I am just savvy enough with anime and manga to hesitantly observe that there are at least two broad types of “magic girl” story. There are the naive and upbeat ones in which the magic girls sincerely believe all the nonsense they yell about the power of Hope and such, and then there are the ones where magic girling is revealed to be an exploitative racket awash with misogyny and overwork.

Dear Magical Girls from GIGABlock Studio serves up winsome wizardressing at its most jaded. Its star, Arin, is a baggy-eyed veteran tasked with defending an entire city’s mana stones against otherworldly beasts. “Even when it hurts, even when it breaks you, a magical girl should always smile, right?” the developers comment. OK, so that’s lunging into melodrama more than I’d like, for the opening sentence of a Steam description, but Arin’s workaday suffering is our gain: Dear Magical Girls has quite a fun interpretation of ‘tower defence’.

Each real-time battle sees you reshaping a field of sorcery by moving vertices. Arin’s magic will target anything inside the barrier. The larger the field, the more enemies she’ll have to worry about at once, but you’ll need to expand your territory periodically to enclose resources and objects that confer buffs.

You can also spend mana to add vertices to the barrier, allowing for more flexibility when shaping Arin’s territory as the odds evolve. And you’ll get hold of modules and enchantments that serve as auxiliary weapons, but which again need to be enclosed by the field. One of the fancier spells causes balls of flame to bounce around inside the barrier. The smaller the field, the more enemies they’ll connect with. I do like the intricacy of all this.

Between battles, you’ll get to wallow in Arin’s burnout. And solve mysteries. “As emergency calls keep coming and mysterious disappearances begin to unfold, Arin draws closer to the truth behind mana, magic, and the magical girls themselves,” the Steam page goes on.

I’m betting it’s all some kind of bioweapons experiment. I bet Arin has a hundred grotty clones who are being tortured in an underground laboratory. There are two other characters named on the Steam page. Charlotte appears to be your senpai – I bet she’s in on the whole “underground torture lab” thing. Lily is a younger soul who worships magic girls and dreams of becoming one. I bet Arin wants to murder her. I bet Arin pictures dousing Lily in acid every night, while huddled up in the bath with a bucket of Malteasers.

Dear Magical Girls is out perilously soon – 31st July. Do you know much about this genre? Please, educate me. I’ve just deigned to look at the Wikipedia page and woof, there is quite a lot of history there.