Three months ago, we released the fourth and final chapter in the epic Sorcery! series, to some wonderful reviews. But we promised one last surprise for fans.

That surprise is free, and out now. New Game Plus mode awaits!

A merciless world awaits..

Ever since we launched the original instalment of Sorcery!, one feature has come to define the gameplay in the eyes of casual players and fans.

Not the 3D map; not the lunatic spellcasting; but the rewind feature. The ability to go back anywhere, anywhen, and try things a different way. Some people said they found the game too easy this way - others complained bitterly when things were not so straightforward in Part 4.

For us, we've always known that this was just one way to play the series. And from today, you can try the tougher challenge of a cruel world for yourself, as one of the features in New Game Plus.

New adventures in familiar lands!

To start a New Game Plus adventure, simply ensure you have the latest updates for the games on whichever platform you're using - Android, iOS or Steam - then enter a completed cloud save from Part 4 into Part 1 to unlock the new content.

You'll find a new difficulty setting - merciless - as well as tougher enemies, a few early, powerful spell objects, and of course, a couple of new secrets for the fans - including a visit to a much-neglected secret area...

... oh, and this:

Ready your sword and spellbook

If you've finished your Sorcery! adventure and you want to try exploring things a different way, or playing as a different character, then we hope you enjoy your New Game Plus update. It's totally free.

And if you're missing any of the adventure, we've just released a four-part App Store bundle to celebrate!

New adventures await...

New Game Plus is our last significant update for Sorcery!. As we've discussed a few times on the inklecast, we're leaving the wilds of Kakhabad behind for a brand new world of our own devising.

This new game is bigger, stranger and more beautiful than anything we've attempted before. We hope to bring it to the light to show you all soon. Until then, Season's Greetings from all of us at inkle and thanks for travelling with us.

Two weeks ago, we completed a four year journey across a land of magic, traps and monsters. Since then, we've been enjoying watching players assail the Fortress of Mampang and die - over, and over and over again. Some have prevailed. Some have found secrets. A few unlucky one have found bugs (sorry about that! We're fixing them!) And some of our reviews have been pretty glowing.

We wrote up a long retrospective on the design of the series for the game industry site Gamasutra, but while it goes in some detail on the design processes - and the problems - it didn't touch on the personal side of things; why we made the series the way we did, and how it evolved over time.

Over four years there are a lot of stories, so we decided to put together on last Sorcery!-themed inklecast, so we could tell a few. Here it is: our final thoughts on Sorcery!

And check out next week's inklecast for a few hints on where we're planning to go next...

Four years.

Four games.

One and a half million words.

Thirty-five thousand choices.

The mood in the inkle office today is one of celebration, and sadness.

The Sorcery! series is now complete.

The Fellowship

If you've enjoyed the adventure with us, here are a few people you might want to thank outside of the core inkle team:

Eddie Sharam - character artist. Eddie's done all the humans, monsters and re-animated furniture that appears in the series; sometimes drawing from John Blanche's crazy original illustrations, and sometimes using a little craziness of his own.

Laurence Chapman - composer. We now have original themes for Parts 2, 3 and 4, recorded by live orchestra, and we think they're incredible.

Emily Morganti - publicist. When we started work on part one we had three press emails in a spreadsheet and were planning to stand in a corner of PAX with a banner. Coverage is the oxygen of development and yet most developers have no idea how to do it. Emily sorted us right out.

Iain Merrick - coder. Iain started out in the Sorcery! team doing the audio design for the first part (the infamous walrus laugh that plays in the villages of the Shamutanti Hills was his idea). Since then he became rather more full-time, handling the cross-platform magic that takes iOS code and generates the Android and desktop builds.

Graham Robertson - writer. Graham wrote a lot of the core content for Part 4, adapting the original material, and adding a lot of strange new ideas of his own. Graham likes cats, ghosts, and hungry Goblins - you'll know when you stumble on some of his work.

Mike Schley - cartographer. Mike's maps and building drawings are the heart and soul of the Sorcery! experience. We've loved his work from the moment we first saw and it, and the most exciting moments during development have always been the delivery of a new piece of art.

And last but certainly not least, Steve Jackson himself. After creating the Fighting Fantasy series with fellow dungeon-master Ian Livingstone, Steve wrote the Sorcery!(/sorcery/) series as a standalone set of four books, with an innovative magic system, and aimed at slightly older readers.

Set in a previously unexplored corner of the FF world, they told their own story, and each book has its own tricks and devices. Speaking personally, I can still remember the feeling of being lost in the pages; and the thrill of casting the right spell at the right time (because in those days, you were supposed to learn the spellbook by heart!)

Steve created a vibrant, rich, nasty-but-nice world filled with potential; and then gave us the freedom we needed to play with it.

Then there are our testers. Fifty people played the adventure prior to launch, and of them, five were simply extraordinary. Kathryn, Felicity, John, Nikki and Jules - you guys have been amazing.

A long journey

The first Sorcery! game saw us taking our first steps as a company as not just technical developers, but gameplay and content designers as well: now, four years later, we're a BAFTA-nominated studio, working on our own game-worlds.

Where the first game saw us pushing our ink compilation script to breaking point; we're now fully migrated over to ink, and are enjoying seeing studios all around the world using the system as well.

The reaction to the series has been overwhelming to say the least - from the glowing reviews of Part 1 that appeared on mainstream gaming sites like IGN and Kotaku, through the wonderful Yogscast rendition of the first two games, to the antics at our preview party in London last week - it's been a real thrill to be seeing people getting excited about the series.

So what's left?

We've one more piece of business to do in the world of Sorcery! - a final update to the series, coming shortly. We'll have more information on that later, but if you've finished Sorcery! 4 already you'll know what we have in store.

And, of course, there is one last thing...

But for now - sit back, relax, and get ready, for death awaits you in the Fortress of Sorcerers...

We're hugely sorry to announce this, but Sorcery! 4's launch date has had to change. The epic finale to the series will now be going live on Steam, iOS and Android on September 22nd - one week later than originally planned.

After such a long journey - four games over four years, and nearly one and a half million words of content - we want to be sure the release is as good as it can be.

In particular, this means that Thursday's live playthrough event at Loading Bar in London won't be a launch party so much as a preview party. But come down all the same - because we'll be giving out Steam codes for the game, which unlock immediately.

Once again, we hope you'll forgive us the delay. To help soften the blow, we've put the first three Sorcery! games on sale on the App Store for their cheapest price ever - just $1 each. So if you're missing any instalments, now's the time to pick them up.

It's been too long since we posted any concrete news about Sorcery! 4, the final part of the narrative epic that's been keeping us busy since 2013.

It's finished... again

Writing on the game has now finished, again. That means we've done our first pass, fleshing out all the rooms, encounters, characters, secrets, jokes, puzzles, hidden endings. And we've also done our second pass, playing through everything, smoothing it, checking for logic and story consistency, and getting the pacing as slick as we can.

We're now embarking on the long process of beta-testing - gathering feedback from early players, and hunting down all the strange nooks and crannies of the story-flow. A lot of the details can and will still change at this point - good ideas are never thrown away, even close to release - but if we had to put down our pens tomorrow, we could, and the game would work.

There are multiple endings, but more importantly, multiple states for multiple endings. But there is also an ultimate ending of sorts, better than the others.

All in all, Sorcery! 4 now stands at half a million words, putting it bang in the middle between Sorcery! 3 and 80 Days.

But that's not all!

Even with the writing completed, there's still lots for us to do. There's new audio to gather, and new art to get into the game, and a pile of new code to write as well.

For the first time, we'll be integrated 3D models into the map. These models are still being hand-painted by our cartographer/illustrator Mike Schley, and we've got to make sure they play nicely with the in-game camera. We've also got an epilogue sequence to build, that will suitably reward players who have made the journey all the way from Analand to Mampang and returned with the Crown of Kings intact.

One thing we have got finalised is Laurence Chapman's new theme - as recorded by live orchestra.

Concluding part and new adventure, all in one

One of the things that's made this part a real writing challenge is ensuring that it provides a complete experience for people picking up the Sorcery! series for the first time, while also providing the epic conclusion that returning players deserve. Over the last three games we've seeded a lot of characters and story points, as well as giving the player a lot of choices to carry with them.

(A Sorcery! 3 game loaded into Part 4 brings with it over nine hundred individual story-flags, ranging from whether or not you destroyed a city, to how many gold pieces you have in your pocket, and whether or not you know the name of the witch in the Shamutanti woods.)

Thankfully, we've got a few tricks up our sleeve for bringing new players up to speed...

All platforms, all at once

For the first time, we're planning to launch the game on the App Store, Amazon Store, Play Store, Steam, Humble and Green Man Gaming all on the same day. You can buy the game on any platform to continue your adventure - cloud saves work from one device to another. (Just remember to write them down somewhere!)

And while Mike's latest map looks glorious spread across a desktop monitor or an iPad Pro, we're working hard to ensure the mobile experience is still just as tight and playable as its ever been.

So what's the date?

Later this year. Apologies, we don't want to commit to a date until we know we can hit it!

But we can't wait to open the gates and let you into Mampang - it's weird, terrible place, full of ancient, decaying magic, foul mutants, crosses and double-crosses, and secrets. This is our toughest, most intricate - and we hope, most rewarding - Sorcery! adventure yet.

On this week's inklecast we ask a question that's close to our hearts: when is the game part of your story game too much game for your story?

In all our projects, we try to marry the gameplay and the narrative elements so tightly together that neither could be removed - but is there an argument for the cutscene-and-play model? Have a listen and tell us what you think.

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The gates of Kharé have opened once more, and the wilds of Kakhabad await. Players on PC and Mac can now venture into the shifting deserts, tangled forests and thick swamps of the Baklands as they attempt to make their way to Mampang and the Crown of Kings.

Sorcery! 3 is our most ambitious interactive narrative so far - not just an entirely open-world adventure where you can go anywhere, by any route you choose, and that's stuffed full of secrets - the game is actually two open-worlds, which you can freely blend together as you explore.

You can either continue your story from Parts 1 & 2, or jump straight in at this installment: the game will adapt itself appropriately. And not only that, it's 25% off for the first week.

Many ways to win, and a hundred ways to die

Roaming the wildnerness are seven deadly serpents, racing to Mampang to warn the Archmage of your coming. How you tackle them is up to you - head on combat? Strategy and cunning? Or will you simply try to outpace them?

The choices you make in this part will define your adventure in the concluding part of the story, out later this year.

Want to hear more?

To celebrate the launch we recorded a special episode of the inklecast last week all about how the open-world design affected everything from the way we built it to the way player's played.

Never miss an episode - subscribe on iTunes or use the RSS feed!

We're happy to announce that the third part of the Sorcery! saga will be hitting Steam, Humble and Green Man Gaming on April 5th, bringing desktop player's up to date with the story.

We'll be talking a bit more about the game in the next inklecast, but for now, here's the trailer to whet your appetite:

A wilderness to explore

Sorcery! Part 3 takes the adventure out into the wilds of the Kakhabad, a land of deserts, grassy plains, forests and swamps - and it transform the game from a linear story into a fully open-world experience. Go from anywhere, to anywhere, by any route you can find; backtrack to find every secret or plough your way forward - and with the aid of ancient magic, even reshape the landscape through which you travel.

Open world design, story-rich content

But being open world doesn't change how the game is played: its still rich with characters, stories, traps, monsters and peril. Everything that happens in a Sorcery! game is bespoke and unique, and Part 3 is the largest Sorcery! game to date, the size of Parts 1 and 2 combined.

Can you survive Kakhabad, cross the Horns of Xamen and Lake Ilklala? Will you travel fast to evade capture, or hunt down and destroy the Seven Serpents dispatched to end your journey? Will you explore the ancient land through magic, or leave the past untouched? All these choices, and hundreds more, will carry over in Part 4 and alter the stakes in the story's conclusion.

Next week is GDC, and Joe's going to be presenting a talk about our scripting language, ink, that we use here at inkle to write massively-branchy content in a way that allows writers to get on and write.

We've been using and developing this language for four years but as of yesterday, the language is now available for all to use. We've decided to go open-source, with all you'll need to plug ink-scripted content into Unity projects. You can grab it on GitHub, right now.

And if you want to hear more about how ink works, where it came from, and why we're going open, we talk about in this week's inklecast, which you can check out below.

Never miss an episode of the inklecast - subscribe on iTunes or use the RSS feed!

In last week's inklecast we tackled a game head-on: in this case, stylish teen-horror adventure Oxenfree.

We dig into its clever real-time, multi-character conversation system, and talk about how it plays and (maybe) how it works, before our own conversation branches into dialogue systems in general. Take a listen and see what we thought, spoiler-free.

Never miss an episode of the inklecast - subscribe on iTunes or use the RSS feed!