AFTER 30 YEARS, THE OFFICIAL PREQUEL

A snarky coming of age story, with magic, mystery and a classic 90’s vibe

Simon the Sorcerer Origins

• Is a modern adventure created in a completely hand-drawn late 90s cartoon visual style.
• The prequel is set a few weeks before the events of the first 1993 adventure.
• The game world is crafted with a modern visual style filled with seamless realtime sequences, magic and puzzle solving tied together with an engrossing storyline that will finally answer some important questions raised by fans from the first game.

Only gamers who remember the jarring tones of a dial-up modems, Rick Astley and rewarding the Risk Astley cassette tape with a pencil, have any chance of remembering the original Simon the Sorcerer games!

Source: Public Commons

The Story

Simon is an annoying little sh.. delightful young man who has been invited to leave his existing school, and consequently his family must now leave their home and travel to their new country home and Simon’s new school.

The new house is a somewhat peculiar dwelling, which unbeknown to Simon, contains a portal to a magical world where Simon finds himself and the story unfolds.

A series of events unravel around Simon, where he must overcome a number of challenges in order to find his way back home.

Game Play

Simon the Sorcerer Origins is completely point and click, with identifiable hot-zones that can be cycled through with the controller L2 and R2 or hovered over and then selected with X. Simon can be moved by joystick or by selecting interactive areas.

As with most games of this genre, inventory items must be combined and used in specific ways to solve problems.

Simon does not provide all the answers to the player, and visual queues have to be noticed in order to readily solve problems. Be prepared for some challenges.

Graphics

SmallThing Studios spent a lot of time and effort creating both the ‘real’ world and the magical world, with stark contrast and realism.

In the magical world, depth and perception plays a huge part of how the animators present the story. Simon can be eclipsed by large imposing buildings or even simply have his back to the player whilst performing actions. Cinematically, it is like experiencing an interactive animated movie – and that is just wonderful.

“90s hand-drawn cartoon graphic style, 15.000 animation frames!” and there can be no doubt that each and every frame was maliciously and lovingly crafted by the team.

The graphics are superb.

Soundtrack

The English voice acting, particularly from Simon and Calypso’s characters, is top-notch. The background music throughout the game is the perfect compliment, setting the scenes exactly as intended, but without pulling focus or causing frustration when thinking about the next action to take – which is otherwise often the case in this style of game.

Rick Astley’s ‘Together Forever’ hit features in the opening and end credits of the game which does add a nice nostalgic 90’s feel.

Final Thoughts

Being a prequel, there is absolutely no need to have any prior knowledge or experience with the original titles.

Simon the Sorcerer Origins is by no means a simple challenge that the player can smash through in an hour. There are some real difficult challenges, which require some lateral thinking and visual observation.

Many times whilst undertaking this review, the challenges presented took a few hours with some ‘mental recovery’ (frustration) breaks. There were also a couple challenges that needed some guidance from the SmallThing team.

As a story, Simon’s journey is a comfortable and expected, yet delightful story-arc that will undoubtedly bring a smile to your face.

Suitable for all ages.

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Will Simon return? Maybe.