It's been over three years since inkle released their adaptation of the first book in the Steve Jackson's Sorcery! series. In a lot of ways, that app redefined what players expected from a mobile version of a gamebook. It would have been a far simpler matter for inkle to do the expected thing and do a straight conversion of the original books. They had the engine for it, and the series is well-regarded enough that it probably would have done fairly well. Instead, the developers decided to make something that a physical book would have a hard time approximating, while at the same time appealing to the fairly large overlap between gamebook readers and tabletop gaming fans. The first game mostly relied on a unique presentation and reworked battle mechanics, but the following two games brought more and more complexity to the table. Sorcery! 3 [$4.99] was so near to a full-on RPG that its roots were hard to spot at times.
Despite the established arc of this series, Sorcery! 4 [$4.99] is not more complex than the previous game in any obvious ways. Considering how much it has to wrap up, and the sheer number of possibilities it has to consider, I don't think it's a bad thing that this ended up being a more focused experience than the last couple of games. This is a series that has allowed you to carry your character over from game to game, after all, and that adds up to a dizzying number of potential outcomes and solutions that inkle needed to consider. To its credit, and unlike...