The Magister

The Magister is an RPG that fuses a murder mystery with card-battling. You assemble and customize a deck to win fights, or fall back on Tactical Diplomacy to calm anyone blocking your path, collecting clues and uncovering motives as you look into how your predecessor died and who is to blame.

The mystery is randomly generated, so no walkthrough will help, the events, the clues, the motives and the killer all shift from one playthrough to the next, and only you can identify the guilty suspect. Encounters are card-based: a deck of cards determines your combat and negotiation skills, from Heartstopper and Poison Slash to Weak Joke and Long Talk. Tactical Diplomacy offers a peaceful path, using conversation cards to bring an enemy's Rage to zero.

Different Magisters bring their own specialties and flaws, from a crafty drunk to a sharp-minded insomniac, each defining a different adventure, and you can recruit a Mercenary, Spy or Sage, or befriend a local cat or dog to fight beside you. Set in a captivating fantasy world, you have a fortnight to roam Silverhurst, winning over or strong-arming its residents as the clock runs down on naming the killer. It comes from Nerdook, developer of Monster Slayers and Reverse Crawl.