This game does not come without it's faults, but it was a passion project kickstarted Indie game developed over the course of around 5 years by mainly 4 developers (including the creator, Chris Niosi, who went unpaid and permanently injured his hand drawing almost if not all the art assets for the game) and through the COVID-19 Pandemic, of which got adapted into the story of the game considering Terrain of Magical Expertise was always meant to be a story taking place in the year 2020. All that to say, I can VERY much overlook minor visual bugs and slight gameplay issues for the wonderful product that I love that eventually released.

I have gifted this game to 8 people now, likely more to come, every time it goes on sale I want to buy copies of this game to gift to people, in hopes they'll play through the entire game. And that's not counting the many other copies I've sold of this game by word of mouth telling people how much I love it and when its on sale, I extremely often tweet out or post on Discord whenever this game is on sale to let people know to get and play it. I really love this game.


Below is my original review:

I love TOME, I've always been really a big fan of it ever since the webseries, I've been anticipating this game for years now and I can say as a big TOME fan this has really lived up to exactly what I was looking for.

I can say that it has its few fair share of bugs here and there of which many I've reported on the discussion forums and on Twitter, but the only reason of which that should detract from your experience should be if the game outright stops you from playing from a bug, of which you can probably fix due to removing your previous save file from one of the previous demos, likely the Itch demo, this happened to me and I was kinda bummed but I got as far as like 10 minutes into the game so starting a new save file wasn't a problem really, and it certainly wasn't the developers faults. They've even gone into suggesting the same fix to many people and have been active about responding to people on the forums for reporting bugs, and good on them, they're really great developers who are listening to feedback and I legitimately hope eventually we can make this game as perfect as possible.

So much passion and love has been poured into this world and its characters, fleshing out every individual level, character, plot-line, etc. While it might not be the same universe, plot, or characters from the web-series, that actually makes me happier considering I have a new story to enjoy with all the same characters I love.

If I could make any more nitpicks, I would think the game would benefit from a copy function on the save file screen, and the ability to save in another save file besides the one you already have a save in. There were a couple points throughout the game where I didn't know what would effect everything past the point of no return and wished I could've had multiple save files to do so with and not have to worry.

Anyway, there'll be a little bit of spoiler talk below obviously, so please take that with caution
Throughout the game in Morganite Valley you can go to the side of Rullerruby's castle and talk to the Prisoner there, often I kept coming to her throughout the game to speak with her and found it very enjoyable, though the third Staurday you meet her, the day before the Orange Island event, she says to come back next Saturday. I tried to uphold that promise but the day before the Campaign of Champions was I believe on a Tuesday, I tried visiting her but got thrown out by the guards before I could finish speaking with her, she seemed to have more of a plotline but because of this abrupt ending to her plot I had worried coming there on a day before that Saturday had ruined the plotline for me, so I reloaded my save and didn't touch her, expecting after the Campaign of Champions event to be able to meet her at least one last time, or she would have barring on the ending, however this wasn't the case. Unfortunately I used the save points provided during the Campaign of Champions event, and since you can't go back past that, only forward towards the ending, I couldn't see out what was left in the Prisoners plotline, it made me really sad, and the only way I'll be able to see what is left of what she had to offer is by way of other people, whether thats uploads to YouTube or whatever. It made me very sad, and would've been easily fixed if there were a copy or multi-save option as proposed above. Unfortunately there is no epilogue or post-game.

Nonetheless, everything said in this review has made me really really happy to write about. I adore all the work that went into this game and my only regret is that this cannot go on forever, eventually we'll have to leave this world and never get another chance at seeing it. But I'm happy we were able to make it thus far, the TOME game is excellent coming from me, and my main disappointment is that I wasn't able to donate to the Kickstarter to both recieve my copy and get my own character in the game, I had debated it many times but unfortunately never decided to before it was too late. This is obviously a long-shot, I doubt it'd ever happen, and its way too soon to say but obviously I would want another TOME game, there was a bit of hinting at the end that there was more in the future, but golly I have no clue if that'll follow through or not.
I do hope we can see more of the world of the Terrain of Magical Expertise here in the future as the creation of TOME reaches its 10th anniversary in under a month now, thank you for this adventure you've given us here though, to everyone who worked on this with all their passion, love, and care. It means a lot to the people who care, thank you for everything.