Mahou Arms

by Paperbag

3.0 (20 votes)

Unreal Engine Completed v1.0.2516

Game Details

Version: v1.0.2516
Developer: Paperbag
Engine: Unreal Engine
Status: Completed
OS
Language: English
Censored: No
Updated: 30 July 2026

About

Humanity is losing. The alien 'Locks have nearly finished the job, and GARDA's last card is a squad of magical girls built for the fight. You're their commander, a former prisoner of war now responsible for keeping a small, underequipped unit alive long enough to matter.

Between missions you're back at base getting to know the soldiers under your command, the kind of downtime that decides who fights well together and who doesn't. Out in the field you drop into direct control for the hack-and-slash combat, cutting through 'Lock forces as the story pushes through its chapters. The game backs this up with a leveling and skill system and a spread of spells to earn along the way, so the ragtag group you start with is not the one you finish with.

Changelog

v1.0.2516

No changelogs shared
Holy smokes, it's been a long time, but we're here at last! Mahou Arms 1.0 is now available on Steam and the Mahou Arms Patreon Launcher!
Here's a quick summary of what's been added since the last update:
Three New Story Chapters, and tweaks to the existing chapters (7, 8, and 9)
Leveling and Skills System
A Whole Bunch of Spells to Unlock
More Enemies
Full Voice Acting for the Main Story (Partial Voiceover for the rest)
Animated Opening Movie
Romance Side Quests for Amelia and Susan
With this update, the story of Mahou Arms is now complete! However, we still plan to add additional content, story, and refinements as we go. The promised costumes are next on our priority list, in particular.
If you have been playing Mahou Arms already, we strongly recommend starting a new game to experience the full story, since more content has been added and changes made to earlier levels. It will also ensure you are properly leveled as you progress through the game.
In any case, we won't take up any more of your time. Thank you for your continued support. Go play the game! We sincerely hope you enjoy it. Let us know what you think.

v0.4.2036

Hotfix Build 0.4.2036 is now live! It addresses the following bugs:
Missions should no longer mistakenly lock when loading a game. This previously required a game restart to fix
Holster now works after you load a game. This previously required a new game to fix
Activate Helper Button in Journal now displays the input properly when using gamepad input mode
Game no longer gets stuck in cinematic mode after pressing "Nevermind" at the bed when there's a queued quest reward present
NPCs in Exodus's entrance no longer have clones
Performance in New Inverness has been improved due to a level being mistakenly streamed in at runtime. This also caused the Exodus NPC clone bug
Game should default to 60fps when running for the first time. (After this update, your settings will reset, but it shouldn't again after this)
Player should no longer see a pure fog screen when loading into New Inverness briefly
Projectiles should despawn properly now when their owner is killed
Hole in floor collision near Exodus entrance fixed
Default Inventory rewards will now be granted when there's an update to the default inventory items. This means that you will get a bunch of extra potions when you load in from an old save, and your Holster might reset. This is intentional.

v0.4.2027

Build 0.4.2027 is live! This build includes a new story chapter, new places to explore, side quests, NPCs, towns, soul retrieval, an overhauled spell and holster system, and much more! There are also various tweaks, bugfixes, and some general QoL tweaks and fixes.
Sorry about the especially long wait on this one. This is a massive update that sets the game's structure up for final release and it required a herculean art and coding effort to tear up the foundations of the game and rebuild where necessary. Chapter 1 to Chapter 4 are now directly connected, which means Act 1 of the main story is now complete. With that said, here's an expanded list of the changes:

Chapter 2: On The Run

This is a chapter that takes place in cyberspace. Seiko is a secret AI project created by a defunct techno-cult prior the warlock invasion. Her datacenters are being targeted by Jen's army. How does she end up as an ally of the human resistance? Find out in the cybernetic out-of-body experience that is Chapter 2.
The Vanaheim:
The Vanaheim is a pre-war aircraft carrier that serves as GARDA's home base. All your immediate comrades live onboard, including Amelia, Jack, and Yin. Also onboard is a settlement of refugees named The Ark. You will also find the the Crew Quarters and Commander's Office here, which houses the main characters.
New Inverness Expanded:
New places have been added to New Inverness. Within, you'll find a bounty of items, enemies, and survivors in the snow.
Astoria:
Your efforts in Chapter 1 lead to the resettling of Pier 48. The new residents have named it Astoria after a town east of New Inverness. The residents decided its name upon finding a displaced Astoria sign that made the ten kilometer journey unscathed.
Exodus:
Some survivors have settled in an underground mall east of the Main Street area. You don't have much business here yet, but you get the feeling there's something strange going on.
New Quests:
Foraging with Piro: After finding your way to Rockefallen's entrance in Chapter 3, Piro asks for some help reclaiming lost items. Should you take this chance to know her better?
Survey Drones: Arthur, a crew member onboard the Vanaheim, wants your help jump starting the Search-and-Rescue Drones program.
The Hermits: You've heard rumors of a hermit family in New Inverness somewhere, all alone. Can you convince them to move to a safer place?
Lost Souls: What's this eerie flame in your room? Follow Seiko's instructions and find out.
NPCs:
It's not just you, Piro, and the 'Locks in New Inverness anymore. Say hi to your new neighbors! This one took a lot of work...
Spellscards and Toolspells:
The bones of the Spells system have been added. Spells and Toolspells can be selected in the new Equip menu, accessible from the Pause menu. Currently only Butterfly Ball and the drones are accessible, but new ones will be added.
Soul Retrieval:
Patrons who submitted a Soul Retrieval Form can now have their Souls retrieved inside New Inverness and placed in drones. This system will be expanded later.
Other Changes (Since V.0.3.1581):
Clothing Battle Damage no longer automatically heals on partial health replenishment. To repair clothing, replenish a character's healthbar to full.
Character models got a minor art polish pass on the faces and skin textures.
Characters now look at each other when talking.
Background music will now continue to play while levels load.
Equip menu added.
Inventory and Quest Journal Menu received a face lift.
More tutorials added (WIP).
Tutorials now all have a reminder for how to find them again on the final page.
Quests now have images in the Journal.
Items now get directly added to the player's inventory when interacted with.
Skip button added to dialogue.
Dialogue Text Size in Accessibility Settings now affects Manga Text Bubbles.
Onscreen UI indicators have been added to doors, fast travel elevators, tilt-rotor travel, etc.
UI should now gracefully respond down to narrow aspect ratios down to 4:3 and up to ultrawide resolutions.
Enemy AI now assign a Priority Enemy in their behaviour when they are attacked, which does two things:
This allows for Defend-the-Objective combat scenarios to work since you can aggro them away from an objective.
This also slightly optimizes the AI code since they no longer need to iterate through the Tracked Characters array every AI tick to check Threat Level.
Combat balance adjustments.
Background Music for Chapter 1 has been changed.
Fix an auto-repeat button bounce issue in Menus.
Fixed a bug where you can load a save even where there isn't one in the Rest Point menu, which softlocks the game on a black screen.
Fixed a bug where Use indicators pop up above tutorials.
Various optimizations all over the game, including UI, Game Systems, Models & Materials, Rendering, etc.
Various edits to screenplays, item descriptions, UI, tutorials, etc.
Quest rewards have been added
After Chapter 3 is completed, if you have a save with previously completed quests, sleep in your bed. When you wake up, Piro will call you and drop the owed rewards in your inventory. This will work in the future as well if an update adds more rewards to a quest you have already completed.
Quest journal no longer lets you activate completed quests
Beds and sleeping added to the game
Additional furniture added in human environments
The player should no longer fall through the ground if the survey drone is activated and the player flies it outside of the character's level
More physical materials have been flagged for various mechanics that rely on the flags
The Tasks widget on the top right of the screen now shows the quest name
Sound implementation adjustments and additions
The leaderboard for drone races can save previous race's data into the wrong leaderboard, corrupting the leaderboard data. This has been fixed.
Mortar fuse time for the Arbalest enemy has been lengthened from 1.5s to 1.75s
The crosshair widget should no longer double when the hud is hidden and reshown
Also found here.

Chapter 4 Build (0.3.1146)

As mentioned in our previous announcement, Chapter 4 releases today! There's a big changelog in that post, but we managed to squeeze a couple more tweaks and fixes into the build. The additional changelog is below. Have fun!
Screen Weather Effects setting added to Graphics Settings
Graphics settings grouped
Fix: various out-of-bounds bugs
Fix: transforming and shooting enemies with guns, then transforming back will get Amelia stuck facing the enemy she shot until another attack is executed
Fix: pressing jump and light attack at the same time no longer gives Amelia an undesirable amount of height
Fix: Collision spot for the golden key at the parking lot on Chapter 4 persists after picking it up
Fix: Carnassus's swords spawning attack sticks to the ground better
Fix: Carnassus's encounter no longer has cars where she can get stuck
Fix: Turret enemy can't get up after certain attacks, and cannot be launched with launch attacks
Fix: Amelia can move while loading saves
Fix: Sounds can be heard during initial loading
Dialogue portraits added to Extra Mission 1
Various UI Fixes
Various Sound Mixing fixes, especially during loading
Probes in Ch.4 Boss Stairway removed
Fix: Extra Mission 1 Player Spawn was set to wrong place
Fix: Dining Room Alien Key Meshes invisible
Some optimizations to CPU thread related to fetching enemies
Fix: Probe's ball attack gets stuck when cutscenes start, sometimes sticks to walls
Fix: The massive syringe outside the stairs to the Gold Baroness sometimes disappears
Tweaks to item spawn rates

v.0.1.616

Is now available via the Launcher! (Censored and Uncensored builds now use the same numbers)
Biggest update for this build is the inclusion of Story Mission 01.
Changes since last Bleeding build:
Hitstops
Camera code overhaul
Autocamera mode (activated on camera reset and after a while of running around without input)
New Lockon Behavior (Instructions in Inputs Doc)
Huge CPU performance optimizations for characters & enemies
Inventory system
Quests system (currently unused in this build)
Item chests
Enemy Item Drops
New hit effects
Combat adjustments
AI adjustments
Balance adjustments
Changes since last Public build:
All of the above
Transformation System
Story Mission 01 + Turret Enemy
Gallery Mode (WIP) (Uncensored builds only)
New HScene in Gallery (Uncensored builds only)
Various lighting tweaks
Known Issues:
Healing with items doesn't show the HP bar in menus
Healing doesn't automatically cap when the player's health is full
Healing shows damage particle effect
Hair physics are a little broken. In the process of adding an accessory system at the moment, so this will be fixed after that.
Enjoy! If you have any feedback, make sure to leave it on our discord channel.
Note: This is a big patch, please be patient as it applies. If the patching process seems to fail, you can click the "Delete Local Files" button in the settings and then install the build from scratch.
Launcher Updates
In addition to a new public build, there have also been some changes to the Mahou Arms Launcher:
Pledge rewards and Soul Retrieval Forms are now available from the Launcher
Some warnings have been added/moved to the user dropdown
Your Patreon avatar now shows in the app
Hope you like the changes. Let us know if you run into any problems.
Bleeding build 0.1.525
please use the patcher to update your version to it by clicking the gear and changing the channel to bleeding. This build releases a 98% done version of Story Mission into the wild! the last 2% will be revisited later. To access, select Start Game and then select 'MIS_ST_01'. The previous demo is also available by selecting the other option, TrainingRoom00. In addition, the gallery is now in (a bit buggy and missing in features at the moment, but at least it's in)
Other changes:
A ton of polish on combat, hitboxes, some minor combo chain changes, AI, etc.
Various lighting tweaks
New Turret Enemy
New Hscene in the gallery. This one has multiple camera angles! Use RT and LT on a controller or 1 and 2 to switch angles.
Ton of work on game systems for open world gameplay
Probably a lot more, it's been nearly 200 revisions since the last bleeding build.
Known bugs:
Currently gallery lists the hscenes with "..." instead of names. Clicking on them will still lead you to the scenes, it's just the names that are broken.
If an enemy is below Amelia and she shoots her pistol, the recoil can perpetually propel her upwards until she breaches the heavens.
Enemies will keep bouncing above Amelia if they land directly above her.
Probably a lot more

v0.0.256 & v0.0.257

Builds 0.0.256 (censored) and 0.0.257 (uncensored) are now available via the launcher! The standalone version of the censored build will also be up in a couple hours.
The transformation system hasn't made its way into this build yet as there are still things to fix.
Here are the changes / fixes for this build compared to the previous bleeding build (0.0.215):
major polish pass on all combat animations (WIP)
balance on all attacks
combat sound polish / placeholder replacement (WIP)
quick optimization pass on the cube enemies, more to come later.
Sliding has been almost completely removed and replaced with root motion in animations
fix the lock on victory screen issue
fix the kick/punch throwing the hitbox
fix wrong settings reported on first run of game
added a cheaper, bone-based semen painting system until some stability issues with the previous system can be resolved
And here is the changelist compared to the previous demo build (0.0.206 & 0.0.207):
Changes:
Battle Damage skins added. Dropping down to 75%, 50%, and 25% health should now progressively remove more pieces of Amelia's clothing.
Basic Gallery Mode for the H-Scene. To access, select HScene from the main menu. As not even global savegames work yet, this is always on for now. In the future, scenes will require an unlock, and there will be a scene browser.
Giving directional input during attacks should now only rotate the character instead of also moving the character. This helps a LOT with overshooting. Previous behavior scaled down the input vector length by 0.0001, which was a hacky solution that never felt quite right. This should make soft lock and attacking in general while providing directional input feel way better.
Full length version of the battle BGM implemented.
H-game Changes:
the time windows for the QTEs are increased from 1 to 2 seconds.
all the QTE inputs are now one button so your hand never has to leave the same position. (Y or DPad up for gamepad, Space or Enter for keyboard.)
The pink heart's radius has been increased by 50%.
Minor Changes & Bugfixes:
Fixed dialogue screens advancing very slowly when time is slowed down.
Corrupted Office Ladies now have 500 knockback instead of 2000 on their attacks.
character should no longer fly backwards occasionally during backflip
Ground pound should no longer activate when it's cancelled in midair once the character hits the ground again.
Corrected spelling/grammar errors
Outline for ADV text for improved legibility
Jump now cancels the same amount of things as Dash
Double-jump velocity is now more consistent
Soft lock aggressiveness has been loosened up slightly
Light attacks buffed
Known Bugs
Milestone Progress

v0.0.206

Content:
First build.
Known Issues:
On the first run, the settings might report Ultra when the settings aren’t actually on ultra. Lower then raise and re-apply settings to work around this
Occasionally Amelia’s hair goes crazy during the H-scene.
There is some flickering when morph targets turn off momentarily during semen painting. This is a low level engine bug; a workaround solution for semen painting will be included in a future build, replacing the current semen painting implementation until the low-level engine bug is fixed.
Occasionally Amelia will fly backwards during the mid-air ground pound recovery when sprint parameters are set during the recovery animation.
Switching between keyboard/mouse and game-pad during the pause menu is not 100% intuitive yet, it doesn’t detect mouse movement.
Censor squares sometimes show up even when completely obscured by something else.
QTE widgets only report correct inputs for game-pad
144Hz is not supported yet, but will be.
Key Features:
Smooth Character Action Combat – Control a magical girl and fight with a variety of moves to take out your opponents!
A Gripping Story – Follow the struggle of GARDA and get to know the magical girls you command, along with a number of other characters!
Three Playable Magical Girls (PLANNED/COMING SOON) – Experience the unique movesets and playstyles!
Base Building & Socialization (PLANNED/COMING SOON) – Expand your base and get to know the characters and world of Mahou Arms!
Exciting Boss Battles (PLANNED/COMING SOON) – Fight unique bosses with interesting backstories!
Early Access Information:
Why Early Access?
We are a small independent game developer and without support from those who wish to see Mahou Arms reach completion we are less likely to succeed.
By launching on Early Access, we hope players will try our game and support its development by sharing it with others and providing feedback. More support means more content faster.
Approximately how long will this game be in Early Access?
We’ve been working on Mahou Arms for around two years now (since 2018) and we expect it will take at least another two years (2022) before we have a game that we’re satisfied with.
How is the full version planned to differ from the Early Access version?
We have plans to add more missions and more playable characters in the short term, as well as slower-paced GARDA base sections dedicated to getting to know the characters and world of Mahou Arms.
What is the current state of the Early Access version?
Right now there are two main story missions and a simple side mission. Amelia is the first playable character in the game and her moveset is complete.
It should be noted that all of the content in Mahou Arms is custom. This includes the models, animations, music, sound effects, etc.
Will the game be priced differently during and after Early Access?
Yes. During early access the Mahou Arms will be around 25% cheaper.
How are you planning on involving the Community in your development process?
We will monitor the Steam forums for feedback and bug reports, but we encourage players to join our Discord channel where we can communicate with them more directly: https://discord.gg/uc5Njsy
Fan Forum Signature:
by @Krull
https://f95zone.com/threads/mahou-arms-v0-0-256-paperbag.7876/page-8#post-598810