8 Games With Magic Systems So Detailed Brandon Sanderson Would Be Proud
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Brandon Sanderson has a definition for the difference between a magic system that actually makes sense and one that’s more just vibes. He calls it his First Law, or that an author’s ability to solve conflict with magic is directly proportional to how well the audience understands that magic’s rules. Novels can, on occasion, work around this rule by gesturing at a system’s logic and moving on before a reader checks the math. Video games can’t do this: A player needs to actually learn a system’s rules to use it properly.
Sanderson has been in talks with studios, off and on, about bringing his own magic systems to a video game. It’s easy to see why: Each power he writes links to a specific substance with a learnable effect…which already sounds like an RPG’s skill tree just waiting to happen. Swap steel in a Sanderson book for a wand component in Noita or a Keese eyeball in The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom and the same principle holds: One input, one repeatable output, every time. These eight magic systems prove Sanderson’s law holds up well, whether or not his own game ever ships.
8
Dishonored
The rule that makes it work: One named power source, and a Chaos system that tracks and predicts the consequences of every choice you make with it.
Arkane Studios’ 2012 stealth-action game grants protagonist Corvo Attano powers from a single named source — the Outsider, a god-adjacent figure who marks chosen humans with supernatural abilities. From there, the system tracks consequences down to the pixel. Every kill, every body discovered, and every act of mercy feeds a visible chaos meter that determines how many rats and plague-bearing weepers flood the city, how NPCs react to you, and which ending you get. Push chaos high enough, and the game will darken Corvo’s own portrait between missions and rewrite the weather waiting for you at the finale. This one has Sanderson’s Second Law running in the background, too: Limitations, not powers, make a magic system interesting. Dishonored illustrates that by having rules that hold steady enough to reward exact positioning, every single time.
7
Prey
The rule that makes it work: Alien powers come with a real, learnable cost: use them too much, and the station starts hunting you.
Prey gates its best powers behind a specific ritual. Scan enough of a Typhon alien species with the in-game Psychoscope, and you unlock that creature’s ability for yourself — whether that’s shapeshifting into a coffee mug small enough to roll under a locked door, or hurling furniture with kinetic force. Lean too hard on those alien powers, though, and the station’s own systems start tracking your corruption and just might spawn the Nightmare. (Spoilers: You don’t want this to happen.) Good luck remembering that your own humanity might just be what saves you as you start realizing the full extent of your alien powers…
6
Divinity: Original Sin 2
The rule that makes it work: Fire spreads, water conducts, poison ignites — consistent enough to predict, chaotic enough to keep things (very) interesting.
Larian Studios’ 2017 RPG treats the environmental elements in Rivellon less like spell categories and more like a chemistry set. You’ll quickly learn that fire spreads across oil slicks and burns away poison clouds. Water conducts electricity, turning a low-cost lightning spell into a powerful crowd-control weapon. Keep an eye on your enemy’s feet; once they step in a puddle, they’re yours. Poison ignites into an explosion if fire so much as brushes it, and a well-timed Bless spell can flip a cursed surface into one that heals instead of harms. Sanderson’s own lecture notes on his laws describe good magic as something a reader can use to solve problems once they understand it. Divinity: Original Sin 2 simply swaps “reader” for “player” and introduces combat encounters that involve environmental, fully-solvable puzzles.
5
Tyranny
The rule that makes it work: Every spell is built from a small, fixed set of sigils, so you always know what a new combination will actually do.
Tyranny — a 2016 RPG from Obsidian — builds every spell out of a small set of fixed sigils. You have core sigils that define the base effect, and accent or expression sigils that modify it. Combine “burn,” for example, with one set of modifiers, and you’ll get something very different than when you combine “burn” with another. But the puzzle pieces themselves never change meaning…a system thoroughly documented on Sanderson’s wiki as the textbook definition of a hard magic system. That consistency isn’t a one-off quirk of Tyranny’s magic system, either. The game opens with a conquest sequence where the player’s own choices rewrite the map and history of the world before the story even starts, so the same consistent law-and-interpretation logic that governs spellcasting governs the plot of each run, too.
4
Noita
The rule that makes it work: Every spell obeys the same physics and chemistry rules, with no unexplained exceptions to trip you up.
Noita, a 2019 roguelike from Nolla Games, simulates every single pixel in its world as an actual physical material. In practice, that means every material in the game — water, lava, blood, sand, poison gas, stone — is individually tracked and reacts the way that material would actually behave, not according to a script. Flood a room, and the water fills it. Set a gas cloud on fire, and the explosion spreads along however the gas actually drifted. That’s the system you use as you play a nameless witch descending a procedurally generated mountain in search of the Sampo, a mythical artifact from Finnish folklore rumored to grant wishes, with permadeath waiting behind every wrong step. Fair warning: most runs end because your own spell did something you didn’t predict.
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3
The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom
The rule that makes it work: Fuse and Ultrahand run on consistent physical logic you can learn and predict.
Nintendo’s 2023 The Legend of Zelda game doesn’t call Ultrahand and Fuse magic per se — but they run on the same underlying promise that Sanderson’s First Law demands. Fuse lets Link weld any two objects together, grafting one item’s properties onto another. Glue a Keese eyeball to an arrow and it’ll home in on targets, every time. Sanderson’s own top 10 favorite games list includes this game’s predecessor, Breath of the Wild, which he praised specifically for combining “the magic of classic gameplay with modern design aesthetic.” Tears of the Kingdom takes that same physics-driven playground and gives it even more sandbox-y rules, ones consistent enough to build a working hoverbike out of fans and sticks.
2
Control
The rule that makes it work: Every ability has a named source, a visible energy cost, and a cooldown you can plan around.
Control roots protagonist Jesse Faden’s abilities in a clearly named source: Her connection to the Board and the parautilitarian tools of the game’s Federal Bureau of Control. Every ability, from launching to seizing to levitating, draws from a visible energy resource that depletes with use and regenerates over time, gated further by cooldowns and an upgrade tree that spells out exactly what each point buys you. It’s a near-perfect illustration of Sanderson’s First Law: Strip away the Oldest House’s shifting hallways, and the whole system is a resource management problem wearing a telekinesis costume — one that does in fact reward players who learn and respect the system’s limits.
1
Magicka
The rule that makes it work: The rune combinations are fully consistent — which is, for better or worse, exactly how you know it’s your fault when you kill your friend instead of your enemy.
Magicka builds its entire spell system out of eight mix-and-match base elements. The rules never bend: Water plus cold makes ice, a life plus weapon enchantment heals on hit, arcane plus nearly anything makes the situation worse. As Sanderson’s Second Law notes, weaknesses are more important than powers. Magicka takes that idea to its logical extreme and doesn’t make things easy for you. While traveling from Castle Aldrheim to defend the besieged city of Hávindr, you’ll be guided by a tutor named Vlad. He insists, repeatedly and unconvincingly, that he is not a vampire despite looking exactly like one. Similarly, you’ll find that, tragically, your friendly fire will always unflinchingly follow the exact same physics as enemy fire.
By the time you’ve played a few of these games, a familiar pattern starts to emerge. The actual pleasure these games are selling is the satisfaction of correctly predicting what a specific combination of rules will do before you commit to it, the same rush of a chemistry experiment landing exactly as calculated. Sanderson wrote, arguably, the rulebook for making a hard magic system feel earned and real in that way. These eight games simply happen to show that those rules work even better with a controller in hand.
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