Simon The Sorcerer: Origins Review by New Team Writer GamesGuru1

The following review for Simon The Sorcerer, is written by GamesGuru1 aka Del. 

Please welcome Del, who has recently joined the Complete Xbox Team, and we look forward to many more reviews from him down the line.

At Completexbox, we always welcome your views, and we love to share and promote them within the wider gaming community, so if you are interested in writing a guest review, please do get in touch.

First Impressions

My first love of gaming from way back from when it wasn’t quite as cool to be a gamer, was the genre of Point ‘n Click Adventure games. From the incredible Secret Of Monkey Island, Loom and Day Of The Tentacle games from LucasArts, to the gritty and cinematic games such as Operation: Stealth and Cruise For A Corpse from Delphine, the style of game I affectionately call a ‘Point-‘N-Clicker’ has always held the biggest space in my heart growing up with the medium called Gaming as a hobby and pastime.

One of the standout games from ‘back in the day’ was a Point-‘N’-Click Adventure game entitled Simon The Sorcerer. Originally made by Adventure Soft and released all the way back in 1993 on the humble Amiga and MS-DOS systems. The colourful world of wizards, trolls, and magic (think Discworld, before Discworld) was ahead of it’s time as it didn’t take itself too seriously and was one of those games that you genuinely enjoyed playing so you could see the story through to its conclusion.

Which brings me back to 2025 with a nostalgic thump with Simon The Sorcerer Origins. An official prequel game to the cult classic title released over 30 years after the original.

Plot

I was very lucky to be given a review copy of this game before official release and as such, this will be a spoiler free review focusing on the title as a whole and with minimum plot and story beats mentioned in order to not spoil the experience for anyone.

What I will say though, is that the story takes place before the original and tells how young Simon became the sarcastic, dry witted wizard we met back in the 90s. With an ancient prophecy, magic spell books and a ‘big bad’ evil Wizard to defeat along the way. Forget Hogwarts style magic and mystery, anyone familiar with the humour of the aforementioned ‘Discworld’ series of novels (and its own similar styled adventure game in the genre), will feel right at home with the level and type of humour on show here.

Gameplay Overiew

Before ‘the boy who lived’ there was ‘the boy who laughed’ and this was a boy known as Simon. This prequel to the original game is how Simon first travelled to a parallel magical world, were monsters and magic exist, and became a wizard in training.

As soon as you load up the game for the first time, you’re hit by two things. Firstly, how beautiful and detailed the game is, with thousands of carefully hand drawn animations  and secondly, the 90s soundtrack that kicks in as the opening cinematic rolls.

Before starting a new game, as always, I checked out the options menu. Which is comprehensive in both it’s Text and Voice language options, with an additional option to have either Text, Voice or both depending on your preference. The controller option (which is always going to be a challenge for any Point-‘N-Click Adventure title, has both a direct control and a more classic control to obviously try to emulate a mouse interface. Audio has the usual Music, Effects and Speech levels, and a ‘Content Creator Mode’ for us Streamers which is a nice touch in this modern age of content creation.

Next has Video options which, in the spirit of this games legacy, has settings for VHS (remember those kids?) Effects and TV Effects of varying degrees of strength. This enables you to customise your experience by making the game look suitably retro and adds another layer of nostalgia to the mix. Finally, we have the Interface options, which has the usual settings for the dialogue being shown on screen, including speech ballons and even small, medium and large options for subtitles, dialogue choices and backgrounds to help with visual impairment. All this enables the player to truly personalise their playthrough perfectly to their own, unique taste while keeping the game accessible to both new players and old gamers returning to this series.

The game opens in 1993, with Simon and his family moving into their new home. The game is very self-aware initially as both Simon and his Mum initially talk about how the controls and interface work within the world, with the hint that Simon knows you’re there looking out from the telly-box as he often talks directly at you. Once you set about exploring and interacting, you’ll see just how much the graphics convey an almost, ‘90s Saturday morning cartoon-esque’ feel to the game. Aided by Simon’s own animations and little qwirks.

Controlling Simon with the left thumbstick and interacting with ‘A’ feels natural. You access your inventory with the ‘Y’ button, which allows you to attempt to use any items you find on your travels aswell as trying to combine them to make new ones.

Objects of interest in the world are easily highlighted and will show how they can be interacted with, whether looked at, commented on or picked up for use later. Obviously, with the intention of making the control scheme accessible whilst using a console controller, you can use the left trigger to highlight important items of interest in the world, with the bumper buttons then cycling through them all. This is especially handy in parts where you just can’t seem to get Simon in the right spot to interact with a point of interest and allows you to potentially find an important item which might not be immediately obvious.

Some items of interest in the world can be clicked on more than once for additional dialogue and information, so it’s best to click multiple times in classic Adventure style until Simon starts repeating himself.

Items that have been used and are no longer needed are automatically removed from Simon’s inventory, which is a good feature to avoid clogging up the inventory screen with now useless items (although this was part and parcel of adventure games in the 90s). Right trigger allows Simon to run to get around more too, handy for all the too-ing and fro-ing these games will get you to do.

Puzzles in the game are tricky at times, but all make sense when you look at them from a certain point of view. Combining items to overcome obstacles usually is the way to go, with Simon snarkily telling the player if what they’re attempting is wrong in some way. However, in classic tradition, it’s sometimes a case of ‘try every item with everything and every other thing on screen’ til it works.

Talking to characters usually involves multiple choice replies during conversation, some funny, some informative but there’s always one to move the story along. You will also often return to characters and NPCs more than once for additional conversations. With lots of in jokes to the genre and popular ‘pop culture’ references and homages to movies like Lord Of The Rings and other fantasy stories.

The game’s autosave is generous, with options to also create your own save points. Like a lot of adventure games from the 90s also, there’s no real way to ‘die’ and get a Game Over screen. Although the game does like to tease you with possible dire results of Simon’s actions at times.

Presentation

The voice acting and general sound effects are top notch, with original Simon voice actor, the one and only Mr. Chris Barrie (from Red Dwarf, The Brittas Empire and A Prince Among Men TV fame) returning once again to voice our titular protagonist.

The game is very ‘English’ in presentation, with dialogue and slang words showing that the developers were mainly UK based. This could present a small problem to gamers from other countries that might not be so familiar with particular words from this part of the world, but this is a minor gripe and didn’t affect me. In fact, I loved how it makes the game more grounded in its original roots.

However, the spoken dialogue can sometimes not quite match the lips of the characters leading to some ‘dubbed’ like moments. This is obviously because the characters have to speak in different languages depending on the country the game is played in and language selected but can be a bit jarring at first when noticed during play.

The original soundtrack of the classic Simon The Sorcerer is also available as part of the Standard Edition if you preorder and the Digital Deluxe Edition as the ‘PONY’ DLC giving the game another link back to the original. Adding more rose-tinted nostalgia to the experience.

The Bottom Line

In my final thoughts, Simon The Sorcerer Origins is a title that successfully captures the magic (no pun intended) and honours the games that came before it. With a beautiful hand-drawn visual style and a 90s inspired soundtrack including songs from the legend that is Rick Astley to complement it.

The world Simon inhabits is wonderful, vibrant and full of small details that bring it to life. The colourful cast of characters you meet are all well animated and have their own voices and dialogue that fit them perfectly most of the time. The user interface is clean and intuitive, showing that the developers took great care in making the title accessible on console aswell as other formats.

If you’re a lover of ‘Point-‘N-Click’ games like myself or just looking for some good old fashioned, puzzley adventure goodness to soak up a few hours, then you can’t go wrong with this. Definitely recommended for fans of the genre and who loved the original!