Steve Jackson's Sorcery!: The Complete Collection

A masterful, intricate work of fantasy which weaves together themes of history, magic, power, and corruption over a four-part story, Sorcery! is a pitch-perfect adaptation of the choose-your-own-adventure books from the '80s, and one of the best narrative games on Switch. A few bugs and issues here and there dent the experience, but it's hard to mind too much when the rest is just so good.

If I Could Turn Back Time

Steve Jackson’s Sorcery! is the kind of game you can play over and over again as you try to uncover all the different twists and turns you missed the first few times around (and given the sheer number of possibly story combinations, you'll need to play through the game several times and several ways to see everything). Much like inkle's other, later games, Sorcery! is highly replayable and an essential experience for anyone who's even kind of interested in adventure games.

If you are as old as me and let’s be honest, you’re probably not, you would have loved thumbing through choose-your-own-adventure books as a kid. If you are a whippersnapper and have no idea what I am talking about then these were adventure books with choices. At various intervals in the book, you would be given a choice, to attack the snake turn to page 10 or to give it a wide berth, turn to page 20, those kind of free-flowing shenanigans.

Steve Jackson's Sorcery! is a fantastic text-based RPG adventure. You must pick your path, make multiple decisions, and live with the consequences. Subsequently, it is a massive game that is full of surprises and secrets. Therefore, you'll lose yourself in a wonderful computerised rendition of Steve Jackson's epic world.

There are a few minor further issues with the collection – the music is almost shockingly low resolution and difficult to hear, and the interface was clearly designed around touch input so the controller is a little clumsy, but those fade into the background quickly enough and are easy to ignore. What rises above and beyond for Sorcery! is the quality of the writing. My recommendation is to play this like you would read a good book. Forget the in-game music. Put on a pair of headphones with some meditative ambient sound (I like rain “music” myself) and lose yourself in the words. Do that, and the minor irritations along the way will feel rather irrelevant.

If interactive narrative adventures are your thing, then you won't find a better experience than Steve Jackson's Sorcery! This is a glorious achievement, epic in scope, crammed full of meaningful choices, and tremendous fun to play. Highly recommended.

While I may be prone to complaining when titles put me to sleep with their droning stories and dry lore, when the quality of writing is top-notch I'm completely there for it...

Excellent writing, an incredible number of choices with consequences that genuinely impact the whole journey, and a ton of replay value, Steve Jackson’s Sorcery! – The Complete Collection is an absolute treat of an RPG, and if you love the genre, you should play it. The only black marks on it were the menu navigation and the bugs I experienced, but they weren’t enough to make me not want to recommend it.

Sorcery! is a classic fantasy novel and game rolled into one. The elements all fit together. The storytelling is ace, there are many, many choices to make all leading to a different storyline. It’s the kind of tale where you have to remember who you met along the road, pick up keys you find, try to find magical elements and more. It’s like you are stitching loose pages of a book together in the order you want them to be. The graphics are gorgeous as is the soundtracks. If you have never played a Sorcery! game and you love your fantasy books, this is a lovely one to go for. And even if you have played the chapters before, it’s great to have them all rolled into one.