Mirage: Miracle Quest Feels Like Playing A Magical Girl Anime In Its New Steam Demo

Just because a game looks like a cute Saturday morning cartoon doesn’t mean it has to take it easy on you. Mirage: Miracle Quest was recently featured in December’s Wholesome Snack 2025 showcase, offering a look at its potent mix of cute and challenging. Along with the game’s trailer, the showcase also included the announcement that Mirage: Miracle Quest is getting its first demo, letting potential players take a first look at the charming turn-based RPG themselves.

In Mirage: Miracle Quest, you play as Mirage, the descendant of the long-missing Eos, an otter deity whose story Mirage’s late grandmother reveals in a dream. This being a fantasy RPG, the gods are more than likely going to be making a more personal appearance at some point, but in the demo, Mirage awakes from her dream for the more mundane quest of picking up groceries.

Mirage: Miracle Quest makes a great first impression, with an impossibly cute aesthetic and upbeat, cheerful music from the very beginning. Everything from its pixel art to its catchy tunes might give the impression that it’s a low-stakes cozy game, but it soon becomes clear that it’s not afraid to bare its fangs a little.

At the grocery store, Mirage confronts a would-be thief, giving players a first look at the game’s battle system. When combat starts, Mirage gets a full-fledged magical girl transformation, dawning a changeable outfit that affects her stats and wielding a wand that determines which spells she brings into the fight.

Even in its early moments, the combat system in Mirage: Miracle Quest shows off a lot of intriguing ideas. Mirage’s spells (and those of her party members, who join later in the game) are represented by a hand of cards. A helpful menu option lets you pick one card as your favorite, which will always appear in your hand, but the rest are picked randomly and shuffled back into your deck as you use them. Each attack has an elemental type, and hitting enemies with one they’re weak to will eventually stagger them letting you do more damage, much like the combat in Octopath Traveler.

Even early on, Mirage: Miracle Quest isn’t pulling its punches. The first fight in the game likely won’t give you any trouble, but shortly after, the enemies you face start hitting harder and inflicting status effects that can quickly take out your adorable adventurer. Even your own abilities have a nice sense of push and pull to them, with some that drain a chunk of your health for more powerful attacks, balanced by skills that return a portion of the damage they do back to their caster as healing.

Getting enough experience to level up means you get to pick a new ability card, and while there’s not enough time for too many choices in this early demo, it’s already clear how much room there is to specialize your characters and build decks that synergize with one another. Between custom card decks, costume changes, and Mirage’s ability to cook meals that grant stat boosts and other effects, Mirage: Miracle Quest seems to be pushing players to craft their own playstyle and there’s a lot of flexibility on display there already.

A good portion of the demo takes place in Mirage’s hometown, but before too long, you venture out into the wider world to look for the source of a food shortage that’s got everyone back home worried. That’s where it becomes clear that, just as the game isn’t shying away from difficult combat, there’s a lot more going on in its seemingly cozy setting than it first appears. Like a deceptively cute magical girl anime taking a dark turn, Mirage: Miracle Quest quickly reveals that it’s going to pit Mirage against some truly dangerous forces in the world, as even by the end of the demo, her peaceful illusion of home is shattered.

After spending an afternoon with it, Mirage: Miracle Quest has become one of my most anticipated RPGs. It still doesn’t have a release date yet, but its demo is available on Steam now for a preview of how it’s shaping up.