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.