Sorcery+

Sorcery+ was released in 1985 by Virgin Games as an expanded version of the text adventure Sorcery, inspired by Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone's Sorcery! book series. In the role of a wizard, the player sets out through the deep Whispering Forest and other dangerous regions toward the city of Kharé, solving puzzles along the way, collecting magical items, and using a spell system that gave the game a pronounced strategic layer compared to ordinary text adventures without combat and magic systems, where choosing the right spell at the right moment often decided between progress and death.

The Plus version also contained expanded content compared to the original game, and spoken words accompanying the game's introduction were added to the tape, which in 1985 was a technical rarity on the Spectrum requiring extra space on the medium. The player had to remember or write down the magic words for individual spells and correctly match them to the situation, so the game linked its text interface with elements reminiscent of RPG systems, creating the feeling of genuinely studying a spellbook full of risks and rewards, where a wrong incantation could have fatal consequences and forced the player to keep their own notes outside the game itself.

At the time, the game was seen as one of the most interesting adventures inspired by Jackson and Livingstone's gamebook work, and it benefited from their already strong popularity among British players, who knew the source material from printed books sold in large print runs. In the history of the genre, it ranks among the titles that showed how a book-based adventure could be linked with an interactive text parser and a magic system. Today it appeals mainly as a curiosity and evidence of the crossover between literary gamebooks and computer games of the 1980s, though its puzzles, without knowledge of period conventions and game customs, often tend to be unfairly difficult.

Why play it: For players interested in the intersection of Jackson and Livingstone's gamebooks with text adventures – a curiosity whose puzzles, without knowledge of period conventions, tend to be unfairly difficult.