Game: Whimel Academy
Genre: Early Access, Life Sim, Time Management, RPG
System: Steam (Windows)
Developers | Publishers: Impossible Home
Controller Support: Yes
Price: US $14.99 | UK £12.79 | EU € 14,79
Release Date: October 9th, 2024
A review code was provided; many thanks to Starfall PR.
Whimel Academy is a cozy life sim time management game about a witch or wizard student pursuing their education at the prestigious Whimel Academy. It was developed and published by Impossible Home in 2024.
The Gameplay of Whimel Academy,
As students at Whimel Academy, our main goal is to graduate successfully within six in-game years. Each year has two semesters, each consisting of four weeks. We have a limited number of activities we can do in a day—six activities for six parts of the day—morning, noon, afternoon, evening, night, and late night. The only available activity late at night is sleep, which also serves as saving and starting the new day.
Classes are during the morning and the afternoon and can be skipped, but that will reflect on your school grades. If you have good attendance, you might get a scholarship in form of coins for the next semester.
Going to class also unlocks different locations where one might practice skills, study and even do small tasks for coins. Even part-time jobs still require your skills to evolve.
On weekends we get to go shopping. There are several shops, each offering useful items for our career as a witch or wizard in training. One of the shops sells furniture and decorations for our dorm room. The shops change stock each week and from time to time have sales.
Magic Skills
Whimel Academy is not a solitary experience- we get to meet several charming and mysterious side characters and build lasting platonic or romantic relationships with them. Opportunities for socializing are shown on the map as little floating portraits or if you are already on location – fruits or flowers in circles. Socializing isn’t mandatory to progress the game. You can spend all of your time at Whimel Academy without talking to a single soul.
Whimel Academy offers a nice variety of skills and different tracks of magic. There are over 30 different endings depending on combinations of stats you’ve created for your character. The levelling up of skills is slow, though. I didn’t like that we started at level zero and had to work up to level 1 and beyond. But considering that the idea is to develop some skills instead of others, this levelling up system makes perfect sense.
Each activity, be it working or studying, takes a lot of energy. Energy can be recovered by sleeping, eating of playing with you cat familiar. On the other hand, you take time, which could be used to earn coins.
If there’s a thing that needs polishing, I think it would be the time/money management system. The part-time jobs make 3 to 5 coins and take a whole time period. Comparably, food in the cafeteria is around 12-15 coins, books in the shop are around 20 coins, and some objects needed for class and skill development are around 40 coins. Decorations and furniture for the dorm start from 100 coins. The above-mentioned scholarship was worth about 60 coins. I think that either prices and wages have to be adjusted or the number of activities for a day should be increased.
Some Other Things
Whimel Academy is still in Early Access, which means that the developer is still patching and making changes to the game. Whimel Academy has Steam Achievements, but no trading cards yet. It has basic audio and display settings and some accessibility options such as dyslexic font, sparkles on interactable objects, map labeling, larger font.
Conclusion
Whimel Academy is a cozy game, that sucks you in easily and keeps you for quite a while. The fact that the game looks hand-drawn is a nice bonus. I, for one, can’t wait to see how the game develops and what else the developer has in store for us.
Final Verdict: I Like it a Lot. 
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