This isn’t going to shock anyone who knows me, but I’ve got a lot of affection for gamebooks as a gaming medium. I spent a lot of time as a kid going through the most basic Choose Your Own Adventure brand CYOA stuff, but elementary school libraries and book fairs made sure that I quickly gained access to shit that was aimed at kids older than me, with more complex choice branches, more grisly depictions of your self-insert characters’ many terrible fates, and, when I was lucky, full fledged RPG mechanics. I’ve always been fascinated with the space that gamebooks occupy in the RPG world, somewhere between the social and varyingly freeform experience of a tabletop game with friends and the more narrative driven and inherently linear RPG video games that would begin to emerge somewhat contemporaneously to gamebooks as a medium in the mid-1980s. Gamebooks invite an imaginative element, an insertion of oneself into the role of the protagonist and a degree of choice in determining a narrative’s outcome, sort of, that’s not common in video games and more focused than a group-based campaign of Dungeons & Dragons might be. I think you could make the case that a lot of modern solo tabletop games take a lot of design cues from classic gamebooks, and you see a lot more freedom from these a lot of the time to create narrative more openly than you could between the confines of a page. Similarly, people often like to call old Final Fantasies and similarly structured RPGs “open world” games but they’re not, they’re fully linear; just because you have a large map you can wander around and occasionally some side objectives you can distract yourself with doesn’t mean that you’re not making specific progress through the game in a particular order. A gamebook is like this too – no matter what freedom of choice you have to accomplish your goal, you’re ultimately being shunted along and between a few relatively narrow paths to an ending. The real amount of choice can vary from book to book. It’s a malleable form.
I never played the book version of Steve Jackson’s Sorcery!, but I do have some experience with its parent franchise, Fighting Fantasy, which is probably the biggest name in that space still today and definitely was when I was twelve. I’m sort of glad that I didn’t, though, because having perused the first book upon finishing Inkle’s adaptation of it earlier this week it kind of obviously blows most of the stuff I was reading out of the water? Its big claim to fame is introducing a second entire character build, a wizard who can cast magic instead of the kind of generic sword guy you automatically play as in most of these. There are literally dozens of spells that you can cast in any number of situations that could have many outcomes and while there are restrictions on how to cast them and the game only offers six options at a time, that so radically opens up the play space that the idea of playing the book as a normal guy who can’t do the thing the book is named for is like, genuinely impossible for me to fathom.
Inkle takes the choice out of your hands though, one of many very smart decisions they make in what surprised me by being actually an extremely faithful adaptation of the book to the video game format. Ya girl got a new phone so I’m fuckin GAMING now and I’ve had my eye on these for a while. I did NOT know they all got ported to the switch like a year ago sue me. But there’s something nice about having them on my phone, it’s definitely well-designed around that screenshape and a touch interface.
So some fuckin asshole magician stole The Crown Of Kings, which is an important magical artifact that a few countries pass around every once in a while and it’s a big deal. You’ve been chosen to go steal it back and it has to be kind of a stealth mission because the crown is so powerful that if they just sent armies then the now all powerful Archmage could supposedly just like bzzzzap everybody or whatever. In this first of four game adapting the first of the four Sorcery! books, your goal is to travel across a stretch of land known as the Shamuntanti hills, which is a generally blighted, mountainous region with lots of little caves and sad, inhospitable settlements between your starting point and the also shitty-sounding big city of Kharé.
The format of a gamebook translates perfectly to the mobile template, with bite-sized paragraphs leading into one another, occasionally embellished or with options to expand on detail if you want them, but by and large you’ve got all the information you need at most two clicks away at any time, and it’s very easy to put down between events and pick back up any time. The adventure is episodic to begin with as you encounter people on the road, get attacked by monsters or perhaps an assassin as you sleep in the woods, chat with the mysterious lady in her cabin (is she a witch or just kind of weird?). Things are punctuated at the most important moments with the original artwork by John Blanche, beautiful and occasionally grotesque, taken directly from the original gamebook. The general background aesthetic and UI has clearly been designed with an eye towards matching matching his art style in a modernized context and I appreciate that, it all looks good together, it doesn’t feel like they pasted a bunch of drawings from 1983 into an ugly phone game from 2013.
The big changeups are to combat and magic. Combat is done largely via narration, where you read the description of the clash you’ve had and decide based on your enemy’s poise whether they’re going to swing heavy, light, or guard. You choose how much energy to expend out of a possible 10, and if your number is higher, the enemy takes damage and vice versa. If one of you blocks and the other attacks, the blocker takes 1 damage no matter what. It’s a very smart way to handle combat, it’s snappy, it feels as narrative as the choices because of how tied it is to reading and enemy characterization, and it’s possible to really fuck yourself up if you commit to it and can’t learn your enemy’s patterns.
Magic may or may not be more freeform than the gamebook; I’m unsure if you’re offered more opportunities to cast, or if you ACTUALLY have more options once you do, but rather than just picking from a table of six spells you have to spell out words from a jumble of letters you’re presented with, which is both more simple and more complex than it sounds. Because your spellbook is within a different menu, 50 pages long, and digitized (and so must be thumbed through slowly and one page at a time on a touch screen), it’s much more difficult and tedious to refer to it than the spellbook that acts as a glossary in the gamebook, which encourages players to generally have an idea in mind of what they want to do when they go into a cast.
And this shit is all, like, it’s all good, but the game is, as far as I can tell, a 95% faithful transliteration of Steve Jackson’s original work, and so it’s very good that Steve Jackson’s original work is as good as it is at doing what it’s doing. This IS a pretty standard 1980s Western Fantasy Adventure and what you spend most of your time doing is walking up and down hills and maybe into a cave and into the odd village or not it’s your choice. But there’s an element of keeping track of your food intake, making sure you’re sleeping properly, staying not TOO hurt. Because it’s very easy to get caught with your proverbial pants down.
Sorcery! is, at its core, a game about judgment and trust. Not in a DEEP way, not that I’m trying to indicate that it wants to inspire pondering in you, only to say that this game is very very good at making you question whether the guy you just met is going to knife you in the ribs if you help him out of that tree, or if these guys in this tavern are gonna steal your sword if you disarm like their cultural custom says to, or if these elves are gonna be cool with a human walking by their land no matter how you plead their case, or if this witch you’ve talked your way into the good graces of will remain gracious if you make even one incorrect comment, or or or. Subversively, however, I found trust to almost always be worthwhile. After that initial and disastrous encounter with the elves (whose grievance with men at large is extremely well-founded), which did effectively put The Fear in me, it almost always paid to at least be kind or generous in spirit on the surface of most of my interactions. Trusting my defensive and antisocial fairy companion to do the right thing in a dire situation when it was clear from his comments that no one had done this before and he wasn’t used to being treated honestly, helping people out of binds despite warnings against their characters or returning stolen items that you’ve come into possession of when I met their owners didn’t always reward me and in fact once lost me what I think could have been a valuable resource in a future game, but the always led to a more enriching experience. And of course, it didn’t stop me from fleecing and stealing from people who could afford it. You can roleplay a decent range of behaviors and motivations for your character.
The prose, of course, is the real star, but combined with the decision-making it can really sing. The very last obstacle in the game for me was a trial where I found myself agreeing to help rescue the kidnapped daughter of an orc village’s mayor. I was lowered by basket into a pitch black tunnel system, made my way through the creeping maze, and used most of my stamina casting spells to kill the manticore that dwelled there before the kid safely led me back to the entrance. The orcs said hey you can both get in the basket at the same time we’ll pull you up, but I didn’t want anything to go wrong so I put the kid in alone and told them to pull. The basket didn’t come back down. I had the option to call up, or to wait. My character rationalized that they were probably celebrating, this kid had been missing for days after all. Wait again. Nothing, silence, too far up to hear them. Wait. I had to wait four times before the basket came back down. That’s a lot of faith. I don’t know what might have happened if I hadn’t had the trust and the respect for those guys to get me out of there, but there had been multiple moments before where there had been misunderstandings and miscommunications and every time I had chosen to work it out in good faith and every time things had been chill. Good dudes. And they were good dudes, and we went back to the village and partied hard and I moved on happily into Sorcery! book two.
Most of the people in the Shamuntani Hills are good dudes, given the chance. It’s not a game without danger or treachery or mistrust and not all of that mistrust is unfounded, but the undeniable warmth that sits at the core of it is just pleasant, and it’s nice to see such a traditional work of fantasy playing with these ideas in a time I don’t really associate with generous depictions of fantasy cultures in lowbrow Western media.
After the decidedly mixed response to their first project, an IF adaptation of the Frankenstein novel, I think it makes sense that Inkle might have done something more directly akin to a conversion than an adaptation for their next project, but given the way their fortunes have turned over the past decade I’m glad they were brave enough to keep pushing out the edges of what their projects could look like. What I’m most interested to see is whether future installments of Sorcery! take on more of Inkle’s authorial voice. They made 80 Days in between the second and thirds installments of this four-part series so I would very much like to see them take more adaptation agency. Even if they don’t, though, Sorcery! Seems from this first impression like such a rich source material to begin with that it would be hard to come away wanting.
I never played the book version of Steve Jackson’s Sorcery!, but I do have some experience with its parent franchise, Fighting Fantasy, which is probably the biggest name in that space still today and definitely was when I was twelve. I’m sort of glad that I didn’t, though, because having perused the first book upon finishing Inkle’s adaptation of it earlier this week it kind of obviously blows most of the stuff I was reading out of the water? Its big claim to fame is introducing a second entire character build, a wizard who can cast magic instead of the kind of generic sword guy you automatically play as in most of these. There are literally dozens of spells that you can cast in any number of situations that could have many outcomes and while there are restrictions on how to cast them and the game only offers six options at a time, that so radically opens up the play space that the idea of playing the book as a normal guy who can’t do the thing the book is named for is like, genuinely impossible for me to fathom.
Inkle takes the choice out of your hands though, one of many very smart decisions they make in what surprised me by being actually an extremely faithful adaptation of the book to the video game format. Ya girl got a new phone so I’m fuckin GAMING now and I’ve had my eye on these for a while. I did NOT know they all got ported to the switch like a year ago sue me. But there’s something nice about having them on my phone, it’s definitely well-designed around that screenshape and a touch interface.
So some fuckin asshole magician stole The Crown Of Kings, which is an important magical artifact that a few countries pass around every once in a while and it’s a big deal. You’ve been chosen to go steal it back and it has to be kind of a stealth mission because the crown is so powerful that if they just sent armies then the now all powerful Archmage could supposedly just like bzzzzap everybody or whatever. In this first of four game adapting the first of the four Sorcery! books, your goal is to travel across a stretch of land known as the Shamuntanti hills, which is a generally blighted, mountainous region with lots of little caves and sad, inhospitable settlements between your starting point and the also shitty-sounding big city of Kharé.
The format of a gamebook translates perfectly to the mobile template, with bite-sized paragraphs leading into one another, occasionally embellished or with options to expand on detail if you want them, but by and large you’ve got all the information you need at most two clicks away at any time, and it’s very easy to put down between events and pick back up any time. The adventure is episodic to begin with as you encounter people on the road, get attacked by monsters or perhaps an assassin as you sleep in the woods, chat with the mysterious lady in her cabin (is she a witch or just kind of weird?). Things are punctuated at the most important moments with the original artwork by John Blanche, beautiful and occasionally grotesque, taken directly from the original gamebook. The general background aesthetic and UI has clearly been designed with an eye towards matching matching his art style in a modernized context and I appreciate that, it all looks good together, it doesn’t feel like they pasted a bunch of drawings from 1983 into an ugly phone game from 2013.
The big changeups are to combat and magic. Combat is done largely via narration, where you read the description of the clash you’ve had and decide based on your enemy’s poise whether they’re going to swing heavy, light, or guard. You choose how much energy to expend out of a possible 10, and if your number is higher, the enemy takes damage and vice versa. If one of you blocks and the other attacks, the blocker takes 1 damage no matter what. It’s a very smart way to handle combat, it’s snappy, it feels as narrative as the choices because of how tied it is to reading and enemy characterization, and it’s possible to really fuck yourself up if you commit to it and can’t learn your enemy’s patterns.
Magic may or may not be more freeform than the gamebook; I’m unsure if you’re offered more opportunities to cast, or if you ACTUALLY have more options once you do, but rather than just picking from a table of six spells you have to spell out words from a jumble of letters you’re presented with, which is both more simple and more complex than it sounds. Because your spellbook is within a different menu, 50 pages long, and digitized (and so must be thumbed through slowly and one page at a time on a touch screen), it’s much more difficult and tedious to refer to it than the spellbook that acts as a glossary in the gamebook, which encourages players to generally have an idea in mind of what they want to do when they go into a cast.
And this shit is all, like, it’s all good, but the game is, as far as I can tell, a 95% faithful transliteration of Steve Jackson’s original work, and so it’s very good that Steve Jackson’s original work is as good as it is at doing what it’s doing. This IS a pretty standard 1980s Western Fantasy Adventure and what you spend most of your time doing is walking up and down hills and maybe into a cave and into the odd village or not it’s your choice. But there’s an element of keeping track of your food intake, making sure you’re sleeping properly, staying not TOO hurt. Because it’s very easy to get caught with your proverbial pants down.
Sorcery! is, at its core, a game about judgment and trust. Not in a DEEP way, not that I’m trying to indicate that it wants to inspire pondering in you, only to say that this game is very very good at making you question whether the guy you just met is going to knife you in the ribs if you help him out of that tree, or if these guys in this tavern are gonna steal your sword if you disarm like their cultural custom says to, or if these elves are gonna be cool with a human walking by their land no matter how you plead their case, or if this witch you’ve talked your way into the good graces of will remain gracious if you make even one incorrect comment, or or or. Subversively, however, I found trust to almost always be worthwhile. After that initial and disastrous encounter with the elves (whose grievance with men at large is extremely well-founded), which did effectively put The Fear in me, it almost always paid to at least be kind or generous in spirit on the surface of most of my interactions. Trusting my defensive and antisocial fairy companion to do the right thing in a dire situation when it was clear from his comments that no one had done this before and he wasn’t used to being treated honestly, helping people out of binds despite warnings against their characters or returning stolen items that you’ve come into possession of when I met their owners didn’t always reward me and in fact once lost me what I think could have been a valuable resource in a future game, but the always led to a more enriching experience. And of course, it didn’t stop me from fleecing and stealing from people who could afford it. You can roleplay a decent range of behaviors and motivations for your character.
The prose, of course, is the real star, but combined with the decision-making it can really sing. The very last obstacle in the game for me was a trial where I found myself agreeing to help rescue the kidnapped daughter of an orc village’s mayor. I was lowered by basket into a pitch black tunnel system, made my way through the creeping maze, and used most of my stamina casting spells to kill the manticore that dwelled there before the kid safely led me back to the entrance. The orcs said hey you can both get in the basket at the same time we’ll pull you up, but I didn’t want anything to go wrong so I put the kid in alone and told them to pull. The basket didn’t come back down. I had the option to call up, or to wait. My character rationalized that they were probably celebrating, this kid had been missing for days after all. Wait again. Nothing, silence, too far up to hear them. Wait. I had to wait four times before the basket came back down. That’s a lot of faith. I don’t know what might have happened if I hadn’t had the trust and the respect for those guys to get me out of there, but there had been multiple moments before where there had been misunderstandings and miscommunications and every time I had chosen to work it out in good faith and every time things had been chill. Good dudes. And they were good dudes, and we went back to the village and partied hard and I moved on happily into Sorcery! book two.
Most of the people in the Shamuntani Hills are good dudes, given the chance. It’s not a game without danger or treachery or mistrust and not all of that mistrust is unfounded, but the undeniable warmth that sits at the core of it is just pleasant, and it’s nice to see such a traditional work of fantasy playing with these ideas in a time I don’t really associate with generous depictions of fantasy cultures in lowbrow Western media.
After the decidedly mixed response to their first project, an IF adaptation of the Frankenstein novel, I think it makes sense that Inkle might have done something more directly akin to a conversion than an adaptation for their next project, but given the way their fortunes have turned over the past decade I’m glad they were brave enough to keep pushing out the edges of what their projects could look like. What I’m most interested to see is whether future installments of Sorcery! take on more of Inkle’s authorial voice. They made 80 Days in between the second and thirds installments of this four-part series so I would very much like to see them take more adaptation agency. Even if they don’t, though, Sorcery! Seems from this first impression like such a rich source material to begin with that it would be hard to come away wanting.