Simon the Sorcerer to reappear Between Worlds

Written by Jack Allin — August 27, 2014 at 12:34

It's been a long time since we last heard from Simon the Sorcerer – not just for his many fans, but for Simon himself. We'll hearing once again from the former-boy-wizard soon enough, however, as indie developer StoryBeasts are currently working on Simon the Sorcerer: Between Worlds, with input from the original series creators.

Between Worlds will be a hand-drawn, 2D point-and-click adventure that harkens back to the earliest games, and the good news for those who wrote the series off when Simon magically became American is that he's back to being British! He's also still a slacker (some things never change). But this newest adventure isn't simply a return to Simon's teenaged fantasy world of yore. This time around, more than twenty years after his debut, Simon himself is all grown up (chronologically speaking). Now in his mid-thirties, he has been "working in Calypso’s curio shop by way of apology for accidentally transforming the old wizard’s granddaughter into a frog." At least, in this dimension. But imagine a parallel dimension where Simon is "good at magic, hard working, respectful, competent"... and actually a girl named Simone. This scenario provides the basic premise for Between Worlds.

In Simone's dimension, her "world is in trouble. All the magic is being drained out of it, leaving the wizards helpless and pouring magic into a world full of people with no idea how to control their new and spectacularly dangerous powers." Simone uses the last of her remaining powers to open a portal to "contact the one person she thinks can save both their worlds – our hero, Simon. Actions carried out in one world affects the same location in the other world. Simon and Simone need to work together to re-balance the magic and then deal with whoever caused all this trouble in the first place, (not to mention the nasty, tentacled consequences of opening up a whole load of dimensional portals all over the place)."

While much of the game will focus directly on Simon, Simone will also be a playable character at times. According do the developers, gameplay as Simon will be traditionally inventory-centric, while gameplay for Simone will involve the use of magic as her powers gradually return. Series fans can also expect to encounter other familiar faces, including Calypso, whose return seemed in doubt following the events of Silver Style's fourth and fifth Simon games. StoryBeasts are not totally ignoring the events of those games, using the "dimension-jumping aspect of the new game to acknowledge them", but they have chosen to treat only the orginal Simon adventures as canonical.

There is no target release date set for Simon the Sorcerer: Between Worlds just yet, but you can follow the game's production in the coming months through the developer's blog.