http://ift.tt/2d69Myi
The final entry in Inkle Studio's mobile adaptations of Steve Jackson's 1980s adventure gamebook series is upon us.Whether you're playing on iOS, Android, PC or Mac, Sorcery! 4: The Crown of Kings is a suitable culmination of a truly epic saga that has never settled for just providing an eighties nostalgia trip. This time round, you've finally reached the evil Archmage's city - your mission is to infiltrate and climb the central tower, find him and take back your land's property.
It's a series that has constantly innovated. The first game introduced the beautiful map and draggable playing piece user interface - instantly removing the "wall-of-text" barrier to entry suffered by so many other gamebook adaptations. The second took steps towards an "open-world" syle experience, allowing you to return to previously visited locations and experience new things there. The third added an incredible time-shifting mechanic allowing you to explore two worlds for the price of one.
This time round, the innovation is less obvious: the removal of a mechanic, rather than the addition of one. Being able to "rewind", undoing your choices and returning to a previous point, has been part and parcel of the series since its inception, replicating the "fingers in the pages" cheating method known to all gamebook aficionados. By removing it (for part of the story), the stakes have been raised: this is the big finish, after all. A checkpoint system has been put in its place, but when you die, you are restored to the checkpoint with all your items, clues and gold intact. You character remembers everything from the previous run and, in some cases, it is necessary to die in order to make progress in your next run. Planescape Torment seems like an influence here.
Neatly, these changes are all justified by the in-game narrative itself. Your character's ability to rewind, the loss of that power, and the gaining of the checkpoint mechanism are cleverly woven into the story. There is even a sublime meta-textual moment when your ultimate adversary, the Archmage, explains the workings of the titular Crown of Kings. It takes away people's free will, implying character's choices are not their own. In much the same way as you, the player, have been deciding on choices the player character will make. Are you, the player, the true Crown of Kings? Then again, your enemy may be lying to you, and its great that a simple hack-and-slash RPG adaptation can be open to such fan theories.
It's a juicy game, brimming with hidden content. I had already "won" the game at least once, and was on my tenth replay, when I discovered you could go south from the central plaza, where I inadvertently became a contestant in a bizarre game-show. Even later, I tried to lie about my identity, but failed, and was captured and imprisoned. As had happened on several earlier playthroughs. But this time, there was another prisoner with me. A decision I had made much earlier, to allow some guards to escape from their barracks, meant one of their kind had been captured. We subsequently teamed up to break out. The events you experience differ based on the time of day you visit an area, the clothes you are wearing, even the god you worship.
Flaws? There were a few (but then again, too few to mention?). Some spelling and grammatical errors: more than I had seen in the previous games. I sense that this was the most rushed of the four games. I also understand the necessity of including the combat mini-game and the Swindlestones dice-rolling game, but nevertheless they remain a chore, as they were in previous episodes. Thankfully, this time round there are no points where you are forced to play Swindlestones, and very few points where combat is the only way to proceed. So some redemption, at least.
Unfortunately, the sense of being "rushed" also seems to apply to a few areas of the game that don't have the level of polish in terms of narrative content as the main bulk of the game. The first is the Vaults of Mampang, an underground dungeon crawl filled with traps and monsters, that just seems "off": like it was written by someone else. "In the room is a werewolf!" is an actual sentence in the game. Did the developers allow their children to write part of the game as a birthday present or something? I'm tempted to consider it a deliberate reference to some beloved part of the original gamebook, much like the "Spoony Bard" in Final Fantasy, but I may be over-thinking it.
The second is the Invisible College, a Crystal Maze style series of standalone puzzle rooms, designed, ostensibly to teach you about counter-spells. The contrast between the busy, NPC-filled bulk of the game and this slow, solitary experience in tediously casting one spell after another in the hopes of finding the right counter-spell, could not be more pronounced. While it would work as an interlude between two more action-packed areas, Sorcery! 4 requires visiting this area over and over again. The fifth time you have to escape an animated sheep statue, you will be grumbling. The tenth time, you will be throwing your device across the room.
But pick that device right back up! There are huge rewards for persisting, with multiple endings, all equally satisfying. The challenge is not merely to win the game by defeating the Archmage , but to achieve the ultimate ending. Even after that, secrets abound. What to make of Ranii, an ex-pirate who is also after the crown of Kings? Is it worth trying to restore Valiquesh, the previous Archmage, to her former position of power? Why is some of the writing on the steps to the Archmage's tower "strangely familiar to you"? It's this ridiculous level of replayability, much like Inkle's previous 80 Days, that ultimately makes Sorcery! 4: The Crown of Kings so satisfying.
It's a series that has constantly innovated. The first game introduced the beautiful map and draggable playing piece user interface - instantly removing the "wall-of-text" barrier to entry suffered by so many other gamebook adaptations. The second took steps towards an "open-world" syle experience, allowing you to return to previously visited locations and experience new things there. The third added an incredible time-shifting mechanic allowing you to explore two worlds for the price of one.
This time round, the innovation is less obvious: the removal of a mechanic, rather than the addition of one. Being able to "rewind", undoing your choices and returning to a previous point, has been part and parcel of the series since its inception, replicating the "fingers in the pages" cheating method known to all gamebook aficionados. By removing it (for part of the story), the stakes have been raised: this is the big finish, after all. A checkpoint system has been put in its place, but when you die, you are restored to the checkpoint with all your items, clues and gold intact. You character remembers everything from the previous run and, in some cases, it is necessary to die in order to make progress in your next run. Planescape Torment seems like an influence here.
Neatly, these changes are all justified by the in-game narrative itself. Your character's ability to rewind, the loss of that power, and the gaining of the checkpoint mechanism are cleverly woven into the story. There is even a sublime meta-textual moment when your ultimate adversary, the Archmage, explains the workings of the titular Crown of Kings. It takes away people's free will, implying character's choices are not their own. In much the same way as you, the player, have been deciding on choices the player character will make. Are you, the player, the true Crown of Kings? Then again, your enemy may be lying to you, and its great that a simple hack-and-slash RPG adaptation can be open to such fan theories.
It's a juicy game, brimming with hidden content. I had already "won" the game at least once, and was on my tenth replay, when I discovered you could go south from the central plaza, where I inadvertently became a contestant in a bizarre game-show. Even later, I tried to lie about my identity, but failed, and was captured and imprisoned. As had happened on several earlier playthroughs. But this time, there was another prisoner with me. A decision I had made much earlier, to allow some guards to escape from their barracks, meant one of their kind had been captured. We subsequently teamed up to break out. The events you experience differ based on the time of day you visit an area, the clothes you are wearing, even the god you worship.
Flaws? There were a few (but then again, too few to mention?). Some spelling and grammatical errors: more than I had seen in the previous games. I sense that this was the most rushed of the four games. I also understand the necessity of including the combat mini-game and the Swindlestones dice-rolling game, but nevertheless they remain a chore, as they were in previous episodes. Thankfully, this time round there are no points where you are forced to play Swindlestones, and very few points where combat is the only way to proceed. So some redemption, at least.
Unfortunately, the sense of being "rushed" also seems to apply to a few areas of the game that don't have the level of polish in terms of narrative content as the main bulk of the game. The first is the Vaults of Mampang, an underground dungeon crawl filled with traps and monsters, that just seems "off": like it was written by someone else. "In the room is a werewolf!" is an actual sentence in the game. Did the developers allow their children to write part of the game as a birthday present or something? I'm tempted to consider it a deliberate reference to some beloved part of the original gamebook, much like the "Spoony Bard" in Final Fantasy, but I may be over-thinking it.
The second is the Invisible College, a Crystal Maze style series of standalone puzzle rooms, designed, ostensibly to teach you about counter-spells. The contrast between the busy, NPC-filled bulk of the game and this slow, solitary experience in tediously casting one spell after another in the hopes of finding the right counter-spell, could not be more pronounced. While it would work as an interlude between two more action-packed areas, Sorcery! 4 requires visiting this area over and over again. The fifth time you have to escape an animated sheep statue, you will be grumbling. The tenth time, you will be throwing your device across the room.
But pick that device right back up! There are huge rewards for persisting, with multiple endings, all equally satisfying. The challenge is not merely to win the game by defeating the Archmage , but to achieve the ultimate ending. Even after that, secrets abound. What to make of Ranii, an ex-pirate who is also after the crown of Kings? Is it worth trying to restore Valiquesh, the previous Archmage, to her former position of power? Why is some of the writing on the steps to the Archmage's tower "strangely familiar to you"? It's this ridiculous level of replayability, much like Inkle's previous 80 Days, that ultimately makes Sorcery! 4: The Crown of Kings so satisfying.
Gamebook blogs
http://ift.tt/2d69Myi
via Planet Interactive Fiction http://planet-if.com/
October 6, 2016 at 10:19AM
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