Magical Diary: Horse Hall is a visual novel with RPG elements where you play as a new student at a magic school. You get to choose your character's name and appearance, then play through your character's freshman year and decide which skills and relationships to develop.

You decide your character's schedule for the week, choosing either classes or other activities to raise your magic skill, smarts, strength, or decrease your stress. Your magic skills allow you to unlock spells, your strength and smarts determine your mana pool and health, and your stress affects your chances for success in class. Between classes, you'll experience different events and make choices that affect the way your story proceeds.

Several times during the game, you'll have to take an exam, where you'll go to a dungeon and use your abilities to escape. You won't be given any information on what to do for the dungeons beforehand, so the first time around there's a chance you'll fail some of them, either by not knowing useful spells or by wasting mana or running out of health. You only get some demerits for failing an exam, so it isn't a big deal if you aren't able to pass all of them at first. There are multiple ways to solve each dungeon, so you aren't locked in to studying one particular set of spells if you want to pass all of them. It was fun figuring out different ways to get through each dungeon, although none of the puzzles were very difficult to figure out.

There are six different character routes you can get during the game, five major and one minor. Three of them are pretty easy to get, you just have to make a point of talking to the character and being nice to them, but the other three are more finicky and require a more specific set of conditions. Most of the routes either have romantic or platonic variations, although they aren't hugely different either way. I generally liked all of the routes, although there were definitely some I liked more than others.

To see all the story options in the game, you have to play through it multiple times. I enjoyed playing through all the routes and making different choices each time. It never felt too repetitive, as you can skip through all the dialogue you've seen before, and there were new things to discover even after multiple playthroughs. For example, you can get special conversations by taking particular classes on certain days. Going for all of the achievements is a pretty good way to get most of the major endings, and it was fun trying to figure out how to get some of the more difficult ones.

The characters and the world they lived in were very interesting to get to know. Certain aspects of the school and a couple of the characters seemed to be taking a bit of inspiration from Harry Potter, but the world and the story were pretty different and unique. The main characters were multifaceted and it was fun getting to know the different sides of their personalities. I did feel like there were a few story threads related to some of the side characters that were introduced but not fully developed or that didn't end in a satisfying way.

Overall, Magical Diary: Horse Hall is a cute visual novel/RPG. I enjoyed the story and characters, and it was fun playing through it to get all the details. I wish some of the side characters had been more fleshed out here, but some of them did end up getting more details in the sequel. 9/10