As I’ve mentioned plenty of times elsewhere, I grew up with gamebooks as a kid and I’m still fascinated by how they could be adapted to digital media. The Fighting Fantasy books were never my personal favorite series but I was always impressed by the incredible variety of genres they included. It’s not a big surprised that I preferred the non-fantasy books to the all too common fantasy ones. This computer adaptation of the standalone Sorcery! books unfortunately is fantasy but they’re pretty much the only ones available so far. Since I never played these books back in the day and I am intrigued by how well they pulled off the adaptation, so this was one of the main reasons why I plonked for that narrative bundle a while back.

As the title indicates, this desktop PC version sold on Steam incorporates both book one and two of the four book series. A neat cloud save system ensures that your character and a record of what you’ve done can be brought forwards to subsequent books. One very welcome change is that rather than presenting everything through blurbs of text, both games essentially take place on a large map of the area that you travel through. It feels almost like a boardgame as you drag your peon from area to area. Also, the combat system has been completely revamped. Instead of the usual Fighting Fantasy system of rolling two dice and trying to get a total that is under your skill statistic, you start with a certain amount of energy. Each round, you can choose to either attack, spending a certain amount of energy to do so, or to defend. If you defend, you take minimal damage, no matter how much energy the enemy spends on attacking. If both attack, the one who expends the most energy wins and inflicts damage on the enemy. It’s not overly complicated and it adds some much needed tactical decision making to the combat.

Content-wise, the story is about your character being sent to recover a crown that was stolen. I found the beginning of book 1 to be rather confusing as you’re not who you are or who you work for. In fact, as far as I know, your character doesn’t even have a name. I found book 1 to be generally underwhelming as it covers traipsing about the countryside, passing through a number of small towns and villages, until you reach the city of Kharé. It’s also rather short and is so easy to complete that you have to try pretty hard to fail to reach the end even on your first attempt. No matter which route you choose, all paths eventually end in Kharé so the choices don’t really feel meaningful.

Book 2 however is much more interesting. It is far larger for one thing, which explains why both of them are sold as a single package, and I very much doubt that it is possible to complete it, at least properly, in one attempt. This one starts with your character being outside of the gates of Kharé and your objective is to get to the other side of the city and out of the gates there. The problem is that those gates are magically locked and so you will need to comb the entire city to obtain the keys that are needed to open them. Since gathering all of the needed clues in one run is so unlikely, the game actually has a time-travel mechanic that sends you back to the beginning except that you get to keep the items, resources and clues that you’ve already found. It’s a very neat way to encourage you to play through multiple times and try all sorts of different options each time.

I do have to admit that the variety of possibilities is impressive. Your choices can influence future events in all manner of unexpected ways and the sheer variety of the magic spells vastly expands the number of options that you have for dealing with any particular situation. Forming spells out of three letters is a bit of a gimmick but I guess it’s fun and atmospheric. There are certainly some spectacular effects available, including a spell that turns you into a giant, as well as some odd ones, like being talking to animals. There’s almost never a reason not to use magic too. Some spells cost stamina but using them to win fights is almost always better than fighting yourself while spells that require items to cast are free. You can abuse the hell out of them once you find the required item. A wonderfully useful one is the mind reading spell that requires a skullcap that you can cheaply buy at the beginning of book 1.

Book 2 further pads out its gameplay with the swindlestones dice game. It’s essentially a straightforward implementation of Liar’s dice played against a single AI opponent that is rather easy to take advantage of but still kind of fun for a while. It would have been more interesting, I think, if the game was played against multiple opponents. If there’s a limit to how much gold you can earn playing that game, I’ve yet to find it. Combined with the time travel mechanic, it’s not too difficult to end book 2 equipped with absolutely every single magic item in the game and tons of gold and rations. I wonder how hard they made book 3 to make this at all balanced?

Overall I enjoyed my time with this game but probably not so much that I’m going to buy the rest of the series. It’s fascinating how the two books make for a wonderful study in contrasts. Book 1 feels much like a series of random encounters until you abruptly hit the end. If you’re going that route, something like Hand of Fate seems far superior to me. If gamebooks are going to be a thing again, the tighter and better planned narrative of book 2 feels like the way to go. The more involved combat system and side activities like Swindlestones are also probably necessary to enable gamebooks to compete with other video games.

This series is too generic a fantasy to keep me interested but if they would adapt their system to more unusual genres and come up with the game mechanics to support them, I think I would be a returning customer. I would love the idea of an expanded, properly executed Starship Traveller or Appointment with F.E.A.R. or Robot Commando. Get to it, Inkle Studios.