There was a moment early on in Koriko: A Magical Year, somewhere between sketching out my little witch-in-training’s emotional baggage and stacking a tower of dice like I’m trying to defuse a goddamned bomb with a mercury switch when I realized I was doing something I almost never really get to do in a journaling game.
I was playing.
Not merely responding to prompts. Not “writing through the vibes.” Playing. Like, a game. With choice and strategy.
I don’t mean to damn with faint praise here. Let me tell you, as someone who has dipped a toe (and occasionally a whole leg) into the journaling‑game pool: many of them are just structured creative writing exercises wearing a funny hat. Good hats, often! Hats with gorgeous artwork, solid premises, and shimmering themes, but still hats. Koriko has teeth. It’s not a complicated system by any means, but it has enough moving parts that I feel like arguing it’s a game isn’t bordering on sophistry.
The Part Where It’s Really a Game
Let’s start with the dice.
The dice‑stacking mechanic does something I’ve never seen in a solo journaling RPG. We’ll get to it, hold on. First, it produces risk and tension, and that I have seen before. Icarus does dice stacking directly. The Wretched & Alone system uses jenga blocks to the same effect. Here though, Koriko goes a step further. There’s some choice and strategy in your dice stacking, and that is new to me.
Do a risky thing? Sure. Tempt fate. Tilt the whole tower. If it topples, fallout happens. If it doesn’t, you learn a lesson, and lessons make future tests easier. But there are limited ways to earn these lessons, which means choosing what to risk and when actually matters. It feels like the emotional arc of a YA coming‑of‑age story hiding inside the physicality of a dexterity game, which like, I suppose was kind of what they were going for here.
And then there’s the prompt generation, which is similarly strategic. You’re navigating grids where completing a row or column gives you a mechanical benefit. You don’t just receive a list of prompts. Card draws lead to prompts, and you don’t get handed a deck whole cloth. The player has some limited agency in how those decks are built. Starting my second season, I found myself having the following conversation with myself:
“I could pray the deck serves me a chance to hang out with my friend… or I could engineer the twist prompts so I force that hangout scene.”
That, ladies, gentlemen, and otherwise, is a goddamned game. It’s the first time I’ve felt like I had some medium term strategy in what is predominantly a journaling game.
The Part Where It’s Also Just a Joy to Be In
Mechanics aside, Koriko nails its vibe.
The artwork, the prompt construction, the gentle but persistent themes—it’s all coherent without being precious. Even the random tables give you choice. Roll 2d6? Great. Assign each die to a list. Pick from a few selected prompts. It’s random, but you guide the randomness.
The book layout deserves a nod too. You start playing almost immediately. No 20‑page worldbuilding lecture, no mandatory lore immersion therapy. You get:
- The premise.
- The character‑creation mini‑game.
- The rules you’ll need for the real game.
- A shove into the first major segment of play.
It is mercifully uninterested in wasting your time.
The Quibbles (Because Nothing’s Perfect and Neither Am I)
These aren’t deal‑breakers, but they’re there.
Tarot lookup in PDF form is fiddly. I had physical cards to deal, but getting the resulting prompt from the PDF was rough. The PDF is indexed, and this helps immensely, but I can’t jump back and forth to the indexes easily, that is there are no back links or cross links. A physical book (and some sticky notes or book marks) would have helped me I think.
NPC generation is slightly more prescriptive than I want. Yes, I could chose my own name for the companions, but it’s not presented as a choice, and I took that personally.
The game‑game part doesn’t fully kick in until the second session. You don’t hit the city, and the mechanics that make this so special, until you’re already settled into the fiction. I think this pacing is exactly right, but it may lose players who need an immediate demonstration that “journaling games can be games.”
It really starts to feel samey. The game doesn’t really evolve as you play it, at all. Sure, the number of dice you have to stack when attempting something difficult change. It’s a great way of showing progression and mastery mechanically. Things start to feel less desperate. However, relationships don’t really change game play that much. Hitting a crossroad doesn’t feel that different than hitting a confidant event, and those are honestly pretty similar to the minor arcana.
It ends not with a bang, but with a whimper The final session plays more or less exactly like all of the sessions before it. Now, this might be intentional and tone. The day you leave a town (or don’t, as the case may be) is the same as any other day for that town. There’s a lesson in that, but it’s not the same for the protagonist, and that’s not reflected mechanically, at least not as much as it could or should be, imo.
Who Should Play This
This is one of those games that I think has pretty universal appeal. We all come of age at some point. Maybe some tween is nervous and wants to imagine what might happen. Maybe, like me, you’re older and queer and a little bitter about how things shook out and want to imagine what it could have been like with a little more understanding and magic in the world as you wandered out into it. Maybe you just really like Miyazaki movies and want to spend some time blending Kiki’s Delivery Service and Whispers of the Heart. This game could land with any of those people.
Here’s the thing: Koriko is a great first journaling game. It’s generous with its prompts, and the mechanics provide reasonable guidance. It’s also a great “Who hurt you?” journaling game in that it’s mechanically deep enough to convince someone who bounced off to give the genre a second try. It’s an excellent demonstration of what the genre could be when it remembers to give the player tools and a challenge beyond a blank page.
My strongest piece of advice?
Play it physically.
I used Obsidian, and… well, it was fine. I regret it though. Sincerely. The design wants a real journal. It wants a place where you can doodle or add washi tape or write a note in the margin like “ugh why is my mentor like this.” It leans beautifully into the bullet‑journal conceit. Next time I play, when, not if, I will be buying a journal for the express purpose of letting this game live in it.
Verdict
Koriko: A Magical Year is… well, it’s hard to talk about how I feel about it. Kind of funny, considering that the thrust of my character in the game was struggling with being able to discuss their feelings. I want to like it, and I do. The themes are on point, the mechanics reinforce the themes, it’s well made. It has more playing in it than the bulk of solo journaling games I’ve played.
That said, well, it has some big drawbacks for me too. I didn’t feel like I failed, even when I failed. It lacked bite, and that robbed the game of its tension. When I started losing relationships because I was excited to see the capstone element of companions, I felt cheated. Then I felt cheated a second time when I realized that crossroads weren’t mandatory and the game didn’t care about how many I had done in the end.
If you are a lover of solo journaling games, I think this is a great addition to your collection. It does a bunch of things differently in ways that are good, rather than just experimental. If you’ve never played a solo journaling game, it’s an excellent first entry into the genre.
And if you aren’t either of those people? It’s pretty missable. Koriko is honestly just good. It could have been great, really, but it fails to deliver on the promise it lays out with a really strong opening. As it is, it’s a solo journaling game with more game than almost every solo journaling game I’ve ever played, but that’s me damning it with faint praise.