I really enjoyed this month’s game as well as listening to the play togethers. I do have some final thoughts though and was curious if anyone else did too. Fair warning, spoilers ahead.
I think what Simon the Sorcerer did very well was the humor, interesting scenes, memorable characters and following certain aspects of good adventure game design. I can’t remember if I ever laughed out loud at anything in the game, but I was pretty consistently amused by the absurdity of Simon’s character and the situation he was put in. I’m a sucker for fantasy settings and even my children were sucked in by things like the dragon, giant, witch’s hut, etc. I’m also relieved that the game borrowed from LucasArt’s typical design philosophy of no dead ends or deaths.
I do find it interesting though that the game designers seemed to ignore some other points of Ron Gilbert’s good adventure game design philosophy outlined in his 1989 article “Why Adventure Games Suck And What We Can Do About It”. I thought the game’s biggest flaw was not following that main goals and sub-goals need to be obvious and clear. Despite knowing that your first big sub-goal is to find a staff last owned by Nafflin the Necromancer, there are no clues beyond that which point towards finding the staff. I didn’t notice any hints indicating that the Necromancer was in the Pig Princess’s tower (in fact the princess mentions a witch instead). Every item I picked up and puzzle I solved felt like I was doing it for no good reason, like I was solving them ahead of when I would need to according to the plot. But no, you need to do things that seem completely unrelated to your current task such as help the woodcutter, so that you acquire some worms which you need to descend a tower of which you’d have no idea that staff you’re looking for is down there.
I think that’s what frustrated me the most. I’ll forgive moon logic solutions if it’s obvious that I need to focus on a particular puzzle, but the game really never guides you towards which puzzle you should be solving or give you an indication of whether you have the items yet to actually solve it. Some of the things I got hung up on until I literally tried everything… Opening a door with a pig, showing the gem to the dealer through dialog did nothing yet giving him the gem out of dialog worked, finding the woodcutter’s secret lair which was never hinted at, and skull island being underneath the swampling’s box.
Despite my complaints I really did enjoy the game, even enough to start the 2nd one in the series. So far it seems to have a bit more focus on guiding the player what to do next but I’m not very far in yet. I hope I get to read some other thoughts and really looking forward to this episode. Many things to tijn and rnlf for recording the play togethers!
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