Steve Jackson's Sorcery! Series

Steve Jackson's Sorcery! was originally a four part series of adventure gamebooks published by Penguin Books between 1983 and 1985. Inkle Studios has converted these books into interactive apps for Android, Kindle and iOS. The digital versions are being released as a four part series just as the original books were; links are available on Inkle's Steve Jackson's Sorcery! page.

http://www.inklestudios.com/sorcery/

A gamebook is a fictional adventure with branching story lines in which the reader is the protagonist. They are often similar to "choose your own adventure" books but usually add elements like simple character generation and stats, inventory and sometime some sort of combat mechanic. These features made adventure gamebooks feel like solo pen and paper rpgs, and were a popular diversion for many players of these types of games in the 80's when they first began to gain to popularity. The genre was started by Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone's Fighting Fantasy series of books, of which the Sorcery! series was originally a part of.

While other companies have done a great job bringing other adventure gamebooks to life with apps that feature stat tracking character sheets, vivid art, atmospheric sounds and other multimedia enhancements, what Inkle Studios has done with it's digital conversion of the Sorcery! series goes a step beyond. The movement and travel sequences that take place in the books have been turned into board game like piece movement across a sort of "overworld map" beautifully illustrated from the original works. This gives the travel a cool visual element that is more tangible than text passages. The text passages and encounters are nicely displayed on the screen and sewn together into a story as you play it out. The combat is also nicely visualized and involves a sort of tug of war give and take system as opposed to the usual dice rolling and stat comparison affair.

It is difficult to put into words the innovative and creative way in which Inkle Studios have brought these game books to life in this series of apps, so I will refer anyone even vaguely interested in this sort of thing to the short video linked below in which AppSpy does a great job of demonstrating the game: