An Origin Story That We Didn’t Know We Wanted
For me, it all started in 1988 with Zak McKracken, and ended in 1998 with Grim Fandango. They were the best ten years of my gaming life, when LucasArts and point-and-click adventures were at their peak. Even the B-list was amazing: games like Lure of the Temptress, Beneath a Steel Sky and Curse of Enchantia.
Smack in the middle of those ten years, and very much in the B-list, was Simon the Sorcerer. Nowadays it gets tarred with a ‘not as good as Discworld’ brush, but people forget that it came out two years’ previous to Terry Pratchett and Psygnosis’s game. It was deliciously meta, hilarious, and had a fine line in taking the piss out of Tolkien, well before Ian McKellen donned Gandalf’s grey wig.
Twenty-two years later, Simon the Sorcerer is back. We’re not entirely sure why, and why it’s a prequel rather than a sequel or remake (Simon says just as much: “who wants an origin story?”). It’s certainly not a notable anniversary. Perhaps someone thought that Return to Monkey Island would be incredibly successful and an avalanche of graphic adventures would follow. Alas, that never happened.
Oh Yeah, Chris Barrie’s Back!
But we’re incredibly happy that someone, somewhere, greenlit Simon the Sorcerer Origins. That’s not only because we have a deep-seated love for the Rincewind-a-like. It’s because Smallthing Studios share that deep-seated love, and have produced something cut from the same cloth. There’s so much love and understanding of Simon that you have to admire it. It’s not a spiritual successor, of course, because this is a prequel; we’ll just have to call it a spiritual predecessor.
Simon the Sorcerer Origins immediately has a couple of problems to overcome. The first is that a prequel makes absolutely zero sense. At the start of the original game, Simon has never been to the parallel fantasy land. He’s just a young boy who finds a magical book in the mouth of his dog, Chippy. But Simon the Sorcerer has a trump card here: it’s a far-fetched fantasy parody, so it can do pretty much anything because magic says so. By the end – which we won’t spoil – there’s a perfectly adequate and contrived reason for everything.
The Colour Of ‘90s Magic
The second problem is that Simon the Sorcerer was made for a little 486, not a modern day console. The pixel art is a little retro, so Smallthing Studios have chosen to upgrade everything to painterly backgrounds and characters borrowed from a cartoon. The combo is hugely effective: the characters, plus the interactive elements, leap off the watercolour backdrops, making them easy to spot. It’s a hugely legible world. And nothing has lost its personality. Simon is a charming brat, popping bubblegum and gurning for the cameras.
All of the point-and-clickery has gone, too. Simon moves with the analogue stick, and the unwieldy verbs – ‘Look-at’, ‘Use’ and more – have been shoved into a garbage can. Instead, everything is contextual. You walk up to elements and ‘use’ them in the most relevant way with a press of the A button. As is customary with modern point-and-clicks, you can highlight all hotspots with a tap of LT, and cycle through them with LB and RB.
To a graphic adventure fanboy/girl of forty years or so, that might seem facile or lacking in depth. But Simon the Sorcerer Origins has you. There is still an inventory, and the designers are particularly unbothered about tidying it up. We kept most of our items through the entire game, and that leaves a shockingly large number of item combinations. You can’t just brute-force Simon the Sorcerer Origins. On occasion, we wished it did make things easier for us in the inventory department.
Falling Under Simon’s Spell
Even better, and our favourite part of Simon the Sorcerer Origins, is the spell system. You will find yourself enrolled in the Magic Academy, and that means gaining basic, elemental spells. They’re treated as verbs but sit visually in your inventory. You can tap Y and access newfound spells, casting them on items or the environment. Simon the Sorcerer Origins has a whale of a time using these, contriving to find as much utility for them as possible.
With these amendments to the formula, Smallthing Studios has everything they need to tell a new Simon the Sorcerer tale, and they have a good run at it. As with many legacy sequels, it’s a mix of the familiar and the unfamiliar. Chippy, Calpyso and Sordid return (Sordid is retroactively seen through a Professor Snape lens, and it works perfectly), while the general thrust of returning home is the same. If we’re being unkind it can veer towards nostalgia-baiting with all of its recurring characters and callbacks. But there are plenty of cracking new characters and scenarios, including a pair of unlucky trolls and Mundus, a shopkeeper who is clearly being puppeteered by an eldritch being.
Forking Trapdoors
If there’s a snag it’s the logic, which – to be fair – was also true of Simon the Sorcerer. There are a few too many leaps in what it expects from the player. Just know that, if you’re stuck with how to use the fork, cuttlefish or bone, then you’re not alone. We were reaching for a guide more than we would have liked, and didn’t get that satisfying “oh, of course!” once we had found out the answer.
I’d suggest that one, simple change would have solved this problem. It’s very hard to examine the items in your inventory. You need to choose an item, close the inventory, and use it on Simon. Even then, some items don’t get a reaction, and the whole process isn’t tutorialised anyway. It’s entirely possible to not realise that this is a feature. If there WAS a clear and easy way of getting Simon to comment on an item, it would have been a helping hand. If we had known that the cuttlefish was in our inventory because it produces ink, well, we would have gotten to the solution quicker.
We are in an age of online guides, so the logical peaks and troughs aren’t so much of a problem – certainly not as much as they were in 1993. There is still a lot of backtracking, though. Fast-travel pins (hilariously thrust into a handheld map and then appearing in the world as the size of boulders) aren’t nearly numerous enough. That’s a 2025 problem, though: we’re just used to games helping us out with navigation. Me from 1993 wouldn’t have found it a problem.
Simon Says Pick This Up
By the time we reached the end of Simon the Sorcerer Origins, we had one abiding thought; we dearly hoped that Smallthing Studios were planning to remake Simon the Sorcerer next. As an audition for that task, this is near-faultless. This IS Simon the Sorcerer, claw-machined from the ‘90s and dropped into a polished, modern graphic adventure.
It says so much about the quality of this version that we wouldn’t want that game to be a mere remake. The devs, artists and writers are too good at constructing a world around Simon. We’d want them to magic up some new bits. Do the impossible, Smallthing Studios: remake Simon the Sorcerer – but make it new, too.
Important Links
Simon the Sorcerer – Origins points and clicks at a 2024 launch on PC and console – https://www.thexboxhub.com/simon-the-sorcerer-origins-points-and-clicks-at-a-2023-launch-on-pc-and-console/
Chris Barrie AND Rick Astley?! Simon the Sorcerer Origins is a Bizarre Adventure – https://www.thexboxhub.com/chris-barrie-and-rick-astley-simon-the-sorcerer-origins-is-a-bizarre-adventure/
Buy Simon the Sorcerer Origins from the Xbox Store – https://www.xbox.com/en-GB/games/store/simon-the-sorcerer-origins/9NNM6QRCZX76/0010
There’s a Digital Deluxe Edition – https://www.xbox.com/en-GB/games/store/simon-the-sorcerer-origins-digital-deluxe-edition/9N0DSPK84SSM/0010
