Tails by the Foxfire

Indie Spotlight Review for Magical Girl ER by noranuco

Magical Girl ER by noranuco was my Halloween game of choice this year. Magical Girl ER is a horror visual novel and medical sim where you treat magical girls who have been injured in the line of duty while fighting kaiju who threaten the world’s peace. The gameplay loop is simple: decide which magical girls to admit to your hospital while working with limited stamina and resources, effectively determining who lives, and who dies. Horror elements are sprinkled throughout with a seriously heavy atmosphere, jump scares, blood, and sanity effects that brought back memories of Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem.

I’ve been super busy with so much work stress these last couple of weeks, so Magical Girl ER‘s bite-size 20-30 minute sessions were ideal for slotting in where I could without feeling guilty for gaming instead of doing overtime, housework, or falling asleep flat on my face to catch up on some much-needed rest. Though Magical Girl ER feels a little unfinished in parts, it overflows with potential, and has a seriously committed dev who’s been diligently improving the game over time in response to player comments, so I fully believe that this score might be even higher next time I play. I played the game to completion twice and achieved two quite different endings, which was good. I’m uncertain about how satisfying those endings ultimately were, as I felt there were narrative pieces missing to help them land as intended, but maybe these will fall into place on subsequent playthroughs when I have the time. The scares are decent though, especially if you don’t dabble much in the horror genre: definitely intense enough to make me close out of the game saying ‘NOPE NOPE NOPE’ the first couple of times! As I said, I completed it twice, but I’ve played for around 104 minutes total. It took me some time to get braver.

Keep reading for my full review of Magical Girl ER by noranuco, or check out the short and sweet reviews scores below and try the game for yourself on Steam!

TL;DR: Magical Girl ER Foxfire Review Score: 3.8/5

Price Point: $6.29 CAD, which feels more than fair for an independent game with full voice acting and good replay value across its 11 endings. 5/5
Fun Factor: 4/5
Gameplay: 4/5
Story, Characters & Worldbuilding: 3/ 5, but I would be happy to give this score a boost if future content is added, or if I discover more on a subsequent playthrough. It’s got good bones, but there’s a little something missing.
Maps & Environment: 4/ 5, the game takes place across only 3 rooms, but the atmosphere is intense.
Music: 3/ 5, I only remember the one track, but it unnerved me enough that I feel 3 is fair. However, the soundscape was quite limited in scope, so you get used to it or end up tuning it out.
Recommended: Yes! Probably among the best games (that I know of) that you can buy for under $10 CAD.

What is Magical Girl ER?

Magical Girl ER is a short horror visual novel and medical sim. Over the course of an in-game week, you’ll receive requests to admit magical girls to your hospital. You can turn them away or treat them using a variety of diagnostic and treatment methods, and you can save their lives or end them depending on how accurately you treat them. The story is drip-fed to you through daily newspaper articles, which serve as your connection to the outside world, and NPC encounters are completely RNG, offering a fresh gaming experience each time you restart to try for another of the 11 total endings.

What’s the Gameplay Loop in Magical Girl ER?

Magical Girl ER takes place over 8 days of in-game playtime. You’ll start out with your director, who gives you a brief rundown of how things work before he takes off and leaves you to hold down the fort. Each day, you’ll answer the phone. This either indicates a random event where an NPC will approach your window (these face to face parts were the ones I found scariest!), or a new patient transfer request that you can accept or refuse. Since you only have 4 beds to spare, a finite amount of stamina, and the hospital’s reputation to protect, your director advises that you only admit the famous magical girls and the ones with a low risk of dying while under your care. You can choose to follow this advice, or play your own way: try to save them all, try to kill them all… the choice is yours, and you have 11 endings to find by playing it differently each time. What’s more, which girls turn up & which events activate and when are mostly all RNG, so every play through is sure to be different.

When caring for patients, you are only allowed to administer 1 treatment to each patient each day, and have only 5 stamina points to use per day, so choose carefully when deciding what to do! While checking each girl’s temperature and heart rate are free actions, examining her neck, arm, abdomen, and talking to her to determine her current pain levels and mental state are all actions that consume one stamina point. With these limited moves, you need to diagnose her and issue the right treatment, or you might wake up and read about her death in the paper the next morning. If this happens, the hospital will suffer a big dent to its reputation, especially if a popular magical girl passes away. Handily, the game includes a little checklist of symptoms in the doctor’s manual, and as you check these off, it’ll narrow down her condition until you have your diagnosis. After that, you just have to provide the right treatment. The trick is knowing which examinations to make when you’re sharing your stamina across multiple girls, and deciding which issue is more likely from the symptoms you’ve discovered if your stamina runs out before you reach a finite answer!

Does Magical Girl ER Have a Story?

Magical Girl ER is a story-based game that drip-feeds you information from in-game newspaper articles each day, kind of like Kemono Teatime (which makes me think that a radio may also be a cool connection to the outside world that Magical Girl ER could add someday) and Dressmaker. At the start of the game, you read that there’s a kaiju threat and that magical girls are now considered front-line emergency response personnel. I won’t spoil anything that I’ve heard, but the newspaper articles can be sometimes sinister, and are a framing device I found kept me immersed in the game’s world as I started each day. However, you may feel like you’re left wanting more at the end of the 8th day, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing as the game doesn’t overstay its welcome, but it definitely feels like there are pieces missing. This kind of impacts how satisfying the endings feel in my experience, as they felt at times a little vague and more like interruptions to the gameplay than closure for it. 8 days feels pretty short all told, and I feel like I’d like the chance to select a longer, perhaps open-ended campaign so magical girls could potentially return to your care with different symptoms, or with character arcs to show: mental states impacted by more time spent on the front lines, maybe doubts in their minds about if they’d like this to be their fate, or hardened determination that the kaiju threat must end.

I’ll happily update this review if I discover different outcomes on future playthroughs, but from the multiple sessions I have made, we don’t know much about the doctor (that I’ve seen), or the magical girls or how they got injured, or even the kaiju, which you would think the girls would be keen to talk about. What are their motivations for fighting? Imagine if a girl told you her hope to bring peace to the world for their family, or as revenge for losing someone they loved, and they accidentally die on your operating table. That kind of thing would add weight and stakes to what, at the moment, feels like a revolving door of patients where your reputation matters more than their lives. I wish the girls would stay a little longer so we could talk more, understand them, and feel inspired to do all we can to save them. I’m also greedy for lore, so I’d love to be able to dig a little deeper into what the deal is with the girls, the kaiju, and the MIRAGE organization!

The game’s story feels mysterious in the same spooky way as Ever17, which was also wonderfully full of questions until you achieve all the endings, so maybe this is a me issue until I achieve all of those. However, going by the two I’ve achieved so far, Magical Girl ER feels like it leans just a little more towards undercooked. I still insist it’s worth playing however, as what’s there is brilliant bite-sized horror that’s very unique from anything else I’ve played before. My excitement for the concept and execution so far is probably the exact thing that makes me hungry for more!

By the looks of it the devs are very proactive about adding more content where players suggest it: they’ve since increased the stamina levels from 4 – 5, added new scenes between the girls if they’re in the hospital at the same time (though these can be tricky to activate since sometimes the girls don’t stay in the hospital very long at all if you’re on a roll with your treatments), and added thank you letters from the girls who are saved once they’re released from care. For this, I really respect the proactivity of the dev, and I’m very keen to see what new content might be added in the future. Chances are my score might rise next time I play!

How Scary is Magical Girl ER?

I don’t play much horror. I spent hours of my life watching Two Best Friends play through various Silent Hill games while I was pretending to study back in the Olden Times of my uni career in the 2010s, and I’ve read very thoroughly through the various wikis for Silent Hill, Rule of Rose, and Haunting Ground, but rarely have I sat down in front of the screen and had the stomach to play through an actual horror game. Something about them just triggers my anxiety and makes me jumpy for days afterward, if the atmosphere is good enough to unsettle me.

Magical Girl ER unsettled me. Take that as you will. I’ve seen a Steam review that claims the game couldn’t scare a toddler, and if that’s so, goo goo, gah gah, I guess. With only 3 unique screens, a droning tone, a ringing phone, and quite minimalist horror like uncanny details outside of its light sprinkling of jump scares, Magical Girl ER managed to make me close down the game because my brain noped out with the dread of what might happen next. It’s great stuff, especially as effects will build depending on how you choose to play: will you save everyone or turn some away? Will you drink the Drink? Will you make mistakes along the way? Will you let Them in? What was that I just saw?? Will you listen to what the hooded figure has to say? Ah, the scares are plentiful, and there’s different kinds on offer to make your hairs stand up. Even though runs last 20-30 minutes each time, there’s a wealth of replay value if you can stomach what might be lurking in the quiet and the dark, and I found it delightfully scary to the point I cannot play it alone.

The unfortunate thing is that the more you play, the more you come to predict the scares once you’ve seen them a few times, as they become ‘standard’: you know that that visual effect will happen as a result of this, and so you brace for it on subsequent playthroughs. It’s a good training ground, in that way, for horror newbies like myself to cut our teeth and harden our skin a bit. I haven’t yet experienced that the scares build to anything, either: a reveal that ties the horrors together, or a resolution of any kind that explains them or why certain things happen. Maybe the answers lie in another play through. I’ll have to be brave and keep searching for answers, because I desperately want to know who we, as the doctor, are, and why so many girls keep asking if we’ve met before…

What Specs are Required for Magical Girl ER?

Magical Girl ER isn’t a graphically demanding game at all, requiring a 64-bit processor, Windows 10, an Intel Core i3 or equivalent, a graphics card compatible with DirectX 11, and 4 GB of RAM. I’m running Windows 10, an AMD Ryzen 5 5600X 6-Core Processor, 16 GB of RAM, a Radeon RX 580 Series, 8 GB of VRAM, and the Razer peripherals on the slider below!

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