Simon the Sorcerer

When a caped figure first appears and offers you a magical shield, you probably don't realize you're about to spend the next four hours hunting a fly in a pixel fortress. Simon the Sorcerer from 1993 is a point-and-click adventure from Infocom that plays like a puzzle wrapped in dialogue — and I mean that literally.

You're Simon, a young sorcerer with limited magical talents, thrown into a fantasy world of ruin by a magical portal surge. The goal is simple: get back home. But the path there leads through a kingdom soaked in absurd humor and logic puzzles in the tradition of Sierra and LucasArts. The difference is in the tone — Simon complains about everything, the world makes fun of itself, and you're just a puppet on strings.

The game commandeers your cursor and forces it to click everywhere — on every object, every NPC, every corner of the screen. You combine items in your inventory, solve riddles, and collect strange artifacts for strange purposes. The controls are clean and no-nonsense, but the game's pace is sluggish by modern standards. Waiting for animations, scenes to load, the character shuffling along — it all adds up. Some puzzles are elegant, others feel like frustrated guessing with no logic behind them.

Simon had its charm in the early '90s, when these kinds of adventures were the PC gaming craze. British humor and voice acting (in the English version) gave the game personality. Today it feels more like an archive piece — interesting, but not particularly easy to play without a walkthrough.

If you're drawn to retro adventures without action and without rushing, Simon fits the bill. It's a game for a long evening with a notepad. Anyone wanting comfortable viewing should try something friendlier — but if you enjoy solving nonsensical puzzles and hearing cynical commentary while you do it, you've got something to look forward to.