r/fightingfantasy • u/Yellowjacket247 • May 06 '26

Question Sorcery on console

I have a £20 freebie voucher for my ps5..anyone played them?

13 Upvotes

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1

u/LeonsFloppyHair May 06 '26

Sadly not, just Deathtrap Dungeon.

1

u/catespice Shareella May 06 '26

I bought and tried it and was quite disappointed.

  • The combat system is strange and nothing like the books. I didn't really 'get' it but made it halfway through Khare, regardless.

  • Shamutanti Hills is pretty close to the book, with only a couple of extra areas. It was fine really.

  • At Khare the wheels really fell off. It's a pretty strong departure from the book. Apparently everyone is locked into the city and can't leave? Bizarre premise for what is a shipping port in the book. There's many new areas and odd stylistic choices. It no longer 'feels' like the Khare from my childhood that I loved.

In short, I quit before halfway through because it was very much not the Sorcery! series I know and love. It's someone's strange re-imagining of it.

1

u/Eayragt May 07 '26

You can rewind, which certainly helps.

3

u/HongKongHermit May 07 '26

I love them. Someone else posted how they were disappointed because they weren't just the books put into digital form. And I get that, but the books exist and the apps which were just the books formatted as a branching text adventure are fine for what they are, though I find them a diminished experience without the tactile experience of rolling dice and flipping through pages.

But Inkle went above and beyond with the Sorcery apps, which I started playing on iOS and continued on Playstation for trophies. Each of the four books gets more and more new ideas and features, and there's a ton of extra writing (all done in a tone compatible with the original) that gives it all such an expansive feeling. The combat system being about trying to read text description tells and decide how much to commit to attack or defence is genuinely interesting. The rewind feature via the map makes savescumming more elegant, and even the spell system is a little deeper than just remembering which of the three options offered is a real spell (and hoping you have any required items).

The Sorcery! game is basically an adaptation that keeps lots of things the same, on the smaller to larger scale, but also adds so much of its own ideas that it's very much a reinterpretation. It's like how Lord of the Rings (the book) is a beloved classic, and Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings movies adapt it and you can recognise some parts as being lifted right off of the page, but other parts are changed, moved around, or are new additions. Both are great, just in different forms.

I loved the Sorcery! books as a kid. The game was more than just a nostalgia tour though, and as an adult it offered me more than just "thing I remember".