There’s a chance you grew up with Steve Jackson – and his running mate, Ian Livingstone – with the duo providing the backbone of your book reading antics. It was the Fighting Fantasy series that they were best known for but in and amongst that were the mid-80s releases of Sorcery! as Steve Jackson honed his skills. It’s those books that today come to the console landscape, as Steve Jackson’s Sorcery begins to play out on Xbox, PlayStation and Nintendo Switch.
Previously having rocked up on the App Store, Steve Jackson’s Sorcery! is now available to purchase and play on Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, PS4, PS5 and Nintendo Switch, as the inkle development team combine forces with No Gravity Games, in order to hit the gaming masses.
It’s priced at £20.99 and sees players given the chance to play through the entire Sorcery! series in one hit, utilising mechanics that could only really work inside the virtual playgrounds we like to call home. And yep, that means we’re getting all four separate installments in one, as the interactive fantasy adventures play out.
As you’d expect, the key features of Steve Jackson’s Sorcery are plentiful, mostly centring around the chance to create our own adventures, to forge our own paths and to fight to the death (mostly death) against all manner of opposition. The Sorcery! series in itself focuses on how the Crown of Kings has been nabbed and we must go out to reclaim it. Going deeper would spoil things – you’ll just have to play through Steve Jackson’s Sorcery for yourself to find out what happens.
Key game features include:
- Forge your own path. Go where you want in a vast world spread across four enormous maps.
- Weave your magic. Over fifty weird and wonderful spells await, that can send the narrative off in unpredictable directions. Talk to creatures, read minds, glue enemies to the ceiling or turn them to stone, fly, float, and more…
- Swindle the swindlers. Play to win at Swindlestones, a game of cunning and deceit, where you can earn gold as well as crucial information.
- Find your Spirit. Select your God from a pantheon of deities, all with their own quirks and powers
- Fight to survive. Battle hundreds of creatures with unique turn-based fighting that balances raw strength against cunning.
- Explore every avenue. Don’t like where you ended up? Curious about the path not taken? Rewind to any point in the story to try a different way.
- Spin your unique story. The game’s powerful storytelling engine allows for thousands of choices, all of which are remembered and can alter what happens next. No two playthroughs are the same.
- Play it again. New Game Plus mode unlocks tougher challenges and deeper secrets.
Our full review of Steve Jackson’s Sorcery! is up, live and ready for your perusal. It’s spoiler free so is more than safe to read. Just be known that we rate what has been put together here extremely highly so much so that it’s gone and got 4.5/5 in review. Give it a read to find out why.
From there, get over to the Xbox Store, the PlayStation Store or the Nintendo eShop and nail the download you need. We’re sure you’re not going to regret this one.
Game Description:
The Crown of Kings has been stolen. You, a lone adventurer, must cross the wilds to get it back—armed only with a sword, a spellbook of wild magic, and the power to choose which path you take. Brave the deadly Shamutanti Hills to reach Kharé, a city of bandits on the brink of revolution. Navigate the Baklands, a wilderness adrift in time, to reach the Fortress of Sorcerers. Can you learn the secrets of sorcery well enough to outwit the Archmage himself? Adapted from legendary designer Steve Jackson’s multimillion-selling gamebook series and massively expanded by the award-winning narrative studio inkle, Steve Jackson’s Sorcery! is a truly epic interactive adventure that bends its story around every choice you make, big and small.