I’ve been playing an old adventure game lately – Simon the Sorcerer, and it is nowhere near as good as I remembered it. The experience is still sort of enjoyable, but there’s ahuge element of frustration, which sort of spoils it…

The first thing that strikes you when playing the game, is the stunning visuals. Simon the Sorcerer has some of the nicest pixel art I’ve seen in this type of game, it’s amazingly detailed and some of the scenes are really beautiful.

That being said, there’s way too many scenes in the game that are just "transportation": there’s nothing to do there, and they really serve no purpose in the game. This means that you are spending a huge amount of time in the game just walking around exploring things.

You do have access to a map though, which allows you to teleport to known locations, once you’ve found them by walking around.

I think that having this many locations, with so few of them being used for puzzles, was a big mistake. And adding a map was not the solution – they should have dropped about 70% of the locations, and the game would have been much better for it.

Another thing that adds to the frustration, is the number of possible actions you can perform. Some of them (like Wear and Consume) are only used once or twice in the entire game – and it’s never a good idea to include mechanics in a game which are used only once or twice. If you ever find yourself doing so, you’ve found an area which needs redesigning.

I think that a lot of these specialized verbs could have been replaced with just a general Use action, and that would have worked wonders to reduce the frustration. Also, requiring you to at one time (and at one time only) combine two inventory items (the rope and the magnet) by "Use"-ing one with the other, is also an amazingly poor mechanic…

The last big cause of frustration is that inventory items stay in your inventory even after you have used them. This is just really, really stupid, as it leaves you with a lot of objects at all times, and you don’t know if you’re done with them or if you’re meant to use them again.

It gets quite bad towards the end, but at one point (when you’ve shrunk yourself down to the size of a mouse), the game totally clears out your inventory, leaving it all in a pile next to you. It’s good in a way, because you have less things getting in the way for the last few scenes of the game, but wouldn’t it have been better to lose items after they’re used, leaving you with a smaller inventory at all times?

All in all, Simon the Sorcerer is not a good game, as it highlights some of the worst flaws of the genre. And the stunning visuals doesn’t make up for that.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 25th, 2008 at 8:21 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.