That old serpent

We were just talking last month about how the fantasy adventure gamebook has evolved into (among other things) CRPGs, so no need to go into all that again. This is Inkle's latest gamebook app in the Sorcery series, and it's interesting that 80 Days seems to have steered them more towards the go-anywhere open world gameplay of Fabled Lands.

Good thing too, though I'll admit to a heartsink when I saw a piece of simulated text-on-paper flip up onto the screen - only because the rest of it looks so good, particularly Mike Schley's maps, that those old connections to gamebooks' past seem as out of place as wisdom teeth or a burst appendix. (I know, I know - text is inexpensive; I'm not faulting Inkle for using it, just saying that the rest of their banquet looks so appetizing that the paper napkins are bound to come as a slight disappointment.)

What particularly impresses me is that all this is built on the foundations of Inklewriter, a markup language, rather than the object-oriented database structure you'd use in a CRPG. But that's the bit of the iceberg you don't see. The important thing is that Sorcery 3 is here, it looks great, and if Games Workshop style goblin-bashing is what floats your boat, you're going to be spending the next few months in Analand. (Don't look at me; it's what Steve Jackson called it.)