Sorcery is the closest thing to the actually-good Harry Potter game that exists in my mind that I think we're going to get in the real world. You play an apprentice sorcerer, Finn, in a colourful, storybook fantasy world that's a marked contrast to the blood-soaked high fantasy of Skyrim, Game of Thrones and The Witcher. Having gone rather quiet since last year's E3, where it was shown as little more than a concept demo, Sorcery has emerged from its development cocoon as a fully-formed adventure.
Here's the most important thing about Sorcery: the motion controls enhance the core experience rather than getting in the way of it. With PlayStation Move you have the full control over your character and your surroundings that comes with a traditional analogue stick and buttons, as well as gesture controls that actually work reliably. Motion games are usually so desperate to asset their uniqueness by foisting terrible control schemes on you that this feels like a bit of a revelation. Like Skyward Sword, it reminds you of the value that motion control has to offer traditional games, if developers would only take advantage of it.
Sorcery's world is lovely, full of ornate-looking chests and potions and spells and magical artefacts and quaint villages and a big, tumbledown sorcerer's tower. It's a simple game, built on reliable and enjoyable motion controls that focus on using Finn's magic to manipulate the world or duel against enemies. The opening half-hour teaches you how to aim and flick your wrist to target things with destructive and transformative spells that arc from the end of your wand, bursting pumpkins into chunks or turning rocks into vases of flowers. Other spells – an earthquake one is available from the start, and you earn a shield spell early on – are selectable from a radial menu.
Magic isn't restricted to combat. You open chests with a flourish of the wrist, move things out of your way by lifting and depositing them elsewhere, and mend broken structures by moving your arm in circles. Mixing potions is probably the sweetest gesture control, getting you to shake it up in your hand before raising the Move controller to your mouth to drink. You're taught all of this in rapid sequence - for the opening few hours at least, Sorcery funnels you down clear avenues of progress rather than letting you explore. After a quick wander around the wizard's tower, Finn heads off to explore some magical ruins in search of some grave-dust for his wizard mentor.
Before long, as you might expect, it becomes clear that investigating magical ruins entails fighting off hordes of the undead. The basic combat makes perfect instinctual sense: you point your wand at bad guys and shoot destructive spells at their faces. It's a bit of a shooting gallery – waves of enemies appear, and you have to cast all of them down before you're allowed to progress – but there's enough subtlety to the aiming and casting itself to make it challenging. Flicking your wrist sends the spell curling across the screen, where casting with a straight arm blasts enemies directly in front of you. Because you've got full control over movement and dodging, it doesn't feel on-rails.
The cheesy American-accented voice acting jars a bit with Sorcery's fantastical, Celtic-inspired world, but the dialogue itself is an unexpected highlight. The back-and-forth between the characters, as Erline answers Finn's optimistic brashness with calm sarcasm, is genuinely enjoyable. The script often plays on your your natural impulse to smash things up for fun with a mock-congratulatory quip ("Yeah, take that, you… rocks!"). The story – as demonstrated in the trailer at the top of this page – is told with beautifully illustrated animated drawings rather than in-game cutscenes, which preserves the storybook ambience.
It's the little things that entice you, rather than the meat-and-potatoes pointing and shooting. Sorcery has a Nintendo-ish tendency to reward curiosity: try waving your wand at one of the grazing sheep in the castle grounds, for instance, and it'll turn into a pig or a giant rat. These details are what give Sorcery its charm – the mending spell that demands a theatrical flourish of the wrist, the action of placing a key in a door and physically turning it, transforming flower pots into piggy banks and kettles.
I'm so used to being disappointed by motion controls that Sorcery has impressed me just by working, but it's also got oodles of charm that make it very easy to sink yourself into, especially if you've any weakness for the kind of whimsical fantasy that it paints. The gameplay is simplistic, sure, but less so than it looks, and there are indications that it'll develop into something more multi-layered after the opening sections; it would be great to see puzzles and exploration play as large a part as combat as the game progresses.
Keza MacDonald is in charge of IGN's games team in the UK. You can follow her on Twitter and IGN.