In the early 00s, it seemed that the time had driven past 2D art, so Adventuresoft decided to follow suit with their 3rd instalment for the Simon the Sorcerer series and turned it into a 3D game. A decision, which was in hindsight, a poor one. The game that came out in 2002 was already seen as technically dated during its release, many pointing out the outdated extremely low-resolution 3D models and the terrible controls. And there's no denying it, Simon 3D does look horrible and the controls are, while not the worst ever, terrible. It does have some minor redeeming qualities about it, so as such it's not as bad as the 4th and the 5th game are, but still, it is a miscalculated mess, that was meant to awe adventure fans, but ended up exploding into the developers face.
The way I've understood it is, that there was an almost complete version of Simon 3 made in 2D, but there was a rampant belief, that no 2D game would sell anymore after the advent of 3D graphics. In a haste, the game was cobbled together in a 3D engine. But instead of ending with a best seller in their hands, Advenuresoft had a proper turkey that failed to win over either the old or new fans. And in the always 20/20 hindsight, the death of 2D games was proven to be a false narrative as well.
As an interesting little factoid, the developer of Simon 3D, Headfirst, made Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth as well. Though that might not be a bug surprising when you consider the fact that Simon and Mike Woodroffe did dabble in horror games before making the comedic adventures of Simon the Sorcerer.
Some time has passed since the end of the 2nd game when Sordid possessed Simon's body. Now Sordid has returned and transfers his being to a robotic contraption built by his apprentice Runt. This leaves Simon's body up for grabs and soon his body ends up in a temple, where Calypso has arranged the merger of the sorcerer's body and soul.
The first chapter is basically a tutorial, where a cheery fairy godmother guides Simon in how to use his new three dimensional surroundings. So, you basically, move, use, pick up items and so on. Very relevant to the player as well, as you might imagine. This is also the time, when you notice, that the controls aren't really that great. Especially the short Indiana Jones inspired "escape the boulder" bit forces you to give it several tries because of the movement of both Simon and the camera. After getting out of the temple, Simon has to eath a sacred peach to complete the joining and the second chapter brings you to the unnecessarily large and empty wilderness map, which you need to run back and forth in order to get to locations. Luckily, the wilderness is filled with phonebooths, that work as teleporters, otherwise, this would be a frustrating exercise. Still, there are some points of interest in the wilderness, so you do have to run around from time to time.
I did forget to mention, that as Simon eats the peach before it was ripe, he did effectively killed someone else before their time, But, as Simon says, it's just a game, so who cares.
While running around the wilderness, I can't escape the feeling that I'm playing a prototype instead of a finished game. There's a feeling of a first pass iteration about all you do, the way you move, the way you interact with the world, how the teleporters work or how the puzzles are solved. It's like playing a draft, which would have benefitted from a couple of more passes. There are nice ideas here and there, like how you have to use crawling at times in order to solve puzzles. The problem is, that the game is very poor at communicating what it wants you to do, so you spend a lot of time just aimlessly jumping between locations, which gets tedious really fast, as the sparsely built world isn't very interesting in terms of exploration.
When it does communicate with you, it's about the controls via the help of the fairy godmother, who explains to you the controls for a puzzle. Most often, you need these controls only once. Sometimes, she explains to you things that are painfully obvious. For example, the rhythm game fireworks puzzle could have used additional explanations, but how to drive the cheese cart was just pointless. And then there's Simons ability to climb ledges, which you need about once, but that one isn't mentioned anywhere beyond passing and when you finally find a place, where it is needed, it is likely, that you won't remember it and the manual makes no mention of it either. Some things, like using the items on other items in the inventory is explained in the manual, but it takes a while before you need to do that, so you'll have to check that out when you actually have to do it.
After getting to the city, Simon has to find the Swampling for a hero Melissa Leg, who then turns out to be Runt in disguise and he and Sordid needed the swampling for their own purposes. After that baffling encounter, Calypso tells Simon to collect 4 heroes, of which one is the real Melissa and one, utterly pointless character as far the game goes, is the poor sap who died because Simon couldn't wait for the sacred peach to ripen.
After all the running around, Simon finally enters Sordid's tower, defeats Runt and goes to the world Nexus to face Sordid. There he finds out, that Swampling is actually a member of an ancient race, that actually built the world and that the heart of the universe is a computer. Makes sense, as Simon has always been aware of the fact that he is in a game. A good deal of 4th wall breaking jokes have always been a part of the series. The game ends with a cliffhanger when Simon's double leaps out from the computer after he has managed to reset it.
Tedious is the word that comes to mind often. For the scale of the gameplay areas, the puzzles are few and far between. Or it feels like that, as running around is what you do most of the time. There's even some busy work stuffed in, like the butterfly collecting bit, which you have to do in order to get some more money. It's not a riveting task, then again, most of the tasks you end up doing aren't that interesting either. And that's really a big part of the problem: a big, uninteresting world, where you are forced to run around in hopes of finding something to do.
I'd say, you spend roughly 70-80 per cent of your game time just running around. Or teleport around. It doesn't really matter, as the teleporting is annoyingly slow accompanied by annoying sound effects and unnecessary animations. The running around is just, well tedious, because of how the camera works and how the controls are and the fact that it's easy to get stuck on objects in the environment.
A final icing on the cake is the last puzzle of the game, which is very hard to solve in most modern systems if you are playing a digitally downloaded version of the game. It's not because the puzzle is hard, it's because it's dependant on you having either a virtual or a physical CD-ROM drive. See, the final puzzle needs you to eject the CD drive, otherwise, you can't complete the game and while some virtual CD drives can work, not all of them will. Considering many, if not most, new systems are delivered without any physical drives, you can see a huge problem with such a hardware dependant puzzle. It might be a clever puzzle, but considering that to get it working in this modern era requires some technical know-how, it also is a puzzle some people just aren't able to solve. It should work with Daemon Tools, but I couldn't get it to work with Windows 10 inbuilt ISO mounter. Not that you'll be missing much with the ending sequence.
There's really no question about it, Simon 3D is not a very good game. It's a bad game, really, in almost every way. The biggest problems stem from the bad design, which seems like the developers didn't quite know what they'd actually want to use the 3D engine for. That wouldn't surprise me at all, really, considering the whole 3D aspect of the game was more because of business rather than the developers wanting to go that way.
I'm fully speculating, but my guess is, that there was not much playtesting done for Simon 3D. After Headfirst shifted to 3D, they just hammered the game out, hoping for the best, but like it often is, they were blind to the glaring gameplay issues because they were already accustomed to them. And it's also possible, they just ran out of money and were forced to push the game out, no matter how half-baked it was. There are possible reasons why Simon 3D is the way it is, but what remains is, that it is a broken, badly designed game, that doesn't seem to fully know what to do with the technology shift it was given.
Oh, I did mention some redeeming qualities. Well, there's some decent laughs in it and the animation is surprisingly good. The soundtrack is nice as well, albeit it does get a bit monotonous after listening to the same songs in a loop for hours while running the wilderness.
Simon 3D is a bad game. It has glaring issues, but if it had been given some additional polish, perhaps even redesigning some aspects of it, it could have been fun. Even in the state, it's in, I'd rather play it than those dreadful sequels, Simon 4 and 5. Now those should be eradicated with nuclear fire. I wouldn't recommend buying it though. Far from it. Steer away. But for those not willing to listen to sense, you can get it from GOG and Steam.
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