HEDGEMAGE

HEDGEMAGE is a short top-down wizard action game for Windows, with a free demo you can play in your browser on this page: the first area, THE RILL, and its boss. You build every spell on the spot from four elements: tap one or two of FIRE, FROST, STORM and EARTH, then cast. Four elements make fourteen spells, and each one does something to the world and something to a fight. The paid download is the whole game: three areas, twelve rooms, eleven kinds of foe, three bosses and the ending. Hand-written HTML5, no engine, made by Core Systems Asset Factory using AI tools.

The world answers your spells

Frost freezes the river into a road you can walk. Fire burns through a bramble hedge and the bookstacks of a drowned library. Earth smashes boulders and fallen masonry. Storm wakes the old rune stones, and when every stone is awake the gate opens. The rooms are built out of those four obstacles, so the way forward is always a spell.

And the foes do too

A soaked foe conducts: hit it with storm and the spark leaps to every wet foe near it. Frost freezes a wet foe at once, or any foe you chill twice, and a stone then shatters it for triple damage. A rune chip over each foe names the element it fears. Each boss asks a question: the Sporefather regrows unless it is burning, the Eye Beneath the Water turns thrown spells back unless it is shocked, and the Last Lecturer is warded until a shatter breaks the ward.

Fourteen spells, one spellbook

FIREBOLT, FROST SHARD, SPARK and STONE, and the ten pairs: FLAME JET, ICE WALL, THUNDERCLAP, QUAKE, STEAM, FIREBALL, MAGMA, SLEET, ICE BOULDER and LODESTONE. Every spell you cast for the first time is written into your spellbook with what it does to the world and to a fight. Nothing forces a combination: our test bot got through almost every room on single spells. The pairs are what you find when you go looking, like an ice wall that is a bridge on water, or a lodestone that pulls a crowd together and shocks it.

What is in it

• Three areas: THE RILL (meadow streams), THE MIRE (where the old causeway sank) and THE DROWNED ACADEMY (where the dead still lecture).
• 12 rooms and 3 bosses, eleven kinds of foe, each with its own weakness.
• 14 spells from 4 elements, a spellbook that remembers them, and one bar of focus that every cast draws on.
• Keyboard with mouse aim, gamepad with right-stick aim, and touch with a rune diamond. Aim assist and screen shake can be switched off.

Free demo and full game

The browser demo on this page is THE RILL: four rooms and the Sporefather. The $4.99 Windows download adds THE MIRE and THE DROWNED ACADEMY, seven new kinds of foe, two more bosses and the ending. It is a short game, made to be finished in one sitting; CONTINUE picks up at the area you reached. No install, no account: unzip and run HEDGEMAGE.exe.

Made from our own packs

Everything you see and hear comes from asset packs we sell, if you are making a game yourself:

• Wildmark 01: The Party - the hedge-wizard and the rest of the party ($5.99)
• Deepwarren 01: The Living Dark - the myconids, the cube and the Sporefather, with strike, hurt and death animations ($9.99)
• Sparkfall 01: Status Auras - the burning, frozen, shocked and soaked overlays ($5.99)
• Verdant 38: Cascades - the animated river you freeze ($7.99)
• Sixfold: Elemental Casting Chains - every spell sound, one family per element ($12.99)
• Elven Realms - most of the music, 44 tracks ($12.99); THE MIRE plays our Wildwood album ($17.99)

AI disclosure

The code and the writing were made with AI (Claude). The sprites, tiles and effects come from our own AI-generated asset packs. The music comes from our own albums, composed as MIDI by our composition code and rendered with a sample bank; the sound effects are our own procedurally made packs. No generative audio model was used.