The Magus Circle

Four years after Vampire Survivors turned “walk around and let the auto-attacks happen” into a genre, the survivors-like has hardened into a formula. You move, collect gems, pick one of three upgrades, and repeat until the screen is a blizzard of particles. Most new entrants compete on theme or on the size of their upgrade pool. Very few change the core action.

The Magus Circle, from indie studio By Witchlight, changes the core action. Your attacks don’t fire on a cooldown. You cast spells by drawing sigils, tracing shapes with a mouse, pen, finger or thumbstick while enemies close in. That single change reframes the genre’s power fantasy. Survivors-likes usually take away control of your attacks and give you control of your build in return. This game gives you both, along with the pressure that comes with them.

Around that hook sits a familiar but generous structure. There are six playable mages, each with their own skills and backstory, and four planets of escalating waves capped by colossal bosses. The game offers 20 spells and a claimed 600 possible upgrades. Between runs, a manor hub handles meta-progression: unlocks, familiars, potions, a garden, and conversations with the rest of the Circle. Each run reveals more of the story.

Version 1.0 launched on Steam on September 24, 2026, for Windows, macOS and Linux, at $12.99. The negative feedback has been revealing, because it focuses mostly on technical problems rather than design ones. That distinction shapes everything below.

• Sigil-Based Spellcasting: You draw spells instead of pressing buttons. Recognition is deliberately forgiving, so rough sketches still count.
• Player-Controlled Level-Ups: Levels accumulate, and you decide when to spend them. Upgrades stop being interruptions and become planning decisions.
• Six Mages, Four Planets: Each mage has distinct skills and a backstory. Runs move across four planets with large boss encounters.
• The Manor Hub: Failed runs send you home to unlock powers, raise familiars, brew potions, tend a garden and build relationships with the other mages.
• Flexible Input: The game supports mouse, drawing tablet, touchscreen and controller. A button-based casting mode is available for players who don’t want to draw.
• Accessibility Time Controls: Options can slow or freeze time while you draw, which turns a reflex test into a deliberate one.
• Optional Challenges: Opt-in modifiers raise the difficulty for experienced players.

The Sigil Gamble

Gesture-based casting has a long and mostly cautionary history. Black & White had gestural miracles, Arx Fatalis had rune-drawing magic, and Ōkami had its Celestial Brush. The idea always sounds immersive and always runs into the same problem: recognition. If the recognizer is too strict, players feel punished for bad handwriting. If it’s too loose, the drawing stops meaning anything.

By Witchlight leans firmly toward forgiveness. Rough drawings work, and the casting comes across as fresh and immersive. That’s the right call for this genre, where your attention is split between the horde, your positioning and your hand. A survivors-like that demanded calligraphy would be miserable.

Forgiveness has a cost, though. Sigils can be misread or appear in the wrong place. In most games, a misinterpreted input is a minor annoyance. In a survivors-like at minute twenty, with the screen saturated, a misfire can end the run. Precision and tolerance pull in opposite directions. The looser the recognizer, the more likely two of the 20 spell shapes are to collide. This is the system’s central tension, and it isn’t fully resolved.

The accessibility time controls are the smartest design decision here. Slowing or freezing time while you draw changes the game from a dexterity test into something closer to a tactical puzzle. Purists may argue that removes the tension. It’s optional, and it opens the game to players who would otherwise be locked out.

The button-based casting mode is more complicated. It’s a sensible safety valve for players with motor limitations or those who simply don’t enjoy drawing. It also quietly admits that the hook won’t work for everyone. With buttons, The Magus Circle becomes a competent survivors-like with good art. With a pen or mouse, it becomes something distinctive. Draw if you can.

Banking Levels

The underrated innovation here is manual level spending. In Vampire Survivors, every level-up pauses the game and pushes a random handful of choices at you. The Magus Circle lets levels accumulate, and you decide when to cash them in.

That turns progression into resource management. Do you spend now to stabilize a collapsing run, or hold out for a specific build? It rewards players who think about synergies instead of reacting to whatever the dice offer. It also removes the constant stop-start rhythm that makes long survivors-like runs feel choppy.

The system is only as good as the choices it unlocks. Spell balance is uneven, and that undermines planning. If a few spells clearly outperform the rest, “planning” collapses into “taking the obvious build.” By Witchlight says patches 1.1.0 and 1.1.1 rebalanced spells. That’s encouraging, but balance is a moving target in a game with 600 upgrades.

The Manor and the Meta Loop

The manor hub owes an obvious debt to Hades. Death is folded into the narrative, failure sends you home, and home is full of characters who grow as you return. The cozy layer of gardening, potion-brewing and familiar-raising gives the meta-progression texture, and it delivers a steady sense of progress even after failed runs — exactly what a roguelite hub is supposed to provide.

The cracks show in the storytelling. The cast has voice acting, humor and charm, but the characters can feel thinly developed, and mechanics and lore are easy to miss. Both can be true. The surface is delightful, but the depth beneath it is shallower than the presentation suggests. The underwhelming final boss fits that pattern. When the narrative payoff of the meta-loop doesn’t land, the grind to get there feels less rewarded.

Content Depth and Its Seams

Six mages, four planets, 20 spells and 600 upgrades is substantial on paper. Upgrade counts, however, are the genre’s favorite vanity metric. What matters is how many of those upgrades meaningfully change how a run plays, and that depends on what you’re fighting.

This is where limited enemy variety hurts. Survivors-likes live and die on horde composition, the mix of fodder, chargers, ranged threats and elites that forces you to adapt. If the enemy roster is thin, four planets start to blur together, and the cleverness of your build has less to push against. The developer says it has adjusted enemy spawns in recent patches. That helps pacing, but it doesn’t add new enemy types.

Optional challenges raise the ceiling for veterans, and that’s welcome. Harder modifiers stretch the same content further. They don’t replace new content.

The art direction is charming, and the voice acting gives the manor’s characters a warmth most survivors-likes don’t attempt. The presentation has personality, which matters in a genre where many entrants look interchangeable.

Performance is the problem. Frame rates reportedly drop badly in long runs with many enemies on screen. That’s a common survivors-like issue, but it’s especially damaging here. In a drawing game, frame rate isn’t only about visuals. It’s about input feel. A sigil drawn during a stutter feels unreliable, and an unreliable stroke is exactly what a gesture system can’t afford.

The more serious problems were launch stability. Reports include crashes, softlocks, progress-blocking bugs and lost saves. Lost saves are the worst of these in a meta-progression game, because the accumulated progress is the reward. Wiping it erases the point of every failed run.

By Witchlight has been responsive. The studio says patches 1.1.0 and 1.1.1 fixed bugs and improved performance. Those are the developer’s claims, though, and the next wave of player feedback will be the real test.

The Magus Circle is available on Steam for Windows, macOS and Linux, and its input flexibility makes the PC experience vary widely depending on hardware.

• Mouse: This is the practical baseline. It’s precise enough for clean sigils and familiar to most PC players.
• Drawing tablet: This is the best way to play. Tablets suit the concept perfectly, but few players own one.
• Touchscreen: Touch laptops and handhelds offer a natural fit. Drawing with a finger is the most intuitive version of the idea.
• Controller: Drawing with a thumbstick is inherently coarser. The forgiving recognizer helps, but many controller players will likely end up using button casting.

The game reportedly runs smoothly on Linux and the Steam Deck, good news since a handheld with a touchscreen suits this game’s interaction model well. Controller and keyboard remapping arrived after launch, closing a gap that should not have existed at 1.0.

The bigger strategic point is that this game’s interaction model seems built for touchscreens. By Witchlight is targeting iOS and Android for late 2026, and the mobile version may end up being the most natural way to play. The studio calls a Switch version “a maybe at best,” with no active plans, so don’t wait for one.

The concept deserves attention: drawing sigils restores something the survivors-like genre gave up on purpose, the feeling that your hands, not a cooldown timer, are doing the work. Player-controlled level-ups add a layer of strategy the genre rarely offers, and the manor hub has enough charm to make failure enjoyable.

But the execution hasn’t caught up with the concept. Thin enemy variety, uneven balance, shallow characters and a flat finale keep the content from matching the hook. The launch-window stability problems, especially lost saves, are hard to excuse in a game built on accumulated progress. By Witchlight appears to be listening, and the 1.1.x patches address the right problems.

For now, this is a clever game held back by its rough edges — one to consider only if the drawing hook excites you enough to tolerate them. Everyone else should wait a patch or two and check whether recent player feedback confirms the fixes. Touchscreen players may want to wait for the mobile version, which could be this game’s natural home.