Wizard's Duty

Wizard's Duty is a job interview with cauldrons. You play a young man who wants the position of court wizard, and the terms are posted plainly on the store page: to win, you need to survive seven days of the trial period, preparing potions against a timer while the side tasks pile up, with every day harder than the last. One Face Studio released it on Steam in May 2021, and the whole design is a week of probation compressed into a first-person brewing sim.

What the loop feels like

Every day is a shift. Orders arrive, the clock runs, and the cauldrons demand attention on their own schedule, with the side duties lurking at the edge of the day like meetings you cannot decline. That's Wizard's Duty.

The trial structure gives it stakes a management sim usually lacks. You are not building an empire, you are passing probation, and each of the seven days is a small test of whether your brewing routine can survive contact with the court's demands. That's Wizard's Duty, a game whose drama is entirely administrative, which is either the joke or the genre, depending on your last job.

How it actually works

A frank note first: both of our AI research passes failed to find this game, one matching to an unrelated browser action game of the same name and the other to a completely different wizard hit, and the Steam reviews are too few to consult, so this description rests on the store page. What it documents is a first-person game with simple controls, mouse, WASD, E and Space, and an economy of attention. The main task is potion preparation under a time limit that shrinks daily. The side economy is item-driven: search and sell items from the lab to earn money, and buy the reagents the main task demands. The tower upgrades simplify the job, purchasable with earnings. And the well is the stamina engine: almost every action consumes stamina, the well replenishes it, and the well only works if you keep paying the dwarf builders, a maintenance bill that doubles as the game's sense of humor. Difficulty rises on both axes, less time per day and more distractions, and an assistance option exists for levels that bite too hard.

Where it stumbles

The two-review footprint is the review in itself. There is no community verdict on difficulty, balance or charm, no guides for the trial's later days, and no signal about long-term support from a small solo-scale studio. The premise is genuinely charming and the stamina-well-dwarf triangle is a real design idea, but nothing outside the store page confirms how it plays across the full week, what the endgame of a seven-day structure even is, or whether the difficulty curve lands. Buyers would be wagering on a premise, and the honest entry states the wager plainly rather than dressing it as a verdict.

Playing it today

A Windows release on Steam, cheap, with a demo on the store page. For magic management with a longer paper trail, Magic Research and Magic Research 2 cover the spell-crafting idle genre properly on this site.

The verdict

A charming, undocumented little trial sim about earning a wizard's chair one potion at a time. Brew carefully, watch the clock, and bring your own map.