The original Sorcery! games on mobile made a strong impression on me. They were my first encounter with Inkle, a studio I’m now besotted with, and they were among my first encounters with deeper, more substantial mobile games. In fact, at the time – and this was quite a long time ago – I couldn’t believe my hunk-a-junk iPhone 4 was capable of something so beautiful.
Sorcery!Developer: Inkle, No Gravity GamesPublisher: No Gravity GamesPlatform: Played on Xbox Series SAvailability: Released 23rd June on Switch (£25), PlayStation (£20) and Xbox (£21)
I still see Sorcery!’s gorgeous world maps in my mind – maps I now know are drawn by the superbly talented Mike Schley; I still hear Vaughan Williams’ Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis in my ears; and, perhaps more importantly, I still think about the situations the game presented me with – the unpredictability of their outcomes, the strangeness of the encounters, and the wonderfully sobering realisation the game wasn’t afraid to kill me for taking a wrong turn.
Of course, a lot of this comes from the source material: the old Steve Jackson Sorcery! game books. But there’s also so much of what I’ve come to know as Inkle in there too – a cheekiness and a fondness for upending convention and doing what you don’t expect. And perhaps above all: a skill with wielding words in text-based adventures that I think is unmatched.
But Sorcery! was overshadowed by the studio’s own success with 80 Days and by the prestige of Heaven’s Vault, and fractured by appearing on both mobile and eventually PC, where it failed to make much impact. Time passed and Sorcery! was forgotten. But now it’s back.