Game development studio Inkle has been put in charge of Steve Jackson’s gamebook series Sorcery!, having already published two of them onto Google Play. We had a chance to meet up with Inkle to talk about the Sorcery! franchise and, more importantly, get some hands-on time with the next installment heading our way very soon, Sorcery! 3.
At GDC chairs are a rare commodity that are hard to find, especially on the showroom floor. So after we met up with Inkle at the IGF showcase we found a nice piece of flooring to pull up as our own, sat down and started talking about Sorcery! and the next one that would be heading our way. If you thought the previous two games were good, Sorcery! 3 takes the franchise to a new level.
The first major change that one notices with Sorcery! 3 is the world map which keeps the original art style it has always had, but is now rendered in 3D. This allows players to zoom in and out as well as rotate the map 360 degrees. It looks quite good to be totally honest. The map plays a major role in Sorcery! 3, not only because you need to use it to navigate to places, but also because you need it to navigate time. In fact the game essentially has two world maps now, one in the present time period and one that represents a long time in the past.
Scattered across the main map in present day are light towers. Moving your characters to one of these towers and turning it on allows you to shine the light on a specific area of the present day map. What this light does is warp that area of the map into the distant past. Players can then travel to that area on the map while the light is shining on it and explore it as it once was in the past. So, as an example, if a village is abandoned and decayed in present day, shining the light on it will warp that village back in time to when it was prosperous and populated. As you can imagine, this means there is a lot of intertwined gameplay and storyline between the past and present in Sorcery! 3.
An interesting side-effect of this time mechanic is how the rewind function works. In previous installments players could rewind time in a specific section of the game for whatever reason, whether that be to fix a bad choice they made or just to see a different outcome. Instead the rewind functionality is now a part of the map with a scroll bar style feature at the bottom of it. As a side-effect of this, there is now a day and night cycle in Sorcery! 3.
The other big change in Sorcery! is the fact that it is now pretty much an open world game. No longer do you have to stay on the path you’ve chosen. You are free to wander the world as you see fit, finding secrets out, doing side quests and general exploring outside of the main storyline. Of course you can always just stick to the main story if you so choose. There are some other really nice changes coming with Sorcery! 3 but we don’t want to spoil all of it.
Sorcery! 3 has some big changes to it, making it a much deeper game, even more so than the franchise already is. If you are eager to get your hands on this next installment, you won’t have to wait too long. Right now Sorcery! 3 is slated for release this Spring. When talking to our friends at Inkle, they mentioned a target time period of April 2015 but that is if everything goes well with the finishing touches. Don’t wander too far off as we will be doing a live preview of the game soon on our TwitchTV channel.
Developer Website: Inkle
