My review for Threads of Magic
Threads of Magic is a free game by bkomei available on itch.io for Windows and Mac about the tailor for magical girls, magical girls aren’t always limited to girls in this game, and how they sew the clothes for the new magical users. I enjoyed it and would recommend it, spoilers past this point so read on knowing that I’ll spoil most of the plot and mechanics so if you either want to play it first or are avoiding spoilers for whatever reason, then maybe don’t go any further.  I am also going to use magical girls as a term to describe the concept of the powers as a whole even though not all of them are girls.
Threads of Magic has a nonbinary protagonist that works on making costumes for magical girls to use after they get their powers. Have you ever wondered about where the costumes of magical girls come from? Well now, you have a feasible explanation to how they are made and distributed. Personally the idea that someone is making them rather than the costumes just appearing from magic, makes the clothes much more meaningful and thought out. I also like the concept that they make clothes for a lot of different planets and that each planet has slightly varying magical girl mechanics.
There are three stories which each have a costume of their own to make. For each of them once you pull the dangling cord with the star, a scene plays out which contains the events that caused them to become a magical girl and then the gameplay starts where you make the costume.
I really enjoyed the process of making the costumes, I would recommend a steady hand and to be paying attention though. My hand can be shaky and I was also using a touchpad and not a mouse and I struggled a little with the cutting and sewing of the costumes while the decorations were no issue for me. It’s just something to be aware of, it’s not a fault of the game but just something that affected my individual gameplay.
You are issued a score at the end and there is a bar that fills up as you progress through making the clothes, I am unsure whether this affects the outcome of the story if you get a low score, however the gameplay isn’t very complicated so I wouldn’t worry too much about that. After all the costumes have been created, the mannequins dangling cord with the star comes back and you are able to view what happened after they received their costume.
The first person to make an outfit for is Lea who jumps in front of a big monster to save her friend and girl that she loves Renni who was already a magical girl from danger. The magical girl magic in their world seems to come from these tiny hamster-like creatures with wings.
Ely’s magic comes from something called The Heart in a world where most people are magical and they were doubting whether they were going to get their Resonance which is the name for the powers in their world because they say that they don’t want to date, kissing is unappealing and when talking about Amir, they say “I love him, just not in the way he wanted me to.”
A group of magical girls call out to Hana who is a trans girl and ask her to form a contract with them when they are in danger, she finds out that in their world magical girls can only pass magic onto magical girls and so on for other genders too.
Some other thing about this game is that I find the art and music really cute and there is a type of bunny with wings and a long tail that you can pet called Thimbles. To end the game, click on the couch and after a short scene the game will end.
So, what did I think of the game? Well you just read a lot of my thoughts so I’d hope you know by now. To be serious about that question though, I think it’s a very cute game with fun gameplay and thought out stories that are told in a great way. I know that I didn’t fully explain everything about the stories so you may have to seek out the game yourself or watch a video about it to fully get that if you want to, I just felt as if I was repeating what the game already said in trying to explain the stories further. I like that we get to see three different magic systems from three different planets and explore them all a little bit. I like that the protagonist is non-binary and that the stories we see have a great range of identities. I think it was very well done and it’s definitely a game that I would play again and share with a friend.
