Rhell: Warped Words & Troubled Times Is Redefining Magic with 102 Million Spell Possibilities

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In most fantasy games, magic follows rules you’re expected to memorize. You unlock a spell, assign it to a button, and use it exactly as intended. Rhell: Warped Words & Troubled Times is taking a radically different approach. Ahead of its March 12, 2026 release on Steam, Yogscast Games and developer SlugGlove have revealed new details about a spellcasting system built not around predefined abilities, but around experimentation, language, and discovery.

At the heart of Rhell’s design is a simple but ambitious idea: what if spells weren’t selected from a list, but constructed by the player? Instead of equipping abilities, you combine magical “runes,” each acting as a keyword with its own properties. With more than 40 unique runes and over 102 million possible combinations, the game transforms spellcasting into an open-ended puzzle system rather than a rigid mechanic.

Rhell is a mystical adventure built around solving environmental challenges, and spells function as tools for creative problem-solving. Combining ice and smoke, for example, produces snow. Cast that spell on the protagonist, and she transforms into a rolling snowball that gathers mass as it moves. Manipulating time offers another layer of experimentation. Slow time and speed it up in the same incantation, and the system interprets the contradiction by pausing time altogether.

According to creator Alice Jarratt, the goal is to “make spellcasting feel like discovery rather than execution.” “Some of the most powerful or surprising spells”, she notes, “may be ones the developers themselves have not yet encountered.”