Sorcery! Parts 1 & 2
That's the actual title - they're not separate games (technically...).
This is what I've been watching and playing over the last seven days...
MOVIES
Hadn't watched this in a while and, while it's not the meatiest movie to sink your teeth into, it's still a lot of fun, with brilliant visuals and a fantastic score to boot!
GAMES
Sorcery! Parts 1 & 2
Game summary: Armed with your sword and over fifty spells with weird and wonderful effects, embark on a narrative adventure of a thousand choices where every one is remembered. (Steam)
If you're old enough (like me), you might remember those Choose Your Own Adventure books where at the end of a section there would be a choice to make and you'd have to pick which page to turn to?
Sorcery: Parts 1 & 2 is the gaming version of that, but not as fun because it doesn't take advantage of being a game to eliminate issues from those books, and instead makes things much more needlessly complicated.
Well, Part 1 is apparently a fairly faithful adaptation of the text it covers, but whereas your imagination has an infinite budget to imagine what the world looks like, the game doesn't.
Art from the book is used at various points - conflicting with the art style of the protagonist you choose (male or female is pretty much it) - and, as a result, it's not the prettiest game to look at.
Neither is the audio design anything to write home about, and the constant rewinding of time when you go down a path that you regret can mean hearing some sounds over and over and over... and over again.
Part 2 is where it becomes much more game-like with what is effectively an open world of sorts, but is also where the needless overcomplication of things really ramps up.
I played through both parts without a guide first before checking to see what I'd missed out on, and while I did pretty well in Part 1, my efforts in Part 2 were going to leave severely handicapped in the eventual third and fourth parts.
And some of the hoops you have to jump through are genuinely insane - some of them are so counter-intuitive and nonsensical that you are absolutely going to miss out on key items or lore unless you use a guide, or have a fairly unhinged way of playing games yourself.
Part 2 is the worst for this (so far!) to the point where I thought about maybe just starting afresh with a new character for Part 3 before resetting the game and following a walkthrough to leave my character in decent shape for the next part.
Except Part 2 is so convoluted and over-elaborate that I still didn't finish with all the items I should've had - and multiple places confirmed certain scenes should've triggered based on what I did, but just didn't.
Yes, Sorcery! is a game that has so many twists and turns that even a guide designed to produce exact outcomes still won't work.
I don't want to be too harsh towards inkle, who made the game, as they also made Heaven's Vault, which is one of my favourite games of the last 10 years, but I can see why this game doesn't get brought up that often when discussing their best titles.
Whether or not you'll like Sorcery! will depend on your tolerance for randomness and potentially missing out on items and information solely due to them not triggering when they should - I personally do not enjoy it,
That said, it is a game you can pretty much enjoy at your own pace, and the writing is generally of a pretty decent standard overall, although you might find repeating some scenes annoying as hell depending on your choices.
Sorcery! Parts 1 & 2 didn't really work for me, feeling far too complicated for its own good, which leads to it being a not particularly enjoyable experience as a video game. [4/10]
TV
The more attentive among you have probably noticed the continued lack of a review of M.O.D.O.K., despite me saying in my last post that I had a long weekend coming up.
What I said was true, but I lost half a week to personal life stuff, so I needed the long weekend just to get real life things up-to-date and didn't have time to start M.O.D.O.K. when I wanted, and neither did I want to rush it.
Fortunately, there's another long weekend coming up, so unless something unexpected happens again, you should be able to read my thoughts about M.O.D.O.K. next Wednesday!
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