Sorcerer

by Steve Meretzky

Episode 2 of The Enchanter series
Fantasy, Zorkian
1984

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- LoquySSS46 (Longueuil, Québec, Canada), March 27, 2024

- Artran (Taipei, Taiwan), February 10, 2024

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Rezrov review. Read. Rejoice!, February 2, 2024
by deathbytroggles (Minneapolis, MN)

Steve Meretzky took over the reins from Marc Blank and Dave Lebling in his second adventure after the wildly popular Planetfall. His style is quite evident here. While telling perhaps a weaker story with a significantly less serious atmosphere than Enchanter, Sorcerer far exceeds it as a sequel thanks to a more user-friendly design and some truly excellent puzzles.

You’ve been promoted in the interim and are more or less the right-hand man of Belboz, the head of the Guild of Enchanters. One morning he goes missing and in your search for him you discover he may be in the thralls of an evil sorcerer. And, unfortunately, that is pretty much the plot. In fact, the only times you can encounter this evil presence yourself is at the beginning if you fall asleep at home (which is never clearly explained) and at the very end.

Upon starting I was immediately annoyed as I was told I was getting thirsty and hungry, my biggest complaint from the first story. But I was soon relieved to discover a magic spell that obviated the need to eat or drink. That this new spell was even necessary was a rather pointlessly cruel joke, but at the same time a humble acknowledgement of a past mistake. The sleep daemon still exists and for the same reason: to get incredibly subtle hints for later in the game. As the game has no time limit, you can sleep just about anywhere when you get tired without worry.

Most of the game takes place in the land where the evil sorcerer hails, and it is extra-Zorkified as decrepit castles and coal mines butt right up against a gnome-run amusement park with a casino and a flume ride. Most locations are vividly portrayed even if as a totality it’s an incoherent mess. As such the map is easy to remember.

The amazing thing about Sorcerer is how fairly it treats the player, a rarity in 1984. There are plenty of walking dead scenarios you can get yourself into, but they’re pretty much either obvious right before or right afterwards. For example, you can drink a potion when you don’t need it, and it’s immediately clear you need to restore. Or you might enter an area that kills you, but the signs were clear that potential danger lied ahead. But beyond that, there is an optional spell that allows you to essentially create a save point, reviving you to that location if you kick the bucket. And the really cool aspect is that not only is the spell there to rescue you, it can also be manipulated to solve a few different puzzles in the game. While the “normal” way to the solve these puzzles may be more satisfying to some, I was happy to be rewarded with what my brain felt was clever in the moment.

Sorcerer rewards the player in many other ways as well. While there are many red herrings, when you attempt to solve puzzles in logical ways and fail you are almost always rewarded with an amusing retort as to why it didn’t work. The side effect of this was that I trusted the game to communicate well and I never went to a walkthrough when I was stuck. In fact, to this point it’s the first Infocom game where I didn’t require at least one hint (outside of A Mind Forever Voyaging, which is generally puzzleless).

And to top it all off, there are some damn fine puzzles. Two double as copyright protection, but you still must use logic to correctly interpret the game’s lore from the written materials. Believe it or not, there’s a maze that is actually really cool, a statement I may never make again. Finally, an unexpected time travel puzzle near the end is extraordinarily satisfying to solve.

There are three endings depending on how you play out the endgame, with the two better endings requiring you having solved previous puzzles. They’re well written, if a little underwhelming from a story perspective, an expected outcome given the utter lack of plot progression throughout the game. 

For those who loved Enchanter, Sorcerer may feel like a bit of a letdown as it veers wildly in tone and barely does anything to further the Zorkian lore. Thankfully, the excellent spellcasting system was maintained; so if you’re mostly just in it for the puzzle-solving you’ll be right at home.

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- Max Fog, January 25, 2024

- ENyman78 (Gold Beach, OR), October 29, 2023

- Kastel, May 24, 2023

- Phil Riley, April 28, 2023

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Solid, but not mind-blowing, October 11, 2022

The main thing I enjoyed about Sorcerer was simply that there was nothing to hate about it. It is a solid game, in the best Meretzky style: clear progress from start to end, many simple puzzles, with some interesting mildly-complex ones, and a clear and satisfying ending. In fact, this is a very strongly average game in every aspect I can think of (which is definitely not a bad thing for 1984 --- the norm was way worse).

I feel that this was maybe the easiest Infocom game I've played so far (maybe easier than Wishbringer and Hollywood Hijinx; it's just very well-written and consistently reasonable). Actually, one thing that bothered me a bit was that many puzzles were just too simple. For example: You find a scroll with a spell that affects dogs, you find a dog, you cast the spell on the dog, and that's it (not an actual in-game example). With the exception of one solution ((Spoiler - click to show)Throwing guano inside the cannon), which took me a few days and some brute forcing, everything else was pretty straightforward. Even the infamous early-game thing that blocked many people seemed ok to me; it's all heavily hinted and there is even an in-game hint system, so to speak ((Spoiler - click to show)the vezza spell).

All in all, I heartily recommend it to anyone who wants to actually feel good about finishing an Infocom game without a walkthrough and without banging your head against the wall. This is probably one of your best shots!

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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
The Sagging Middle of the Enchanter Saga, August 18, 2022
by Drew Cook (Acadiana, USA)

I've learned that my disappointment with Sorcerer is a minority opinion, but it has garnered its share of ambivalent reviews over the years. Obviously, Steve Meretzky making puzzles with Enchanter's magic system could never culminate in a bad game, or even a mediocre one, but the result can match neither Enchanter's innovations nor Spellbreaker's moments of transcendence. It is, in other words, a good game wedged between two brilliant ones.

Its chief problem is a lack of coherence. The Zork trilogy is held together by a kind of subsumed mournfulness. Elsewhere, the recently abandoned habitations and escalating ambiance of dread in Enchanter create a sense of the stakes. Sorcerer feels aimless by comparison, and the player may forget their goal altogether in favor of riding the rides at Bozbarland, a surprisingly thorough (in those days of constrained computing resources) implementation of an amusement park.

That isn't to say that there aren't mechanical satisfactions. Sorcerer's two most famous puzzles deserve their reputations. They also are remarkably different. One relies on intuition, while the other requires careful mapping and spatial awareness. I have often said that Steve Meretzky was Infocom's most reliable puzzlemaker, and Sorcerer offers no counterarguments.

A frequent complaint is that something must be completed in the first (I just checked) 27 moves or so, and it isn't completely clear that this is so. It's true! If that kind of old-school meanness could turn you off of the game entirely, then (Spoiler - click to show)prioritize finding a use for the matchbook.

It's the weakest of what I call the Zork saga (the two complete trilogies in that universe), but that's a very high ceiling. Sorcerer is a four-star game among five-star games, and worth a play for those interested in Infocom's magic system or the Zork universe.

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- nosferatu, May 22, 2022

Adventure Classic Gaming

On the high side, the puzzles in Sorcerer are truly entertaining and clever. They also play fair. The solutions require insight and do not require brute force thought (except for mapping). The location descriptions are very well written. They are brief yet evocative, and they do not become monotonous. On the low side, the long dead-ends can make the gameplay unforgiving. [...] There is little in the way of developing plot. A lot of the background story is contained in material that comes with the game but not in the game itself. Some of the missing material is for copy protection purposes, but I like to have seen most of it appear within the game as well.
-- David Tanguay

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SPAG
[T]here is much in Sorcerer to enjoy

For fans of Enchanter, Sorcerer is worth playing; it continues the inventive use of magic to solve puzzles, and there is a genuine sense of accomplishment at the end. Though, particularly in the writing, it doesn't quite equal the standard set by Enchanter, it is well worth the time of any fantasy-game enthusiast.
-- Duncan Stevens

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- RustyBones, May 4, 2022

- cgasquid (west of house), February 13, 2022

- Lance Campbell (United States), December 24, 2021

- heasm66 (Sweden), August 10, 2021

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
Enchanter levelled up , May 31, 2021
by dvs

My friend and I have been using this Pandemic period to play the Enchanter trilogy over Discord. We just finished Sorcerer and we have previously finished Planetfall/Stationfall.

This game was one of our favorites Infocom games we've played. It has a definite story arc, from the tense intro to the final "chapter". Because there were so many red herrings (puzzles that don't need to be solved and items that are never needed) we didn't even know we were in the endgame until we looked at our score and realized we were close.

There were several unique puzzles we hadn't seen before (both areas which had maze-like mechanics). Unlike in Enchanter, we never had to look at any Invisiclue hints to solve them. The setting succeeded in giving us the feeling of constant danger, particularly when we ended up in the super creepy Chamber of Living Death.

A quibble we had were some areas that felt like randomized deaths that were more annoying than fun. (I was ready to give up on getting anything useful from (Spoiler - click to show)the slot machine when we kept getting killed over and over randomly before my partner's perseverance finally paid off.) Otherwise this is a classic worth playing.

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- mifga (Brooklyn, NY), October 15, 2020

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- e.peach, December 29, 2017

- ifMUD_Olly (Montana, USA), April 21, 2017

- Denk, March 17, 2017

- Spike, February 26, 2017

- EngineerWolf (India), December 18, 2016


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