Simon the Sorcerer II: The Lion, the Wizard, and the Wardrobe Review

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            Simon the Sorcerer II: The Lion, the Wizard, and the Wardrobe

Review by Enigma

Simon the Sorcerer 2 is an inventive cartoon game focusing on comedy. If you love its particular brand of humor, you’ll probably love the game. If not, you probably won’t. I didn’t, hence my judgment of rotten egg, but read on and decide if Simon might be for you.

I haven’t played Simon 1. Did that leave me unprepared for Simon’s peculiar personality traits, or has his character evolved from the first game? It doesn’t matter. Simon 2 stands on its own quite well.

The good news is that Simon 2 offers intricate inventory puzzles, pretty good voice acting, imaginative gameplay, and splashy cartoon art in bright colors. The game comes on only one CD, but the complexity of the puzzles leads to lengthy gameplay, unless your own mind is as outlandish as that of the designers’ and you can zip along with ease.

Now for the bad news. Simon, our hero, is not a likeable sort of guy. He’s intentionally rude and insufferably conceited. He’s supposed to be funny, of course. Many players will find him funny and enjoy the game. If you don’t, well, Simon is our hero and dominates the game. You’ll just have to put up with him.

Simon 2 owes much to the early Monkey Island games both in the navigation system, which resembles the LucasArts SCUMM system, and in the wackiness of its puzzles. It’s a British game, replete with British slang that may leave some American players a bit lost. I caught a distinct flavor of Monty Python, especially in the falsetto voices of the washerwomen around the fountain in the first chapter of the game.

I personally love the Monkey Island games, and I love Monty Python. So, does it sound good? Not unless you tend to giggle at the name of a minor character, “Snot,” or unless you guffaw when you learn that “Mucusade” is the name of the substance you’re trying to acquire throughout most of the game, or unless you spontaneously snicker at any mention of the number “69.” Players will encounter several mild sexual references of the sort that delights boys who know about sex but haven’t yet experienced it. Mostly, however, Simon gets his jollies from degrading nearly every character he meets. That sort of adolescent stuff is the unrelenting flavor of the humor.  It is pervasive. It is inescapable. It overwhelms every other aspect of the game. The developers clearly intended the game for teens.

The Story

We begin by meeting Runt, a farmboy who aspires to become a wizard.  He’s seduced to the dark side by the ghost of Sordid, the evil wizard whom Simon killed in the first game. Sordid wants to come back to life and get revenge on Simon. He sets up residence in the Valley of Doom, to whence he attempts to kidnap Simon by trapping him in a “wardrobe” (British for “armoire”) that will transport Simon to his castle. The plot goes awry when Calypso, a good wizard, diverts the wardrobe containing the unsuspecting Simon. After this long opening sequence, Simon begins insulting virtually every character he meets in his search for the aforementioned Mucusade that will power up the wardrobe and return him to his own world. Along the way he must win a wizard’s contest, break into the royal treasury, and escape when he’s kidnaped by pirates.  Eventually we meet the lion, although you may have forgotten the subtitle of the game long before that cuddly beast appears.

Gameplay

Simon 2 is third-person with no action elements. You can’t die, although if you leave the game alone during a scene, Simon will go through a series of interesting actions such as juggling and levitating and will eventually turn into a broken-up skeleton.  Don’t worry. He’ll spring to life again as soon as you click something. 

Movement works through simple pointing and clicking within scenes, but all other actions require clicking on an icon rather than a word. The “use” verb is a hammer, “pick up” is a magnet, “wear” is a top hat, and “give” is a wrapped present. It’s easy enough to learn, but it does require the player to glance through the game manual at first. You save, load, and quit by using the hammer on a postcard in the inventory, as Simon himself will tell you. That feature allows you to save as many games as you like, always an appreciated feature.

The puzzles themselves can be intriguing and frustrating. Mostly they possess a certain logic. Dyeing a piece of cloth works the same as in the real world. If you stumble over a welding torch and want to do some welding, you’d better find some eye protection first. Fair enough. Many puzzles, however, reveal their logic only after you’ve solved them. One of the final puzzles, getting past a rather polite monster, requires a systematic check of every inventory item with every verb. Yet even when you’ve found the correct combination, it doesn’t get you past the monster. Especially during the first chapter of the game, you’ll be trekking hither and yon, having conversations that reveal the need for a certain item that you’ll eventually obtain, often with difficulty and always in another location. Although the game appears to be nonlinear because you can wander about almost at will, nevertheless one puzzle depends on another, requiring you to build them up in a certain order.

As in the early Monkey Island games, dialogue choices appear, but it usually doesn’t matter if you choose the right response. Simon eventually will say the right thing. The lengthy conversations aren’t subtitled, however, so you’d better listen carefully to all conversations, often delivered in strong dialect, or you’ll miss vital clues.

I found the gameplay to be rather slow. Simon 2 has plenty of animated cutscenes, and these run slowly, almost as though they were occurring underwater. The four opening scenes take up a total of 12 full minutes, and they must be skipped through every time you restart the game. Simon walks as though he’s trudging through knee-deep water, and about as slowly. That odd gait pays off when Simon indeed is trudging through knee-deep water during a sewer scene, but it looks quite strange in the rest of the game and appears to contribute to the lethargy of the animations.

Bugs

I played on an iMac with plenty of juice, yet six times I experienced a nasty bug. Animations would simply continue after Simon had left the scene. The first time this happened, I was left watching a dirty underground waterfall gurgling on and on. Each time an animation got stuck, I had to quit the game and reload. Moral: save early; save often, unless you enjoy the humor so much that you want to see it all again. My second attempts to get through these scenes always worked.

The game manual assures the player that you can use the F10 function key to locate items, but every time I tried I got nothing but a large white window within the game and had to quit and reload.  It would have been a nice feature if it had worked.

The Verdict

So much in this game depends on your ability to enjoy the intentionally offensive humor that if you don’t find it funny, you’ll probably think the game’s a stinker. I didn’t enjoy it, but I’m restraining myself from throwing a stink bomb at the game because it is well designed and executed, and the puzzles, if they’re your cuppa tea, will keep you intrigued. If it becomes tedious, then grab a walkthrough, as I did. Be forewarned, however: the final cutscene hardly looks like a “win,” so you may feel a bit let down at the end. Or perhaps, if you didn’t like Simon, you’ll finally grin at something in this game. The End

The Verdict

The Lowdown

Developer: Headfirst Productions Publisher: Adventure Soft Release Date: 1995

Available for: DOS Macintosh Windows

Four Fat Chicks Links

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Screenshots

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System Requirements

Macintosh: Power Mac 16 MB RAM OS 8.X +

PC: 386/40 processor VGA/MCGA 256 colors 4 MB RAM Hard drive Sound card CD-ROM drive Mouse

      Copyright © Electric Eye Productions.  All rights reserved.  No reproduction in whole or in part without express written permission.

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17 Responses to First Impressions: Heavy Rain

  • Toger

    I hate QTEs, but Heavy Rain is sitting in my Amazon cart waiting for me to push the button. I don’t even own a PS3, but I plan on buying the game anyway. I do have a good friend who’ll let me play at his house. Of course, I’ll have to drive 100 miles, one way, through the snow to get to his house. His chat-happy birds will cheerfully chirp thereby completely disrupting any atmosphere, but I can play.

  • David

    What!?  Heavy Rain is full of QTEs?  I totally did not see that coming.

    The whole dad experience thing sounds intriguing.  I’m already getting odd looks from my girlfriend for exclaiming over cute kids on the bus or at the mall, something like what you described might send my biological clock over the edge.

  • Lewis B

    My sentiments exactly David!

    Mat has been playing the Heavy Rain demo for a while now, and although he admits he is intrigued by the story, he does constantly complain about the control method.

    R2 + Analogue stick to run? *scoff*

  • Gregg B

    @Lew: DEMO?! PS3 DEMO?! *runs off to PS3*

    That sounds like the Batman: Arkham Asylum controls – Crazy Bonkers Design. The sort of design that puts pull handles on push doors.

    @Steerpike: “I despise children. They are disgusting and annoying. They knock things over. They interfere with everything. They’re not useful until they’re at least 13, when you can get them to mow the lawn and stuff. But you can pay a service to do that for just a few hundred bucks a year and the service won’t vomit on you, shit in its diapers, grow up to resent you, or otherwise suck. Don’t flame me and don’t post comments to the contrary: kids are repulsive. Why anyone would want them is beyond my feeble imaginings.”

    HAHAhahaha- I er, – hahahaha – you’re as outspoken as me about demon spawn children.

  • Lewis B

    Yeah its been on the internet for weeks and weeks Greggi.  I think you have to do a couple of online puzzles etc to get the appropriate code or something.

    Search on Kotaku, they first ran with it IIRC.

  • Mat

    The puzzle code was for early access before it hit the PSN Store. It’s been available to all since last week.

    Regarding the demo, it took me around 3 or 4 attempts at it to appreciate it. First time around I couldn’t have been more dissapointed by it, but after the 3rd or 4th I decided I wanted to stick with it. I don’t think the demo is a particularly great example of what the game supposedly does best either – choice. I also HATE the control scheme and some of the voice acting is so wooden. Creating an immersive, realistic game is fine but having characters stumbling into tables and fridges because of the ham fisted controls, and listening to French voice actors impersonate Americans does remove that realism a little!

    Still, I rushed out to buy it this morning and will rush home from work to play it in about an hour!

  • xtal

    @ Toger: I don’t own a PS3 either, and it’s not like Heavy Rain seems to be “that” game which makes you run out and buy one– like Bioshock made me run out and get a 360– and it’s also not like this game looks groundbreaking in any way, because it really doesn’t. It’s just got me curious…and people tend to do crazy things the week after they get their yearly bonus. Soooooo yeah, who knows; maybe I’ll own a PS3 soon, but like hell I would admit that it was for Heavy Rain. Psh. I’d tell people it was because I wanted to watch BSG on blu-ray; though anyone who knows me would see right through that lie since I am an avid non-format-upgrader: I’ll switch my BSG collection from DVD to blu-ray the day I upgrade my copy of Jurassic Park from VHS to DVD. (Hint: never)

  • Toger

    @xtal: I’m in no hurry to upgrade my meagre DVD collection to blu-ray either, but I have to say the movies I’ve watched on my friend’s PS3 are absolutely stunning. Blade Runner was simply breath-taking in blu-ray and it made me want a PS3. I don’t think Heavy Rain will be a system seller for me, but I’m betting the game from the Ico team will.

  • xtal

    A game from the Ico team, you say? Hmmm. I’ve been making rounds on Kijiji and Craigslist looking for a copy of Ico (eBay prices are so shudder-inducing) for a few days now. I really need to play that game after my experience with the indescribable Shadow of the Colossus.

    It’s good to know they haven’t died some Interplay-esque death in the meantime.

  • Matt "Steerpike" Sakey

    Nope, they’re a small team that works within Sony. Fumito Ueda is the lead and he’s got like ten or so people who’ve worked with him on all his games. Sony pretty much lets them do what they want.

    The Last Guardian is the game that’s coming up from them. It looks more like Ico and less like Shadow of the Colossus to me, which is to say it appears to be focused on platform elements. If I didn’t already have a PS3, it’d be the game that sells it.

  • Gregg B

    @Toger: Ooh, Blade Runner on Blu-ray, gorgeous in all its gorgeosity. In 5.1 it sounds incredible too.

    I bought my PS3 for Team Ico’s unnamed-at-the-time game, Heavy Rain (back when it was just a teaser), LittleBig Planet (yes, yes, I know), Dead Space and Motor Storm: Pacific Rift which sort of pushed me off the fence.

  • Toger

    Gregg, oh yes. The surround sound was spectacular. Did I mention my friend’s HDTV is 72″ (obscene, isn’t it)? It’s like being at a high-class theatre: better food, pauses for bathroom breaks and no one talking through the movie.

    Is Trine up on PSN, yet? If so, that might be my tipping point: Last Guardian, Heavy Rain and Trine.

  • Gregg B

    *spits tea out, despite not drinking any*

    O_O

    72″?! I’m speechless. I can only imagine how awesome that is. Size does matter.

    Not so sure about Trine… hang on. I think it is.

  • Matt "Steerpike" Sakey

    I think it is too, Toger. I’ll check.

    To be honest, though, I doubt you’d be disappointed with the purchase even if Trine’s not there yet. I’ve been way happier with my PS3 than with my 360. Demon’s Souls, Valkyria Chronicles, Uncharted, Folklore, even little games like Flower – I’ve had more concentrated fun with the PS3 than with Microsoft’s console, which tends to gather dust for months between game releases.

    72″???? I thought size didn’t matter!

  • Toger

    Size doesn’t matter. 😀

    In my friend’s defense, it was a great deal: opened box, itty-bitty scratch on the case, not a dead pixel to be seen and it was less $$ than the 60″ he originally wanted.

    Thanks for checking guys. I’ve played a tiny bit of Uncharted, but I’m horrible at the combat. Flower intrigues me. As does Demon’s Souls, but I know that game will crush my soul.

  • Gregg B

    There were certain moments in Flower where it just totally succeeded in conveying a feeling that I can’t say I’ve had in many other games, usually when rushing across a field through the grass or through a canyon or just skimming a pond, but it was never anything to do with collecting bloody petals or fulfilling some rudimentary puzzle. I think my problem with it was that it felt like it was trying to be this deeply emotional piece but in the end there seemed to be too many concessions to being a game rather than just running with the emotive side of the experience. One thing I am sure about though, is the trophies. Don’t get me started on the fucking trophies…

    One of my favourite little games on the PS3 is Everyday Shooter. It’s got a brilliant soundtrack that suits its raw visual style and I love how each level requires a certain tactic or strategy to survive it. It’s a very satisfying game in small bursts.

  • Hanover

    Unfortunately Cage mucked up the ending yet again.  The problem is that the mechanic of the game forced them to have to cheat in order to prevent spoiling the mystery of the game.

    There is also a red herring that makes no sense and is obviously put there to misdirect the player.

    90% of the game is awesome, the last 10% while not as bad as the indigo prophecy, is still sloppy.

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