12 But when they believed Philip as he proclaimed the good news of the kingdom of God ( D) and the name of Jesus Christ, they were baptized, ( E) both men and women. He boasted that he was someone great, ( B) 10 and all the people, both high and low, gave him their attention and exclaimed, “This man is rightly called the Great Power of God.” ( C) 11 They followed him because he had amazed them for a long time with his sorcery. It would probably be better for the franchise if they just let it die, though, or at least put it in the hands of someone more competent.9 Now for some time a man named Simon had practiced sorcery ( A) in the city and amazed all the people of Samaria. Saying that Who’d Even Want Contact? is a better game than its predecessor is technically correct, but is also giving it too much credit – it is merely more tolerable. It’s just crazy enough that it almost excuses the previous puzzle, a daft bit where you need eat some chalk to make your voice sound more feminine. Instead you need to dress it up with a makeup kit to give it lipstick and eyelashes, properly distracting the guard crab. You find a regular crab on the beach, but if you unite the two, the lesser one just gets scared away. In order to steal Red Riding Hood’s backpack, you need to distract a fierce-looking crab that’s guarding it. Plus, some of the puzzles are actually kind of funny. The shipwrecked boat on the island, the beautiful underground mushroom cave, the city of the moles, and the Nihonian spaceship are all way more interesting locales than the boring city that encompassed the first part of Chaos Happens. Yet for how bad most of it this, it’s still a vague improvement. Then there’s Captain Narrow, a play off of Captain Sparrow from Pirates of the Caribbean. There’s a crazy doctor who talks to the sock puppet on his hand as if it were alive, a joke South Park did nearly fifteen years prior. There’s a pretentious talking mechanical bird who follows you around. The new characters aren’t that much better. Swampy returns too, and his voice actor should be shot, or at least tortured a little. The Genie from Simon the Sorcerer II (who probably no one would recognize if Simon didn’t bring it up himself) also makes a return, here having taken on the guise of a Freud-like psychoanalyst. The cowardly Wolf returns too, and you can even play as him for a bit. The bratty Little Red Riding Hood was cute for just a second before, but she’s practically unbearable now that she’s devolved into an obnoxious straw feminist. Some old characters return, but they’re mostly the ones Silver Style made for the last game.
The same horrendous voice actors from Chaos Happens return to fill their voice roles, and the dialogue is just as dire as ever. Other than the graphics, though, not much else has improved. It’s a suitable style that makes it more distinct. The advertising claims this is “cel-shading”, but it really isn’t – they’re just regular textures colored to make them look more like classic cartoons. It looks mostly the same, although the character models are much brighter and cartoonier. Simon the Sorcerer: Who’d Even Want Contact? uses the same interface as its predecessor. But paradise can’t keep him down long, as Simon eventually heads to the skies to take down the otherworldly visitors. Before Simon can properly take off after her, he’s accosted by two talking moles in trenchcoats and whisked away to a tropical island prison, purportedly for his safety. In the fifth Simon game, the Magic World has been invaded by a group of aliens called Nihonians, not only stirring up trouble but also kidnapping Alix.