Sorcery! Parts 1 and 2

Cured my doomscrolling by actually making me read

I bought Warlock of Firetop Mountain on my Nintendo Switch, and, while I liked the art and gameplay, I did not like the abusiveness of the game. There was no back-tracking allowed even when it was logical to be able to do so. There were many "you chose poorly, you die/lose everything/etc" choices without enough foreshadowing to help make better choices. On and on. Basically felt like an abusive DM/GM was running a game just to abuse the player. I thought maybe the Sorcery! games would be a bit different, but, no. It still has that signature Steve Jackson abusive GM/DM feel to it. Every encounter in Sorcery! is basically "don't trust this person, but don't hurt them either!" B/c if you trust them they'll shaft you. But, if you hurt them, they'll also shaft you. So, often, the only seemingly "good" choice is to just bypass the encounters. However, this game tracks sleep and eating. So, if you bypass too much stuff, you'll be a starving, low-hp character i no time. Since you won't have any encounters to get food or enough money to buy food. And money is very hard to come by in his game. One town wanted 3 gold to get room and board. Cool, I finally get 3 gold. But, no back-tracking (rolls-eyes), so push on to the next town. This place was 5 gold. Well, ****. I only have 3 gold, man! Everything in the game feels like it's designed to punish and frustrate you instead of feeling like the risk was worth a reward. There's a tough monster fighting you for seemingly no reason. Ok, kill it. Do you get anything for your trouble? Often, no. So, it feels pointless. But, many times you're railroaded into the combat. And the combat itself is aggravating. You and your opponent choose how much overall strangth to use, from holding a defense, to a light jab to full on charge attack, each taking more and more energy. Each enemy has different cadences to attack, defend, etc. But, if you defend while it attacks you still get -1 damage. If you attack and it has a higher score, you get hurt but it doesn't. Lot of combats turn into menial slug fests where you're gonna get damaged by just DEFENDIGN yourself. I guess I'm just not a fan of the true-to-book translation these games had, b/c it just brought all the nasty parts of 80's Fighting Fantasy style garbage over to a computer version.

It's a fun game for the most part. The story-telling and characters are good enough that you'll likely be immersed and entertained. As for the choice aspect, it's a bit of a hit and miss. Surviving/progressing through certain parts is sometimes down to pure luck when picking your way through a sequence of options the game provides you with. I feel like there could've been a lot more creativity here, like giving clues as to what the right option might be, for example. It gets annoying (borderline frustrating) when you end up dying the same way to different sequences of choices, so you'll likely end up speeding your way through every option until you get the right one. That doesn't exactly make for good gameplay, and it can quickly ruin your immersion in the story. It's a significant flaw in the game's design, but luckily one that only occurs once every so often.

Funny how all the best roleplaying games are just books lol

Mild spoilers for Sorcery 2 ahead, so beware. ### First game was really good and I enjoyed it, but the second one.. I dunno.. at the end of Sorcery 2 you can be sent back in time if you didn’t get all the clues to open the gate, which is likely to happen since one wrong decision can keep you from getting all of them. But being sent back in time means you have to replay all the previous stuff. I happened to miss just one clue because I chose the wrong alley once and didn’t encounter the event that gives you the clue. Apart from that I was really satisfied with the playthrough and my decisions. But now I would have to redo everything except for that one choice, probably 1-2h of gameplay. Alternatively, you can finish the game without all the clues, but then you get the "bad" ending and become cursed, which negatively affects your character in the later games. Ironically, this is exactly the reason why I also dropped the game a few years ago and never continued with Sorcery 3. Now the exact same thing has happened again and I’m wondering if I should just bin this game for real. It just feels kind of frustrating that a single wrong turn can immediately lock you out of the "best" ending only for the player to realize it hours later.

Its like a telltale game had actual choices and good writing.

no matter who talks to me or how much they do it, i feel beyond alone, and completely abandoned. i don't trust anyone anymore. it's been a while since they have trusted me anyway...

What's good about it is how much there is to find, how different choices will quite literally lead to different outcomes. The combat system is rather good, like that. The whole being able to rewind the story to a previous point is good, allows you to get out of a bad spot. The writing's pretty good, as well. If you enjoy Choose Your Own Adventure games, this is a good one.

This review will be a little bit biased as I bought the game mostly out of nostalgia. It has to be over a decade ago now, somewhere around 2013-2014 that I happened upon the game after watching a livestream from the Yogscast. Had it stayed as such then I probably wouldn’t have ever played it but it just so happened that not much later I was hospitalised due to a severe bout of sickness, making me unable to leave bed. It didn’t take long browsing the internet to learn of this relatively obscure app from China called Tongbu. It provided apple users the means to download cracked versions of apps on the app store, for free without having to jailbreak your device. Which as a young, less scrupulous child that was never quite able to get cydia working meant that I could play games instead of staring at a dreary ceiling all day. Anyhow, I believe I quickly played and then finished both sorcery 1 and 2, the third instalment not having been released yet. This brings us to today where, after remembering the games in a dream, I have once again played both, now with a more critical eye. First and foremost, the story is enjoyable if not very unique, there’s nothing there that besmirches the writing but it is a bit dated. The gamebooks which these games are based on are over 40 years old at this point so if you’re even a tepid reader or consumer of fantasy media there won’t be anything that is likely to impress you per se. That said, the game has a certain authenticity in its writing that I often find missing in modern media, maybe this is just a conjuration of my mind but nevertheless it is something that I appreciate. The occasional art work from John Blanche, whom was one of the principal artists and miniature painters for Games Workshop until his retirement back in 2023, also helps to bring the in-game world alive. If you just want to play a story game then you will likely be satisfied with this series. That said, nothing is perfect and this series certainly is not either. On a technical level there are occasionally issues with text appearing warped, this seems to be common enough that I have found steam forum threads on the matter and it might be fixed with a reinstallation. It didn’t overly bother me as it only happens occasionally but it is an issue. As for the story, I will not spoil anything. A particular mechanic in sorcery 2 bothered me a little bit in how it makes you backtrack through the game but that's just a minor annoyance that was likely meant for the player to experience more of what the game has to offer. I do not know if the cloud saves for this game still work, I imagine that they will but regardless I don’t know if the game should be pinging, what my firewall is saying are google analytics servers, on game open. This may be a miscategorisation and as I have not checked myself I’m not passing any strict judgement on that front. That said I must give kudos to the Inkle team for publishing their scripting language for this game. You can find it on github alongside documentation on how to use it. I believe that’s all I have to say, I enjoyed my time playing these two instalments and will likely continue on with the next two as well. Goodbye.

A masterful choice your own adventure game. One of the best and should set a standard for these type of games. Also try "Roadwarden"