Hogwarts Legacy is a 6/10 game that preys heavily on player nostalgia. It constructs a place players have never visited, in a world that doesn’t exist, but that has been alive in imaginations around the world for 25 years. It then fails to do anything interesting with its setting, or indeed come up with a single truly original idea of its own. It is the very definition of a AAA game in 2023 — derivative, shapeless, and wrapped in a popular third-party IP.
What Hogwarts Legacy is built to do, from the first, is disarm you. It is purpose-built for convincing the player (and I’ll borrow a phrase from Waypoint) to give in to astonishment. Every single one of its major flaws is lampshaded with fan service bullshit in the hope that you’ll be too starry-eyed to notice or care. It starts this process by crafting a detailed and explorable model of the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, something even the 2000s tie-in games struggled to do. And it is, for sure, impressive. The atmospherics have been finely tuned to evoke the eight-strong series of Warner Bros. films more than anything written by the Queen of Terf Island. Hogwarts Legacy ties itself in knots to avoid anything approaching JK Rowling’s increasingly awful views, despite using the world she created as its canvas and ensuring that she will receive compensation for its success through royalties. It also deploys a period setting over the more contemporary setting of the novels and films, in an effort to bottle its story and avoid doing any canonical harm.
But once the novelty of being in the castle wears off — that lasted around two or three hours for me, but your mileage may vary — you begin to realise how hollow the experience actually is. Its quest design is not terribly inspiring, mostly fetch quests that require long traipses around the game’s needlessly massive open world. I know it’s needlessly massive because the game contains four different modes of transportation, each significantly faster than the last, in hopes of convincing you that travel isn’t a dull pain in the arse. Walking anywhere takes forever. Flying on a broom takes only slightly less time than walking. Flying on a Hippogriff is like flying in a jet. And finally, there’s the Floo Network that, once each port is unlocked, can be used for instant fast travel.
Then there are the quests that attempt to evoke moments or memories from the Harry Potter stories, many of which result in a breaking of the established rules of Rowling’s world. The novels drill the basic rules of Hogwarts into the reader’s head — as do the films, but to a lesser extent. We know what they are. No roaming the halls after curfew. No using Unforgiveable Curses at school. No entering the Restricted Section in the library. No leaving the castle grounds except on specific days when it is acceptable to visit the village of Hogsmeade. And stay the hell out of the Forbidden Forest.
Hogwarts Legacy lets you break all these rules, and, unlike in the novels, it is not considered a transgression. There is no punishment for any of it. I can roam the halls of the school all night if I want, and (outside of one specific questline that introduces the Alohamora lockpicking charm) no one ever tries to stop me. I can fuck off up the hill to Hogsmeade at any time, day or night. I can access any part of the castle I want, and barge through any locked door. I can scrabble around in staff quarters looking for dinglehoppers and reading their emails all day long. I can run around in the Forbidden Forest as much as I like, wiping out the local spider population like I’m pest control.
After one quest that involves sneaking into the Restricted Section in the library after dark, the danger never comes up again. I’m free to dick around down there as much as I want. Nobody says shit.
(Extremely Griffin McElroy voice) They can’t touch me.
And here’s the crazy part — your character is a Fifth Year that, according to the game, has never picked up a wand before and is starting school as a late enrollment. You want to talk about a Mary Sue character, Hogwarts Legacy turns you into the ultimate fan fiction know-it-all. Despite having to cram four years of magical education into a half-day Friday, they’re great at every spell from the second they learn it. In addition to being apparently the only student in the castle not bound to its rules, they can ditch their daily robes and wear whatever bizarre clothes they want. They have the ear of the Charms professor from the moment they arrive at the school. They’re allowed to directly choose their house (regardless of the ancient Pottermore data the game draws from to predict your pick). They’re allowed to gallivant around the countryside, murdering poachers and dark wizards with powerful spells, right out of the gate, and all of this goes on under the supposedly piercing gaze of Headmaster Phineas Nigellus Black, who is canonically a real prick.
All of this to say: for fans obsessed with authenticity, Hogwarts Legacy is frequently only skin-deep. Obviously, a lot of these things are video game concessions. Developer Avalanche doesn’t want you getting frustrated by having to creep around the castle at night, because that could become tedious. But it would make the castle more interesting, and it would introduce something else you could do in there beyond hoovering up a number of collectibles that would make Banjo-Kazooie sit up and take notice.
There are moments where Avalanche demonstrates an interest in translating daily life in the castle into real mechanics. A potions class begins with a reminder that it is an exact science, and that care must be taken in what you add, but also when. You run through a short quick time event that demonstrates this effectively. The designers clearly thought about how best to communicate the exactitude of potion-making through the controller. That’s why it’s such a shame that it never comes up again. Every potion you make after that is done through a submenu that shows you the required ingredients. Confirm the potion, and a countdown timer begins. Once the timer resolves, your potion is ready and is dumped unceremoniously into your inventory with the others. Herbology gets the same treatment. It reduces something that could have felt more tactile, interesting, or immersive to a passive progress bar.
And then there’s combat, which is perhaps Hogwarts Legacy at its most complex. Across several schools of magic, your character can accrue and upgrade an arsenal of spells for offence, defence, and in-world manipulation. Though you begin with only four spell spots, you can quickly expand this to a total of 16 as you level up and unlock talents. Your standard fire shoots small, fast bolts of stun energy. Holding down the R2 trigger and tapping the face button your spell is bound to will cause it to fire off. Though there’s no ‘magic bar’ per se — magic is innate, it wouldn’t make sense to have you draw from a pool of it — spells used in combat have cooldown timers to keep you from spamming them. However, the cooldowns are short and you’ll quickly rack up enough spells to become a magic damage howitzer. It’s fine. Combat plays exactly like every other AAA action RPG of the last five years, including WB Games’ own Shadow of War and Gotham Knights.
In the end, Hogwarts Legacy feels like it accomplishes the very clear goal it sets out to achieve: evoke the movies and give the player big warm-and-fuzzies for a series of books and films they read as children and as teenagers. Like the Veil that flutters deep within the Department of Mysteries, beautiful and oddly alluring, you can catch glimpses of something great in Hogwarts Legacy, but when you move around the Veil to inspect the other side, there simply isn’t much there.
Do not give in to astonishment.
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