Alongside its intriguing name and its excellent lineage, Bibidi Bibidi has a wonderful central conceit.
That lineage first: half the team behind this Roguelite deckbuilder previously made Surmount, an anarchic and kinetic game about steadily flinging yourself up a mountain. Bibidi Bibidi keeps a lot of Surmount’s barely-contained nature intact. To play it is to feel that you’re dealing with unstable elements, any of which could explode without warning.
And that’s a good thing, because Bibidi Bibidi is a game about taking a wizard into battle, and wizards should probably feel unstable and a little dangerous. And we’ve arrived at the conceit! The big idea here is that you play your cards to create spells, so you’re effectively making a single card from three existing cards. Confusing? Not really. Here’s how it works.
Each card in Bibidi Bibidi has three sections. At the top, and often left empty, there’s the Boon section, which tells you what additional magic this card allows for. So maybe it grants a shield, or maybe it allows you to attack two enemies at once.
Attribution
Below the Boon is the School, which tells you which flavour of attack this is. Zap deals damage. Know brings new cards into your hand (I think; I tend to avoid it) and Bubble creates a shield around you. These are all very early cards, by the way.
Below the School is the Force, which is a number that indicates how much damage Zap does, for example, or how much of a shield Bubble grants you.
So the idea – and I love it – is to look at your hand, and then construct the card you want to play from parts of three of the cards you have in your hand. You’re basically casting a spell from separate components.
An example: you want to do damage to the enemy in front of you, but you’re also running low on health, and if your enemy survives your attack, they’ll attack you in return. So for the Boon I select a card that gives me additional shielding. For the School I select Zap to do damage, and for the Force, I choose the remaining card with the highest number: a three in this case. So I’ve made a card that does three damage and also grants me one shield.
This gets complicated, of course, when you have multiple things you want to do and the cards won’t line up. Maybe the best Boon is also on the only card that has Zap as its School: you’re going to need to choose between using that card for the Boon or the School. Throw in enemy attacks that don’t just do damage but mess with your cards – flipping them around or setting them on fire so they do damage to you when cast – and you have a game with a lot of tricky decisions, even in the early stages.
All of this is delivered with bright colours and thick-lined, characterful enemy designs. It’s a little like wandering through a playable kids’ book, but one of the really good ones that wants to scare the reader just a little bit. At the end of each battle you can select a new card to add to your deck, and occasionally you’ll come across shops on a run. When you’re finally defeated, you’re told that you Bibidied, which is pretty much perfection.
I love the ingenuity of this game, but also the detailing. Each part of a spell you make also triggers a different part of an incantation your on-screen wizard lets rip with, so you can defeat deadly foes with a scream of Bibbidi-oo-Alakazam or some-such brilliant nonsense. There’s a playable demo out now on Steam, and even if this isn’t your thing, it still does double duty as a reminder to check out Surmount, which is proper magic all by itself.