I Fell in Love With Ikenfell
A Game that I had never even heard of has become one of the games I've enjoyed the most this year.
Ikenfell came out in 2020 and I completely missed it. Its a very queer game made by Happy Ray Games and published by Humble Games and it wasn't even on my radar until my partner introduced it to me. They hadn't played all of it but said it was good and I saw multiple people in the queer gaming scene talk about it after I was paying attention to it, particularly Stephanie Sterling really made me interested when they talked about the accessibility settings. So I bought it on sale to give it a try. I played the first 2 chapters months ago and kinda fell off of it until a couple weeks ago when I picked it back up on my Steam Deck and honestly really enjoyed it.
**SPOILERS OF COURSE**
The Good
The accessibility is definitely amazing. Consistent readers will know, I'm often pretty bad at videogames despite my love for them so often I have to cheat to be able to play something. But here in Ikenfell it has this amazing setting where if I'm having real difficulty with a fight, I can just press the Instant Victory button and I'm good! It's amazing as I do love my story based games. These type of accessibility settings make me wish more games had this so that I could enjoy the games more instead of sometimes getting frustrated. Ikenfell does accessibility amazingly and I am so happy with my time with it.
The intro to the story was instantly intriguing to me, you play Maritte who is on a quest to find her sister, Saf, a witch at a magic school who she hasn't heard from for a while. Maritte is a "ordinary" person, supposedly has no magic but not long into the game you discover that she is indeed magical but has some kind of new or undiscovered magic. Not only that, it seems the magic school and magic in general is acting strangely and you meet students who help you work to find Saf. It's a perfect intro to a world and quest and instantly leaves you with questions you want to know the answers too. Then you get set off on a quest to discover where your sister went and meet multiple of your sisters classmates (Rook, Petronella, Pertisia, Ima, and Gilda) who both didn't know Saf had a sister, but still want to help you find her and learn about what's going on with the magic at the school and the magic you wield. I loved it.
Honestly the whole story is enjoyable. As you play you meet new students, discover more people are queer here than you're expecting including someone that uses ze/zir, you have interesting lore surrounding the school Ikenfell, you have depth of characters just through the main story showing they all have trauma and secrets they're hiding from others. Its just a very interesting story that I thoroughly enjoyed. And it's conveyed partially through memory stones that show you moments that lead up to and provide context to what's currently happening on campus. To be honest it reminded me of Lost in that way, but the good episodes of Lost. The flashback storytelling mechanism is something I thoroughly enjoy and have throughout my life. When I was in film school I remember learning about the initial use of the technique in a Ferdinand Zecca film and a D. W. Griffith film (Fun Fact with Cat: fuck Griffith. He might have invented a lot of film making techniques but he also created Birth of a Nation, the most racist film in the entire industry and also a favorite of WWI President Woodrow Wilson).
The music is also great. Not just the atmospheric music and the battle music, but there's a few times when an actual song with lyrics plays and I fucking loved those songs. Including just setting my Steam Deck down so I could listen to that music for a second. It was amazing and I can't express enough how much I enjoyed it. There's also some moments when the music is used to actually convey a story to the player/party and I really enjoyed those moments. Honestly the mix of music is just such a fantastic accomplishment that the developers should pat themselves on their backs with some vigor because damn is it good.
The artstyle is pixelated but not to the point the characters can't show their personality. It has simplistic character designs in the world and has more complex designs when talking and the world designs are able to express emotions via speech bubbles popping up with different symbols in them, and by nodding and moving their head around in general. It never wears on the eyes and I always enjoy running around the world without feeling like I don't know what I'm looking at like some simplistic designs can occasionally do. Overall, great art.
The personality in this game is lovely. It has the overarching themes of discovery and acceptance and those gets developed the further and further into the game you go, particularly when we find out secrets about Ikenfell itself and the Dark Fold and the headmistress. But discovery doesn't just exist for the world and lore but also for Maritte since she is going through the discovery of her magic, that she's a witch and always has been and that her type of magic was lost due to secrets we uncover throughout the game. Maritte eventually goes through a moment of acceptance, after rejecting her magic so much that she literally lost it, and her hair changes color to purple instead of red and she gains her magic back at full strength, showing shes growing as a person and has been able to accept how she isn't the "ordinary" person she thought she was. The game has this personality that just jumps off the screen and charms you with its blatant confidence in what it is. There's never any questioning of the queerness, never introductions of any coming out storyline as a distraction, that's all just accepted which just adds to the personality because Ikenfell is unequivocally proud of being a queer game and an accepting game that believes we should accept ourselves and be confident in ourselves and that even though we all have secrets, we shouldn't necessarily be ashamed of those. Just. Beautiful.
The Bad
Okay I know this is a nitpick but I was CONSTANTLY getting stuck on corners. This isn't like when I played Gotham Knights and was getting stuck occasionally, this is all. The. Time. It sucked. I'm aware that's almost simply a failure of the perspective of the game as it becomes very difficult sometimes to be able to tell if you are at the right spot. Along the same thing happens when I need to be right in front of an item or character in order to interact with them, similar to what I talked about in my Veilguard review, except because of how this game is designed I can't rotate the camera to be able to put myself in front of whatever I'm trying to interact with. Its frustrating and is something that happened throughout my entire playthrough.
This is a small one, I don't like not seeing my opponents health bars. This is something that happens a lot in some games that I've played recently. Specifically Kingdom Hearts does this and I absolutely hate it. I want to be able to see how much more damage I have to do to be able to defeat my opponents. This is important to me for strategy, if I have 2 HP left and have to make the choice between an attack and the instant victory button, and I dont know how close the enemy is to being killed, if I attack and don't do enough damage then I'll be killed and have to start over. But if I just click instant victory then I don't have to worry about it. This is something that would seemingly be an easy fix but I'm not sure how their code or engine is structured so it could be harder than I'm assuming.
The Ending
Turns out, the Headmistress, Aeldra, is killing the world by keeping a sapling of magic kept in stasis so it doesn't die because she thinks it's actually protecting them from the Dark Fold but in reality keeping it in stasis is responsible for all the horrible things happening. And that Magic actually has seasons, they last 1000 years but they still exist. And when those seasons pass, new Magic presents itself and old magic goes into hibernation, but not only that, the people who are aware of the old magic actually forget the old magic. The only way you find that out is through an old book.
Then you find out Aeldra is taking her pain out of her body by using blood magic and you have to take her down in order to save Ikenfell from certain destruction by allowing the sapling to die and the seasons to change. In order to reach where the headmistress is you have to go into a portal created by Perty using blood magic and finally get to fight the Unseen, an enemy that had the ground work laid since the first chapter of the game. Then once you get to the Spelltower, the earthquakes that had started in the second half of the game, begin to start to tear holes in the ground around the Ikenfell campus, all in places you've been before, as you go up the tower towards the final fight.
Once you get to Aeldra, she gets filled with her pain that she had originally used blood magic to stop and then becomes so overwhelmed with her desire to keep everyone in the school safe that she kills Bax, one of the most powerful Mages in the Coven that we met very early into the game and who has been traveling with Ibn Oxley who is also a very powerful Mage in the Coven. Then once you defeat Aeldra, Ibn becomes overcome with grief and takes Bax's body and the Sapling to the roof of the Spelltower. He opens a portal to the Ghost Realm, because apparently that's his actual power, and you have to fight him through 6 forms, 4 as himself, then 2 once he pulls you and Bax and the sapling into the rift. Then you get kicked out of the rift but it doesn't close and Petronella revives Bax and he manages to convince Ibn to come back to sanity, close the rift, and bring the sapling back. Then Maritte and Gilda and Ima break the Sapling out of the stasis it's been in and it dies. The world goes on. Things return to some level of normality despite the changing season. Saf and Maritte reconcile as siblings and Saf has a conversation with Perty that isn't shown.
We then see a small post game slide show where you learn about what happens to the characters in the game. Aeldra leaves and lives on with Ifig, Ima opens a department to research the stars and the magic seasons, Petronella gets inducted into the Coven by Ibn since they revived Bax, Rook organizes an overseas research voyage with Gilda, Safina is inducted into the Coven as well and learned to not put herself first while doing secret missions for the Coven, Perty leaves Ikenfell essentially disappearing, and a new sapling begins to grow deep in the woods. Then, Credits and replaying the amazing music.
Surprisingly there's also a short epilogue where Maritte and Perty meet, make plans to travel together, and obviously start some kind of relationship.
Honestly, I fucking loved all of this. It was fantastic. An emotional experience filled with heartwarming moments and character development. Just. No real notes, great ending.
Conclusion
Honestly, I'm sad I didn't know about Ikenfell sooner. And that once I had bought and downloaded it, I didn't immediately play it. It's an amazing game and I loved the whole experience. The game is fun, it's heartwarming, it's emotional, and the experience will stick with me. And the minor issues are so small that they just barely impact the whole experience.
Ikenfell is an amazing experience and journey and I think more people should play it. It has the amazing instant victory accessibility setting that will allow you as a player to absolutely cruise through the game if you so choose. You can also enjoy the combat, of course, it's interesting and enjoyable, but it being able to be skipped just significantly helped my experience.
You should definitely play Ikenfell. Especially if you're any kind of queer.
Meow,
Cat