With the upcoming release of Simon the Sorcerer Origins, I wanted to play the second game in the series before that happens. I played the first game over five years ago and although I liked it, I also was a bit frustrated with it as some of the puzzles were a bit annoying. There are supposed to be a number of returning characters from the fist game, but I have to say that it didn’t leave a big impression on me, so I don’t think that I’ll remember them. We’ll see. I’ve only just started and so far I did the following:

• Simon needs fuel (Muacasade) to go home. There’s supposed to be some in the castle treasury.
• Simon needs $78 to enter the castle and/or/for and ID.
• Simon should check out the tournament in the center of town for prize money.
• Simon encountered Morris dancers in the town square. They need a stick.
• There a heavy drain cover at the loan office. Simon can’t take a loan right now. Also Simon is an asshole to the secretary.
• Simon needs to help the ironmonger with currency conversion. The guards at the castle gates know this. The ironmonger has a crowbar.
• The joke shop has stink bombs if he has a recipe and the proprietor can make costumes.
• The pet shop is a front for an inventor that can combine animals.
• Simon’s put a jar of glowworms in the machine.
• I think the music in the game is very annoying.
• Some of the screens are wider than you think and there’s no clear indication of this. While F10 hotspots, it doesn’t show entrances or screen exits. I fear I might miss stuff.
• It’s weird how you cannot examine some obvious things, like large signs. It feels cheap.
• Simon has fun idle animations.

That’s my first play session right there. After fiddling with the game on my Windows 98 thin client, I returned to ScummVM on RetroPie. The Pi wasn’t used for a long time, but works fine, although the RetroPie install is so old it isn’t supported anymore. That’s annoying, because the version of ScummVM is too old to offer increasing the mouse pointer speed. One benefit of playing this way is the combined speech and subtitles, although the feature feels a bit finnicky.