallout 4, for example. To pull out my favorite overly dramatic Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn quote: "If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?"

Outro

I hope that you found my analysis and discussion of this game informative and useful. Until next time!