Permit me to take you on a journey back to 1994. As I’ve mentioned before, it was the year my parents finally relented (after a whole lot of nagging about how vitally important Microsoft Encarta would undoubtedly be to my future career prospects) and the benevolent PC gods squatted upon our household to birth a 486 DX2/66 into the world. But it was never about Encarta. Within days, I’d developed an insatiable hunger for PC gaming mags, poring back and forth through increasingly dog-eared pages as a hitherto unimagined world of digital wonder presented itself. LucasArts’ Sam & Max: Hit the Road was my inaugural purchase, slowly ballooning to include the likes of Theme Park, The 7th Guest, and Myst. But one game I never quite got around to playing was Simon the Sorcerer.
Simon the Sorcerer OriginsDeveloper: Smallthing StudiosPublisher: ININPlatform: Played on PCAvailability: Out now on PS5, PS4, Xbox Series X/S, Xbox One,Switch, and PC (via Steam and Epic).
Which is a bit of a surprise given how vividly it exists in my mind. I can easily recall the magazine adverts and the cover disc demos; I remember coveting its sturdy, purple-edged box while prowling the aisles of GAME, lost in the promise of some thigh-slapping fantasy highjinks distilled into that image of Simon and his spellbook, surrounded by unlikely friends and foes. What whimsical marvels lie within?, I pondered, before relunctantly placing the box back on its shelf, never to revisit Simon again. And some 30 years later, I haven’t satisfied my teenage curiosity, despite it being readily available through the likes of GOG these days.
All of which is to say the newly released Simon the Sorcerer: Origins – an extravagantly produced prequel to the cult-classic 1993 game – is my very first time with the series. And if I’m honest, I’m not entirely sure how to feel about it all. The original Simon the Sorcerer told the story of a snarky 12-year-old boy sucked through a portal into a fantasy world of wise-cracking characters while looking for his dog. And so began a quest to defeat the evil sorcerer Sordid and find a way home, all unfolding in classic point-and-click adventure style – think Monkey Island meets Discworld (which would get its own well-received adventure game a few years later) and you’re kind of on the right track.
Simon the Sorcerer: Origins, meanwhile, posits that Simon (who we see moving into his familiar family home at the start, after being expelled from school) actually had adventure to the same universe prior to the events of the first game – which makes so little sense based on my scant knowledge of the original’s set-up, I might be missing something entirely. And so what we have here is a game of knowing winks (‘Haven’t we already met?’ Simon nudge-nudgingly asks the wizard Calypso early on after meeting him for what would technically be the first time) that really only serves to faintly bewilder the series newcomers developer Smallthing Studios was presumably hoping to attract by making it a prequel in the first place.