Four Fat Chicks -- Simon the Sorcerer II: The Lion, the Wizard, and the Wardrobe Review

Simon the Sorcerer II: The Lion, the Wizard, and the Wardrobe

Review by Enigma

Simon the Sorcerer 2 is an inventive cartoon game focusing on comedy. If you love its particular brand of humor, you'll probably love the game. If not, you probably won't. I didn't, hence my judgment of rotten egg, but read on and decide if Simon might be for you.

I haven't played Simon 1. Did that leave me unprepared for Simon's peculiar personality traits, or has his character evolved from the first game? It doesn't matter. Simon 2 stands on its own quite well.

The good news is that Simon 2 offers intricate inventory puzzles, pretty good voice acting, imaginative gameplay, and splashy cartoon art in bright colors. The game comes on only one CD, but the complexity of the puzzles leads to lengthy gameplay, unless your own mind is as outlandish as that of the designers' and you can zip along with ease.

Now for the bad news. Simon, our hero, is not a likeable sort of guy. He's intentionally rude and insufferably conceited. He's supposed to be funny, of course. Many players will find him funny and enjoy the game. If you don't, well, Simon is our hero and dominates the game. You'll just have to put up with him.

Simon 2 owes much to the early Monkey Island games both in the navigation system, which resembles the LucasArts SCUMM system, and in the wackiness of its puzzles. It's a British game, replete with British slang that may leave some American players a bit lost. I caught a distinct flavor of Monty Python, especially in the falsetto voices of the washerwomen around the fountain in the first chapter of the game.

I personally love the Monkey Island games, and I love Monty Python. So, does it sound good? Not unless you tend to giggle at the name of a minor character, "Snot," or unless you guffaw when you learn that "Mucusade" is the name of the substance you're trying to acquire throughout most of the game, or unless you spontaneously snicker at any mention of the number "69." Players will encounter several mild sexual references of the sort that delights boys who know about sex but haven't yet experienced it. Mostly, however, Simon gets his jollies from degrading nearly every character he meets. That sort of adolescent stuff is the unrelenting flavor of the humor. It is pervasive. It is inescapable. It overwhelms every other aspect of the game. The developers clearly intended the game for teens.

The Story

We begin by meeting Runt, a farmboy who aspires to become a wizard. He's seduced to the dark side by the ghost of Sordid, the evil wizard whom Simon killed in the first game. Sordid wants to come back to life and get revenge on Simon. He sets up residence in the Valley of Doom, to whence he attempts to kidnap Simon by trapping him in a "wardrobe" (British for "armoire") that will transport Simon to his castle. The plot goes awry when Calypso, a good wizard, diverts the wardrobe containing the unsuspecting Simon. After this long opening sequence, Simon begins insulting virtually every character he meets in his search for the aforementioned Mucusade that will power up the wardrobe and return him to his own world. Along the way he must win a wizard's contest, break into the royal treasury, and escape when he's kidnaped by pirates. Eventually we meet the lion, although you may have forgotten the subtitle of the game long before that cuddly beast appears.

Gameplay

Simon 2 is third-person with no action elements. You can't die, although if you leave the game alone during a scene, Simon will go through a series of interesting actions such as juggling and levitating and will eventually turn into a broken-up skeleton. Don't worry. He'll spring to life again as soon as you click something.

Movement works through simple pointing and clicking within scenes, but all other actions require clicking on an icon rather than a word. The "use" verb is a hammer, "pick up" is a magnet, "wear" is a top hat, and "give" is a wrapped present. It's easy enough to learn, but it does require the player to glance through the game manual at first. You save, load, and quit by using the hammer on a postcard in the inventory, as Simon himself will tell you. That feature allows you to save as many games as you like, always an appreciated feature.

The puzzles themselves can be intriguing and frustrating. Mostly they possess a certain logic. Dyeing a piece of cloth works the same as in the real world. If you stumble over a welding torch and want to do some welding, you'd better find some eye protection first. Fair enough. Many puzzles, however, reveal their logic only after you've solved them. One of the final puzzles, getting past a rather polite monster, requires a systematic check of every inventory item with every verb. Yet even when you've found the correct combination, it doesn't get you past the monster. Especially during the first chapter of the game, you'll be trekking hither and yon, having conversations that reveal the need for a certain item that you'll eventually obtain, often with difficulty and always in another location. Although the game appears to be nonlinear because you can wander about almost at will, nevertheless one puzzle depends on another, requiring you to build them up in a certain order.

As in the early Monkey Island games, dialogue choices appear, but it usually doesn't matter if you choose the right response. Simon eventually will say the right thing. The lengthy conversations aren't subtitled, however, so you'd better listen carefully to all conversations, often delivered in strong dialect, or you'll miss vital clues.

I found the gameplay to be rather slow. Simon 2 has plenty of animated cutscenes, and these run slowly, almost as though they were occurring underwater. The four opening scenes take up a total of 12 full minutes, and they must be skipped through every time you restart the game. Simon walks as though he's trudging through knee-deep water, and about as slowly. That odd gait pays off when Simon indeed is trudging through knee-deep water during a sewer scene, but it looks quite strange in the rest of the game and appears to contribute to the lethargy of the animations.

Bugs

I played on an iMac with plenty of juice, yet six times I experienced a nasty bug. Animations would simply continue after Simon had left the scene. The first time this happened, I was left watching a dirty underground waterfall gurgling on and on. Each time an animation got stuck, I had to quit the game and reload. Moral: save early; save often, unless you enjoy the humor so much that you want to see it all again. My second attempts to get through these scenes always worked.

The game manual assures the player that you can use the F10 function key to locate items, but every time I tried I got nothing but a large white window within the game and had to quit and reload. It would have been a nice feature if it had worked.

The Verdict

So much in this game depends on your ability to enjoy the intentionally offensive humor that if you don't find it funny, you'll probably think the game's a stinker. I didn't enjoy it, but I'm restraining myself from throwing a stink bomb at the game because it is well designed and executed, and the puzzles, if they're your cuppa tea, will keep you intrigued. If it becomes tedious, then grab a walkthrough, as I did. Be forewarned, however: the final cutscene hardly looks like a "win," so you may feel a bit let down at the end. Or perhaps, if you didn't like Simon, you'll finally grin at something in this game.