If you ever have a (mis)fortune of owning the first Simon the Sorcerer sequel not done by the series original developer, Adventuresoft, do yourself a favour and don't play it. No matter how much you paid for it, just stick it somewhere safe you won't ever see it again. Leave it at that and continue your living like nothing has happened. Just pretend, that a game called Simon the Sorcerer 4: Chaos Happens doesn't exist. If you do, however, for whatever reason feel like playing Simon 4, do at least the most sensible thing of turning off all voice acting, music and sound effects. That's the LEAST you can do for preserving your sanity.
If this introduction didn't give my takeaway of the game, I'll spell it a bit more clearly: Simon the Sorcerer 4 is a terrible game. There are no reasons why anyone should play it and by the grace of merciful gaming gods, it's a game that isn't sold anywhere anymore.
Simon sees a vision of Alix, Calypsos busty daughter from the fantasy realm, after getting knocked unconscious when his brother threw a remote control to his head. The maiden begs him to help the Magic Kingdom, or all is doomed. He comes to and jumps into his realm travelling wardrobe only to find out, that Alix did not ask him to come. On top of that, she informs him that their fling is over, which baffles Simon, as he didn't know they were even dating. It doesn't take long for him to find out, that he has a goodie-two-shoes double, who has been, gasp, helping people altruistically.
Convinced, that the double is evil, Simon goes forth seeking the truth. But as it happens, his egoistical meddling end in a disaster, when the evil chancellor Calaba kills the king with his death ray. He quickly proceeds to kill both Simons as well, sending them to hell, which seems well deserved at least as far as the real Simon is concerned. He does some downright terrible things in this game.
Some running around later, Simon, Simon and the King managed to escape hell. Now the question is, how to defeat Calaba and get the king back on his throne. For some reason, this means entering in competition with demons. This will allow the Simons to enter the castle and get the king back in power. In the end, Calaba explodes, the real Simon kicks the double Simon in the wardrobe and all is good. Though I am pretty sure, the existence of the doubleganger was never explained, you just have to remember something like a doubleganger was present at the end of Simon 3, which is, again, a game not that many bothered completing. Then again, I just couldn't bother reading most of the text, as the writing is excruciatingly bad.
The best thing and this is absolutely the best thing, I can say of Chaos Happens is that the graphics are pretty decent. The backgrounds are pre-rendered 3D and pretty detailed. While they are a bit gimmicky with all the twisted structures and the mix of realism and cartoon aesthetics doesn't quite work, the quality of the art is solid. The same goes with the character art, which is nicely detailed and the animation isn't terrible either. It all lacks the charm of the first two games, but the art is overall the most competent aspect of this game.
I'm certain a good deal of the script is actually suffering from a poorly done translation job. The original release of Simon 4 was in German. A lot of the language in the dialogues is oddly structured and clumsy, which might be a direct result of a badly done translation. This in itself might explain why the humour isn't working either, as verbal comedy is notoriously hard to shift from one language to another. and the script being what it is, the bad translation would also explain why the voice acting is bad as well, as the poor actors are just trying to make sense of a script that was lost in translation.
That said, this iteration of Simon has a particularly nasty streak in him. He has never been the most likeable of main characters, but as the series has always been about parodying fantasy and game cliches, that has been more of a benefit in terms of comedy. Here, Simon comes out as a particularly nasty and unlikeable character. I do wonder how much of this is the difference between German and British comedy and how much of this can be pegged to botched translation.
All the bad writing aside, puzzles might be adventure games saving grace, but that isn't the case here. Most of the puzzles are fairly simple, yet tedious, fetch puzzles, where you basically just ferry stuff between points. Very rarely do they even feel like puzzles, the whole gameplay has a feeling of padding, that was added when no one came up with actual puzzles to solve.
During the last stretch of the game, you get to play as both Simons. The final puzzles require them both, but again, there doesn't seem to be much thought gone into the puzzle structure. Again, you just mostly move from point A to point B. Like many other ideas in the game, this too feels like a last-minute addition, when someone thought it could be fun to play as two characters.
Besides graphics, I can't really think of much else that works in Simon the Sorcerer 4: Chaos Happens. Maybe there was something lost in the translation, or maybe the new developer just didn't quite understand the original game nor its humour. Whatever the case might be, it is a failure of a game, which will most likely be extremely disappointing for any fan of the original games and just a baffling experience for anyone else unlucky enough to play it.
It is actually peculiar how a game with such a few locations can feel like it is constantly overstaying its welcome. That is, perhaps the fault of a rather slow-moving Simon as well as it is the fault of constant backtracking between locations. But none of that matters, as it's pretty difficult to actually find Simon 4 from anywhere, outside illegal sources. I bought my copy years ago from Gamersgate, but they've since stopped selling it, which is just fine and dandy in my book. Good riddance, I say.
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