Fictorum

Fictorum is an action RPG where you play as the last surviving member of a forbidden magical order, the Fictorum, who has survived execution at the hands of the Inquisition. Set in a fantasy world shattered by magic, you embark on a mission of vengeance against the theocratic empire that eradicated your order. The game features a unique, fully customizable spell-casting system that allows you to dynamically shape and master spells, turning a simple fireball into a cluster bomb or an ice blast into a leaping ball of frozen doom. You will traverse a randomly-generated world, making choices that impact the story and demolishing your surroundings with powerful, destructive magic.

Fictorum: The Unfulfilled Promise of a Mage-God Simulator

In the pantheon of action RPGs, few concepts are as tantalizing as the promise of true, unadulterated magical power. For decades, players have been conditioned to start as a feeble apprentice, slowly grinding their way to competence. Fictorum, developed by the two-man indie studio Scraping Bottom Games, dared to ask a different question: what if you began as a god? Released in 2017 after a successful $30,000 Kickstarter campaign, this rogue-lite RPG offered a spell-shaping system of unparalleled freedom and a world of fully destructible environments. It was a bold vision, championed by a community eager for a true wizard power fantasy. Yet, like a complex incantation miscast, Fictorum is a game of brilliant, explosive ideas tragically hamstrung by its own execution, leaving behind a legacy of what could have been.

Development History & Context

The Indie Dream and the Unreal Engine Revolution
Scraping Bottom Games, founded by Greg Curran and Chip Flory, was a classic indie startup story. The project began as a passion endeavor developed in their spare time, first gaining traction on Reddit. Its very existence was catalyzed by a pivotal moment in game development technology: Epic Games’ decision to distribute Unreal Engine 4 for free. This move democratized high-end game development, and Fictorum stands as a direct product of that shift. The team leveraged the engine’s robust physics and destruction capabilities to build their core premise.

The successful Kickstarter campaign in July 2016, followed by a swift Greenlight approval on Steam, demonstrated a clear market hunger for the concept. Backers were promised a game where they could “become the wizard that you’ve always wanted to play”—a mage who could reduce castles to rubble with a single, well-placed spell from the very beginning. This stood in stark contrast to the AAA gaming landscape of 2017, which was dominated by sprawling, narrative-driven epics and competitive multiplayer titles. Fictorum was a throwback to a more experimental, systems-driven era of game design, aiming to carve a niche for players who valued creative carnage over cinematic polish.

Narrative & Thematic Deep Dive

A Tale of Vengeance Told in Absentia
The lore of Fictorum is, ironically, its most hidden and arguably most sophisticated element. Centuries ago, rival Magical Orders vied for supremacy until the Fictorum, a breed of mages born with the talent to master all offensive schools of magic, emerged dominant. Threatened, the other Orders banded together to form the Inquisition. In a desperate, catastrophic act, an elite Fictorum enveloped the world in Miasma—a corrupting fog that wiped out millions and forced survivors to cling to mountaintops. The Inquisition, blaming the Fictorum for this apocalypse, dedicated itself to their extermination.

You play as the last surviving Fictorum, forced to watch the execution of your entire order before being cast into the Miasma yourself. You survive, but are physically and mentally scarred, left with a single purpose: vengeful genocide against the Inquisition.

This is a remarkably mature and grey narrative framework. It presents a protagonist who is, by any objective measure, the product of a historically destructive and dangerous order, seeking revenge against a brutal but arguably justified regime. This moral ambiguity is a fantastic foundation for a deep RPG narrative.

The Fatal Disconnect
Tragically, this rich lore is almost entirely absent from the game itself. As noted by critics, it was relegated to the game’s official wiki and blog. Within the game, the story is delivered through sparse, text-based “choose your own adventure” segments on the world map. While these vignettes can be well-written and present interesting moral choices (e.g., helping an orphaned child or leaving them to their fate), they feel disconnected from the core action. The player never feels the weight of the history or the moral complexity of their quest. The story becomes a faint backdrop to the destruction, a missed opportunity to elevate the mayhem into a meaningful narrative about power, corruption, and vengeance.

Gameplay Mechanics & Systems

The Spark of Genius: Spell Shaping
This is where Fictorum’s heart beats strongest. The spell-shaping system is a genuine innovation. Players don’t just find new spells; they find Runes—Modifiers like Multi-Shot, High Explosive, Piercing, or Chain—which can be socketed into any spell. The magic happens when you hold the cast button, opening a shaping interface that slows time. Here, you drag the mouse towards the equipped Runes to amplify their effects. Dragging fully towards a Multi-Shot Rune might turn a single Fireball into a devastating shotgun blast. Combining it with an Explosive Rune creates cluster bombs. A Lightning Spell with a Chain Rune becomes a catastrophic arc of energy between enemies.

The system is brilliantly balanced by mana consumption: shaping a spell costs more mana and time, forcing tactical decisions in the heat of battle. This mechanic alone delivers on the power fantasy, making you feel like a true archmage meticulously crafting your destruction.

The Crumbling Pillars: Everything Else
Unfortunately, the supporting gameplay systems fail to uphold the spell-shaping brilliance.

• The Destructible Environment Dilemma: Yes, you can destroy every building. However, buildings contain crucial loot—new spells, gear, and Essence (the game’s currency). Destroying a building with loot inside converts that loot into a pittance of Essence, creating a constant tension between fun (blowing everything up) and progression (carefully looting). Furthermore, the destruction physics are inconsistent. While roofs and walls vaporize impressively, the interior objects and loot often remain bizarrely pristine amidst the rubble, breaking immersion. Debris also despawns quickly via a timer to maintain performance, further reducing the impact of your actions.

• Roguelite Structure: The game uses a node-based world map, heavily inspired by FTL: Faster Than Light. You move between mountain peaks (safe from the Miasma), encountering random events and combat scenarios across eight chapters. While the map is procedurally generated, the combat levels themselves are drawn from a limited pool, leading to noticeable repetition in environment layout.

• Combat & AI: The combat challenge derives not from intelligent foes but from overwhelming numbers. The AI is notoriously poor. Melee enemies charge in a straight line. Archers and enemy mages stand static, firing predictably. The late-game difficulty spike is achieved not by smarter tactics, but by giving enemies massive speed and damage boosts, which feels cheap and frustrating.

• Inventory & Economy: Inventory management is tedious with limited space. Healing is a punishingly expensive resource drain at vendors, discouraging exploration and risk-taking. The economy feels unbalanced, often forcing players to choose between essential healing and new gear.

World-Building, Art & Sound

Aesthetic Ambition and Technical Limitations
Fictorum’s visual direction aims for a high-fantasy aesthetic, with snowy peaks, lush valleys, and dusty ruins. The spell effects are the clear highlight—fireballs erupt with satisfying glow, lightning crackles with energy, and ice spells crystallize enemies. The sound design follows suit, with spells having appropriate, weighty impacts.

However, the overall presentation is severely hampered by its indie budget. Character models and animations are rigid and dated, reminiscent of mid-2000s titles. Textures are often flat and unimpressive. The game suffered from technical issues at launch, including long initial load times, texture pop-in, and frame rate dips during large-scale destruction, even on capable hardware. The first-person perspective, while an option, was poorly optimized and exacerbated the issues with enemy AI.

The world feels less like a living, breathing realm shattered by magic and more like a series of elaborate dioramas waiting for you to smash them. The atmosphere is present but thin, unable to fully immerse the player in its compelling but poorly communicated lore.

Reception & Legacy

A Tepid Critical Response
Fictorum launched to mixed-to-average reviews. It holds a Metascore of 64 and a user score of 4.3 on Metacritic, based on a limited number of reviews. Critics universally praised the spell-shaping and destruction mechanics but lambasted the repetitive gameplay, poor AI, lack of narrative integration, and technical shortcomings.

Publications like Neowin (7.5/10) called it “good” but flawed, stating it was “full of ideas – some borrowed, some new – but it doesn’t get the mix quite as perfect as I had hoped.” German outlet 4Players.de (60%) noted its “lot of potential” that was “merely tapped into.” Many reviews echoed the sentiment that it felt like a promising tech demo or early access build rather than a finished product.

A Niche Legacy
Commercially, Fictorum found a small audience but faded into obscurity. Its legacy is twofold. Firstly, it remains a cult favorite for a specific type of player—the one who values systemic, physics-driven sandbox gameplay above all else. For them, the joy of crafting the perfect spell and unleashing it on a village is enough to overlook its myriad flaws.

Secondly, it serves as a poignant case study in ambitious indie development. It demonstrated the incredible potential of UE4 for small teams but also highlighted the immense challenge of balancing a compelling core mechanic with the surrounding systems needed to make a complete game. It stands as a testament to a brilliant vision that ultimately crumbled under the weight of its own ambition and the constraints of a tiny development team.

Conclusion

Fictorum is a game of profound duality. It contains one of the most innovative and satisfying magic systems ever designed, a system that truly makes the player feel like an omnipotent force of nature. For brief, glorious moments, as you shape a meteor shower to annihilate a fortress, it achieves its lofty goal.

Yet, these moments are isolated islands of excellence in a sea of underbaked and flawed design. The narrative is rich but hidden, the world is destructible but inconsequential, the enemies are numerous but dumb, and the progression is often more punitive than rewarding. It is the ultimate “what if” game—a stunning proof-of-concept that desperately needed a larger budget, a bigger team, and more development time to refine its rough edges and fully realize its magnificent potential.

As a piece of video game history, Fictorum is not a landmark success but a valuable, cautionary artifact. It is a bold, creative, and deeply flawed experiment that deserves recognition for its groundbreaking core mechanic, even as it serves as a reminder that a single brilliant idea, no matter how powerful, is not enough to sustain an entire game. For those seeking pure, uncomplicated magical destruction, it may still cast a fleeting spell. For everyone else, it remains a fascinating relic of what almost was.