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Wizordum Is A Delightful, ‘90s-style FPS Game That Lets You Build Your Own Levels
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Alyssa Mercante
A dead body lies nearby, a jagged pool of blood seeping from it. I bash it with my melee and collect its loot. Emberheart Games’ sole developer, Slovenian Primož Vovk, says that you could only smash dead bodies in the Early Access version of Wizordum (which has delighted players since November 2023). “Player feedback was like, ‘hey, can we just loot them,” he says, laughing.
Wizordum’s plot is steeped in high fantasy: An ancient seal shatters, unleashing Chaos, and you’re one of the last mages of Wizordum, tasked with finding the source of all of this mess. You start outside of a medieval-style castle, but as you progress through the game, you’ll fight through a wintery biome, lava-soaked lands, and even a magic forest. And through all of them, you’ll have to fight your way through ogres and goblins, armed at first with a mace, but later with some cool projectile weapons like a staff that shoots ice (which you can shatter to demolish enemies) and rings that let you shoot fire out of both hands.
It’s fast-paced and fairly simple, built for speed-running and secret-finding. Vovk tells me there are over 200 secrets tucked away in Wizordum, and though there’s certainly a lot to find and do, the goal is for players to easily be able to pick the game up after some time away. Vovk mentions a recent Doom title, remarking how he stepped away from it for a while and struggled to remember how to play it. He didn’t love that experience, which is why he made sure Wizordum is “pretty casual.”
Casual is a great term— though I pick the sorceresses and quickly learn that the world sort of zooms by as I navigate through it, I never feel overwhelmed. Enemies are easy to spot and easy to kill, and maps, despite containing tucked-away treasures, are simple to navigate. If I miss something, I can easily double back. If I turn a corner and start taking damage, it’s easy to turn on a dime to waste an ogre throwing fireballs at me.
Wizordum moves fast and is jam-packed with items to pick up, enemies to fight, and secrets to discover, and it’s a testament to Vovk’s game design skills that it’s manageable the entire way through. Even with just a few minutes of hands-on time, it’s easy to see how Wizordum can suck you in just enough to hook you, but not too much that you can’t put it down and go eat dinner.
But perhaps the coolest aspect of Emberhart’s game is its built-in level editor, which is the same feature Vovk used to make the in-game maps. PC players can use it to craft their own speed-running challenges and immediately upload them to the game for others to test them out (when Wizordum comes to console, it will bring with it fan-made levels, but not the editor itself). They can choose where the player starts and ends the level, drop in enemies and items along the way, and add fun elements like mist, dust particles, and fake walls that push open to secret areas.
The level editor feels like a lipstick kiss at the end of a love letter to ‘90s FPS titles. “Games don’t ship with a level editor anymore,” Vovk points out. Unsurprisingly, the nostalgic appeal of Wizordum, coupled with the old-school inclusion of a level editor (reminiscent of games like Duke Nukem 3D), has made the feature wildly popular. Players love it; Vovk tells me one player loved it so much that he spent over 600 hours in the level editor. His builds were so impressive that Emberheart and Apogee hired him to create a secret level in the game.
After years in Early Access, Wizordum is coming to consoles and the Epic Games Store, bringing all the nostalgic ‘90s fun and quirky fan-made levels with it. If you’re looking to build some levels yourself, remember you’ll need to play it on PC to have that capability. If freezing ogres into ugly little popsicles and shattering them with a wizard-like hand movement sounds like fun, Wizordum is waiting for you.