Simon The Sorcerer: Origins PS5 Reviewed
I’m not sure quite how, in my formative years as a PC gamer, I was left alone with the likes of Simon the Sorcerer. I would have been about nine when it was released. Though I suspect I played it much, much later since – with only a Commodore 64 at home – I relied entirely on my Grandad’s PC and collection of games. The crass, unapologetically horny, teenage humour that Simon opened with wouldn’t fly today and, indeed, Origins has been noticeably toned down. Does this detract from the nostalgic delight of a prequel to a more than 30 year old game? Not really.
Simon The Sorcerer: Origins attempts to capture the same charm, and the same utter frustration that I remember from my childhood experience with the series. It was a time when sheer difficulty or asinine obscurity stretched out a relatively small game into a multi-day saga that I’d slowly tease my way through over the course of months or years. (Though I have since found in retrospect that my chances of completing the Dagger Of Amon Ra were effectively zero.) Simon’s world was one I kept going back to, and one which – when I re-played the original to confirm some of my thoughts on Origins – I immediately felt at least somewhat familiar with.
While that familiarity didn’t carry over to Origins, I was too long removed from the series to spot the strong similarities between locations (and, indeed, puzzles), the overall… vibe… of the game felt very much the same. In fact, I found Origins had prepared me somewhat for Simon The Sorcerer 1. It had given me a taste for the particular flavour of devious obscurity that characterises the game’s puzzles. Props, then, to Origins creators who understood the source material and ran with it.
Visually, Origins is a wild departure from the pixel art stylings of its… uh… successors? Predecessors. Inspiration? Nonetheless it captures how I feel Simon might have looked were the technology of today available at the time. Its whimsical, cartoonish presentation gives the same tonal juxtaposition that allowed the crude, crass, ugly and outlandish to blend so seamlessly into Simon’s world. If you’re not familiar with the franchise then you should expect bizarre modern-world cameos of fruit machines, construction lanterns and other absurdities.
The glorious power of modern computing has also merged Simon’s world from a series of disparate individual screens into larger environments that *gasp* scroll as you walk around. I’m conflicted about this change because the game feels smaller and less varied as a result. Exploring the original Simon and learning to navigate its rather labyrinthine series of areas was all part of the fun. Origins has very little to offer by comparison, with none of the serendipitous encounters (or spotting faces in the backdrops) that Simon would spring on you as you explored.
Gone, however, is the tedious hunt for the right pixels relating to an object you might be able to interact with. The need for console compatibility (I played through mostly fine on the PlayStation 5, using remote play to my iPhone and a Serafim S3 controller) means you must be able to see all interactable objects and switch between them easily. This is a blessing, but Smallthing have taken it upon themselves to recapture some of that frustration by still finding a way to hide things from all but the sharpest of wits. You really, really need to pay attention to seemingly innocuous objects if you want to make your way through this game.
One of my biggest sticking points, relating to playing on a screen the size of a phone, rather than the size of a TV, was missing some visual detail I needed to fully understand to progress. I think perhaps my ADHD cooked brain is at least partly to blame, too, this game was more of a struggle than I’d perhaps like to admit.
The game is also packed with red herrings, items with apparently no use (maybe I missed something?), characters with no interaction and items you might comment upon but be unable to interact with until much later. It’s enough to keep you exploring, and a few things do change as the game progresses. Unfortunately, stumbling between the same handful of areas – with gratuitously long, fade-to-black scene transitions – does get quite irksome after a while. It very much feels like a thirty year old game remade with modern trappings. Without the mantle of nostalgia to hide the cracks- ie: if you’ve never played the originals or have no interest in doing so- it’s probably going to be a hard sell.
Many characters from the original Simon the Sorcerer make a return, but there’s some new blood too. I’d suspect that most players might be, like me, so far removed from the original series that they’ll miss references and won’t spot familiar locations. The game feels smaller, too, fewer locations, and many that serve exclusively as a scenic passage from one place to another. I feel like the original Simon had a little more going on, and a little more variety. And, indeed, picking up the original Simon and replaying it confirmed my suspicions.
Some new gameplay mechanics make an appearance, and they’re… fine…. I guess, but feel a little tacked on in an effort to give the game some interest. Casting spells would be an awful lot more fun if they did silly, random things in more situations. Where they are used, the casting is quite tedious and a lot of the difficulty from the final encounter with Sordid seemed to lie in the clumsy UI (a staple of adventure games, I suppose) rather than the mechanics of the battle.
I have no idea why the game opens and closes with Rick Astley, though it’s fair to say that Simon’s original opening might raise an eyebrow or two today. It was a revelation to me that Chris Barrie voiced Simon – the gap between me playing Simon The Sorcerer and me watching way too much Red Dwarf must have been on the order of a decade – despite them being, surprisingly, contemporaries. While I appreciated the return of an original voice actor – it kinda feels right on some level – the absurdity of clearly a man’s voice coming out of a child character was a little distracting at times. He sounds very distinctly older than the original Simon, as you would expect. Other voice acting was mixed, at best, with Chris Barrie’s Simon so clearly punching above the others, despite the other voice actors being, it turns out, relatively experienced. I can only assume the bizarre, almost drunken and jarringly inconsistent delivery of Sordid was as directed.
I’d have liked more dialogue options with characters, and more things to say other than “bye” when a conversation had been exhausted. Even just some gentle hints as to where I should be looking next might have helped me along.
While you won’t make pass after pass at any buxom vikings or engage in conversation with a talking tree stump, Origins does feel very much like a Simon game. Whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing wholly depends on your patience for thirty year old ideas about games, and your familiarity with, and love of the series. If you’re a newcomer I’d encourage you to avail yourself of a copy of Simon The Sorcerer and give it a try in ScummVM or play the Legacy version from Simon The Sorcerer 25th Anniversary Edition to get an appreciation for what Smallthing Studios are trying to accomplish in Origins.
Overall I enjoyed the game. However I was struck with an urge to do more than a cursory dive into the originals and ended up spending a couple of hours treading water in Simon The Sorcerer before concluding this review. I discovered my nostalgic fondness for Simon was well-placed. While Origins doesn’t quite hold a candle to the variety, unfiltered absurdity and classic pixel art charm of the enigmatic original games, it at least has something to offer. It might even introduce new fans to the franchise.
You can currently pick it up Simon The Sorcerer: Origins £17.99 on the PS5 store or £18.89 on Steam.