Nine Parchments

The pitch: Trine's studio, a different universe, and a co-op spellcasting romp

Nine Parchments sends a party of runaway wizard apprentices through Frozenbyte's hand-painted fantasy world, gathering the titular scattered spellbook pages while blasting, freezing and electrocuting enemies with a growing roster of elemental spells. Frozenbyte, best known for the Trine series, shipped it as a full 1.0 on 5 December 2017 with no Early Access period, positioned explicitly as a 1-4 player co-op game with local and online play both supported. Roughly 4,100 Steam reviews later it sits at Mostly Positive — about 77.5% positive — and the shape of that split is unusually clear once you read past the headline number: the game itself divides opinion less than a specific, unpatched bug does.

Where the design succeeds: elemental co-op chaos, in Frozenbyte's usual style

Set the bug aside for a moment, because there's real, consistently-praised design underneath it. Frozenbyte's signature hand-painted art direction transfers well into Nine Parchments' setting, and it's one of the only things reviewers on both sides of the recommend line agree on without qualification. The spellcasting itself layers combinable elemental effects — freeze an enemy then shatter them with a follow-up hit, ignite a puddle a teammate laid down — with genuine friendly fire between party members, which reviewers repeatedly cite as the source of the game's best, most chaotic co-op moments. It's frequently and fairly compared to Magicka, the genre's most obvious reference point, though several reviewers are explicit that Nine Parchments trades Magicka's freeform, combo-based spellcasting for a more restrictive cooldown system — a simplification some reviewers appreciate for accessibility and others specifically blame for a shallower ceiling.

The bug that keeps recurring: private games that don't stay private

The complaint that shows up most consistently, and most seriously, across Nine Parchments' review history has nothing to do with spell balance or art direction. Multiple, independent reviewers across a five-year span — 2020, 2021, 2023, 2025 — describe the same specific bug: a multiplayer session explicitly set to private randomly switches to public, letting uninvited strangers join a game the host never opened up. Several describe trolls specifically exploiting this to disrupt or grief sessions, in at least one case rejoining a lobby repeatedly after being kicked. One 2019 review states plainly that the developer confirmed the game is "no longer supported" — a claim that lines up with how long this specific bug has persisted across reviews written years apart with no report of a fix. For a game whose entire design premise is trusted co-op with friends, a bug that silently removes the ability to keep a session private is a genuinely serious flaw, not a minor annoyance, and it's fair to weight it more heavily than the more subjective "it's Magicka-lite" complaints sitting alongside it in the same review page.

A second, more structural complaint compounds the first: there's no level or chapter select on standard difficulty, so returning to an earlier level — to collect a missed collectible, or to unlock a character whose payoff you want to see sooner — means replaying the entire roughly 30-level campaign from the start. Reviewers call this actively punishing rather than just inconvenient, especially combined with a large cast of unlockable characters that gives you every reason to want to revisit earlier content.

Solo play, and the cast of characters the co-op design is built around

Nine Parchments does technically support solo play, but reviewers are unusually unanimous that it's a fundamentally different, worse experience than the game the box actually advertises. Enemy density and difficulty are tuned around a full party sharing crowd control and elemental combos between them; alone, several reviewers describe specific enemy types — ones that repeatedly freeze or stun a single target — as close to unfair, since there's no teammate available to break the effect or draw aggro elsewhere. One reviewer's blunt summary: singleplayer "didn't work for me at all because you are too reliant" on party mechanics that simply don't exist without other players. That's a reasonable design choice for a game explicitly built around co-op, but it means the store page's solo-mode listing reads more like a technical fallback than something worth buying the game for on its own.

The character roster mitigates some of the campaign's structural stiffness. A growing cast of unlockable wizards, each with different staff options and spell affinities, gives a returning group real reason to revisit levels together even with the no-chapter-select restriction working against casual replay — trading which apprentice each player controls changes the elemental combos available to the party in a given run, and several positive reviews specifically cite discovering new spell synergies as the thing that kept a friend group coming back across multiple sessions.

Verdict

Nine Parchments delivers exactly what its pitch promises when the technology behind it cooperates: a beautiful, chaotic, genuinely fun co-op spellcasting romp with real teamwork depth in its elemental combos. The honest complication is that "when the technology cooperates" isn't guaranteed — a specific, multi-year, seemingly unpatched bug can quietly strip away the private-session control the whole design depends on, and the developer's own reported statement that the game is no longer supported means there's little reason to expect that to change. At its frequent steep discount, with a friend group you trust and a habit of double-checking your lobby's visibility before every session, it's still an easy recommendation. Buy it expecting to manage that risk yourself, not expecting Frozenbyte to fix it for you.