A DEPRESSING RETURN TO PIXEL HUNTING
Also for: Acorn 32-bit, Amiga CD32, Android, Antstream, DOS, iPad,
iPhone, Macintosh, Windows
Few things can be as soul-crushing as entering a store in a point-and-click
adventure game. You're presented with a whole screen brimming with tiny
objects, represented as pixels of every color, on the store shelves. A lot of them are red herrings, but at least a couple of them are
essential if you want to finish the game. This is one of the genre traits we had to put up with back in the day, whether we liked
it or not.
Things have changed since then. As a kid, I loved browsing
these kind of in-game store shelves, looking for ways to expand my inventory
with potentially useful items. I saw a screen full of possibilities. It felt the same as unlocking brand new skills in a role-playing game. Now, as an adult, I shudder in anguish upon the sight of a "Shoppe"-sign, as I mentally prepare to scour the screen for
minutes on end, feeling my life slipping away by the second. I no longer have
time for this kind of crap. And the world seems to agree with me, because
almost no one plays these kind of games anymore.
Simon the Sorcerer, from British studio
Adventuresoft (previously known as Horrorsoft), does not only
relish in that kind of devious puzzle design, it contains about every bad
point-and-click design decision in the book:
1 - The world is too big and open from the outset. In the role of
Simon, you are transported to a land of fantasy, and instantly get a clear enough end
goal to rescue the kind wizard Calypso from the clutches of the evil wizard
Sordid. Exactly how to accomplish this is, however, highly unclear. So you run back and
forth across a world that's practically wide open from the start. Even with a fast-travel map, it gets annoying, and puzzles can be located miles away from the items required to solve them.
2 - You have no reason to go anywhere in particular. The game feels utterly directionless. Sordid only makes his first appearance at the tail end of the game, and the whole main quest instigator - Calypso himself - is not visually represented in the game at all. You read his letter to start your quest, and hear his voice close to the end, but that's it (or did I blink and miss him?) Between the two of you stand a long series of arbitrary puzzles. Any semblence of a
continuous story or natural progression is lost, and consequently, as a player you feel lost as well.
3 - Too many pixel hunts. I've already touched upon it in the opening
paragraphs, but it's not exclusive to shops - this game hides tiny, crucial
inventory items on so many screens. And that's not enough, sometimes a small part of the floor, the ceiling or the surroundings is important and interactable. I counted no less than four
(it might've been more) times the game required me to pick up rocks or pebbles
from the ground. Not just any rock, but four specific ones, hardly discernible in the surrounding natural scenery.
4 - Too many pointless, empty screens. The constant backtracking gets
even worse by the sheer number of dead spaces between each important screen.
And the fact that the world essentially is a maze, with unclear geographical continuity,
makes it hard to navigate. For instance, you might exit a screen to the right,
then enter the next one from the bottom. It's easy to get lost, and hard
to remember the way back to a particular place you want to revisit.
5 - The puzzle solutions are sometimes illogical, tedious or arbitrary.
To be fair, I've seen many worse transgressors in this department. The game
often tries its best to help out through visual cues and dialogue hints. And a
wise owl, sitting at a particular location, can drop you a few helpful words when you're stuck. But some puzzles also leave you in the dark, and then you need
to "try everything on everything". This is made worse by the size of both the world and your inventory.
Also,
some puzzles require you to act quickly while some gatekeeper or bartender is
distracted. If you fail you have to go through the tedious process of
distracting them again. Also, the item requirements can be too strict - why on
Earth do I need a "specimen jar" to carry some liquid substance when I've
already got a serviceable "bucket"? And why do I need to get a particular out-of-reach human skull in a location that is littered with identical human skulls everywhere you look?
6 - Too many inventory items at once. From the get-go you start picking
up random items, just in case you need them for puzzles later. In the first
few minutes of the game, you'll have filled out the first couple of rows of
inventory space, and have to start scrolling to see it in its entirety. Some
of the objects you never need, and once they've served their purpose most
items remain as clutter. And there's no innate logic to the size of objects you can store in your magical hat. Here's a little tip: Try to pick up literally everything, or you won't get far.
7 - The interface felt old-school even back in 1994. The list of verb
commands is too long, which further extends the frustration of trying everything on everything. Some of the twelve verbs you only have to use once or twice. One of
them is never required at all, as far as I can remember - "Close", I'm looking
at you. Also, for some reason the right mouse button is not utilized. Already in
The Secret of Monkey Island, released four years earlier, you could
right-click for contextual quick commands, often to look at things, but also standardized to talking to people when right-clicking a character.
But Simon the Sorcerer is not rotten all the way down to the core. Adventuresoft thankfully avoids the worst flaw of the genre; no dead-ends (or "walking dead
situations") exist. By that I mean you cannot get completely, helplessly stuck
in a place, having to start over from an earlier save (or, worst case scenario, the beginning of the game). If you require an item
past a certain point, the designers make sure you've got it before opening the
gate to that area. And I love the fast-travel map, even if it's hard to
remember exactly how to get to some places from the fast-travel markers.
Although the game almost entirely lacks an overarching plot, I like the
lighthearted atmosphere established by the presentation, and the grim
undercurrents - especially the contorted faces in the rock - as you travel
further east along the map. I enjoy the liberal use of animations to
exaggerate character expressions. The exterior backgrounds also look
stunning and cooperate with the catchy soundtrack to expand the world in my
mind. Too bad the writing has no ambition other than to rush to the cheapest
joke. And I don't find the mean-spirited, referential humor particularly
funny.
The world is a mish-mash of various fairytale characters and creatures, and
we encounter snippets from the likes of The Three Billygoats Gruff,
The Hobbit, Jack and the Beanstalk and Rapunzel. Many
other mythical beasts, animals and people - bards, witches, mummies,
woodworms, barbarians, wizards, dragons, living snowmen, etc. - make brief
appearances, each with a crazy puzzle in store. People have compared the tone and setting to Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels, but I've never read any of them, so I can't personally make any comparisons.
Simon the Sorcerer might try to imitate the popular LucasArts and Sierra games of the era, but is nowhere near the same quality. From a structural, story and puzzle-design
standpoint I suppose the original King's Quest (1984) is the closest comparison. The game looks like a competitor, though - in some of the screens, the background art and music play in the same league as those
juggernaut studios, even if some interiors do not measure up to the same standards.
That doesn't make me feel better about playing the dang thing, though -
it just makes me feel bad for disliking so much of it. Simon the Sorcerer got its
fair share of great reviews back in the days, and many seem to remember it
fondly. But playing it today is another one of those brutal wake-up calls; an
ice-bucket challenge where you expected the warm embrace of nostalgia.
I got through most of the game on vague memories from my childhood, but
towards the end I got to experience parts I'd only seen once, and had
completely forgotten how to solve. And so, those parts were a harsh reminder
of how frustrating Simon the Sorcerer can be to a newcomer. I played it on my A500 Mini, where it was one of 25 games included with the machine. At
least the hard drive-emulation kept me from having to swap disks - the
original Amiga-release got shipped on nine double density floppy disks.
[All screenshots are taken from
www.mobygames.com]
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