Paper Sorcerer Review — Tribute to Wizardry IV

Paper Sorcerer, released on Steam on November 21, 2013 — and still sitting at 82% positive more than a decade later.

A first-person, turn-based dungeon crawler where you play the villain. Built by one man, in one year, on a Kickstarter budget of thirteen thousand dollars. This is what a hidden gem actually looks like.

The Real Ancestor Isn't Bard's Tale — It's Wizardry IV

When I first played this little gem, the oldie that came to mind was The Bard's Tale.

And for the combat, I stand by it: you assign actions to your four characters, you end the turn, and then you pray everything goes according to plan 😉 That's pure Bard's Tale.

But the real ancestor is something else entirely, and it's far better.

In 1987, Sir-Tech released Wizardry IV: The Return of Werdna — infamous as one of the hardest RPGs ever made. Its twist? You play Werdna, the evil sorcerer defeated in the first game. You wake up at the bottom of your own dungeon, stripped of everything, and you have to claw your way back to the surface.

Evil sorcerer. Imprisoned. Must escape. Summoning Monsters to fight for you,

That's not an influence — that's the entire blueprint of Paper Sorcerer.

Back when the Kickstarter was running, a regular on the RPGWatch forums nailed it: the project looked like the culmination of a decades-long obsession with Wizardry 4. And he was right. Paper Sorcerer is what happens when someone loves the most sadistic RPG of the 80s so much that he spends a year of his life building a version people can actually finish.

So if you're a Bard's Tale nostalgic, you'll feel at home.
But if you ever suffered through Wizardry IV? You're about to meet its spiritual heir.

Kill Those Paladins

Ever wanted to be on the dark side of the moon? Sick of all those Forces of Good always prevailing against the poor little villains? Then show me your vampire teeth — because today we're going to crucify paladins, let the good rangers taste their own blood, send the clerics back to their god, and burn the magicians with the fires of the inferno.

No, you're not in Dungeon Keeper. You're in Paper Sorcerer.

You've been banished and imprisoned inside a book — the Librum Claustrum — and you need to escape from these paper shackles. But it won't be easy: the forces of good made sure you'd stay in your paper coffin for eternity. To get out, you need to break your chains. And trust me, that's no small task… It seems you were an infamous sorcerer, because the realm's finest defenders and its most famous heroes have been tasked with guarding those chains. With their lives.

(Small detail : Hardcore Gaming 101 pointed out that proper Latin would be "Liber Claustrum". Jesse got the declension wrong. Somehow that makes the whole thing more endearing — a guy alone, naming his magic prison book, guessing at Latin.)

Your sorcerer, by the way, bears more than a passing resemblance to Elric of Melniboné, Michael Moorcock's albino antihero. There's a female version too, though the difference is purely cosmetic. Moorcock also happens to be my favorite writer of all time, i think i bought most of his books... And in his fiction, the people of Melniboné are well known to dwell in dark magic dealing with Demons and Elementals... I guess Jesse was inspired by the Dark Fantasy and RPG Folklore.

A World Drawn Entirely in Ink

Let's talk about what hits you first: this game doesn't look like anything else.

Black ink on cream paper. Cut-out silhouettes. Cross-hatching. Characters that look like woodcut engravings from an old grimoire. This isn't a 3D game with a filter slapped on top — it's a game that was drawn. And it makes complete sense: you're trapped inside a book, so the world itself is made of paper.

Rock Paper Shotgun singled out its "fantastic use of blank space" — and that's exactly right. Most games fill every pixel. Paper Sorcerer uses emptiness as a material. Half of what you see is the page itself.

And here's the part I only noticed going back through my own screenshots years later: every block has its own ink. Parchment sepia in one, glacial white in another, blood red further down, spectral blue near the end, and pure black-on-black in the deepest corridors. The game doesn't change engines between areas — it changes ink.

For a game built on thirteen thousand dollars, that's not a compromise. That's a style nobody else has.

The Power of Evil

You haven't only been imprisoned in a book — you've been stripped of all your powers and minions. So you need to rebuild your team, and reclaim your sorcerous might. And trust me... at the beginning you're a Weakling!

That's where the RPG part comes in. As you advance through the pages of your paper cell, you fight and destroy good beings, team up with powerful minions who each have their own powers and perks, and your whole party gains experience, levels up, and equips powerful gear — to show the realm of men that evil cannot be stopped.

And here's a design idea I completely failed to mention the first time I wrote about this game:

You don't equip swords. You equip body parts. Going through my loot screens again, I found things like Master Razorblade Arm, Master Flame Thrower Arm, and Great Strong Body. You're not arming a soldier — you're assembling a creature. Grafting a blade-arm or a flamethrower-arm onto your minion. It's grotesque, it's perfectly on-theme for a villain, and I've never seen another RPG do it quite like this.

Your roster covers the classics of the dark side: a Witch who heals and baits enemies into attacking your tank, an Imp, a Minotaur, a Troll, a Vampire. Each one plays differently enough that party composition genuinely matters.

There's also an Energy bar alongside your HP — not classic mana, but a tempo resource that gates your best abilities. Spells like Witchfire (arcane damage over time), Firestorm (party-wide fire), Deep Impact (permanently lowers a target's physical resistance) or Overdrive (massive damage scaled off your max energy) all cost you tempo, not just points.

An Evil Town, a Zombie Shopkeeper, and Marauding Pigs

And guess what? At some point you discover you're not alone in this book — several other villains have been imprisoned here too. Which means there's a town. Yes: an evil town, where you can buy and sell, train your skills with the local trainer, and grind experience and loot in the Catacombs.

But what I'd completely forgotten is how funny this town is.

Here's the actual text the game gives you on arrival: "You see the shop zombie ambling around the town square, surrounded by marauding pigs. Oddly, they each have a word's worth of dripping paint on their sides. You read 'WALLET', 'ITEMS', 'BUY', 'SHOP' and 'NEW' among them." 😄

The shop menu is a zombie surrounded by pigs with the interface labels painted on them. Dripping.

That's the kind of joke you only get from a solo developer with nobody around to talk him out of it — and it's the exact moment I remembered why I loved this game.

You'll also meet a ghost who greets you with "You have the stench of the living about you! I require your assistance." and a trainer whose sales pitch is "I can train you, so you can realize your full potential… for a price." The writing is dry, mean and consistently funny. 😅

Pick the 1980's Difficulty (If You Dare)

If you're looking for a real challenge, choose the 1980's difficulty. *

The name isn't decorative — it's a promise, and the game keeps it.

You won't win fights without crowd control spells, full stop. And each boss — remember, these are the realm's most famous heroes — will be an absolute pain in the ass. Which is exactly as it should be: you're the villain, and the story has never been on your side. Some Bosses will require from you LOADS of "loading please wait" 😁

What's remarkable is that the difficulty comes from strategy, not grinding. The game explicitly emphasises tactical decisions over farming XP, and it delivers: I never once felt I had to grind for hours to progress. I just had to think harder.

My party went from 25 HP and 3 defence at the start to 660 HP and 488 defence by the end. That curve is earned, block by block. And anyway there is a MAX level, so you will never be overpowered.

The Piracy That Broke a One-Man Studio

Now the sad part — and this one I witnessed personally.

Paper Sorcerer was widely pirated and shared across the usual torrent sites. And at the time, I saw Jesse himself post in the comments on The Pirate Bay. Not raging, not threatening — he put it politely, which somehow made it worse to read. He explained that he'd made just about enough to cover development costs, and asked people to consider actually buying it.

I have no way to link that post today — it's long gone, and torrent sites don't keep archives. But I read it when it happened, and I've never forgotten it. Several indie developers did the same thing in that era; it was a small, quiet, hopeless genre of message. Not the kind of thing you expect to happen when you're a solo dev trying to live from your hard work.

Here's the thing people miss when they shrug and say "piracy doesn't really hurt sales".

Maybe. Maybe that's arguable for GTA, for a publisher with a marketing budget bigger than most countries' film industries. But this game cost four euros. Four. And it was made by one person who needed to eat.

At that scale, every pirated copy isn't a lost statistic on a spreadsheet

— it's a fraction of whether that person gets to make a second game.

He didn't...

Nine Years Later, One Fan Finished the Job

Jesse's last official update was version 2.5. After that, silence. The game was left with a handful of known bugs — including two that could genuinely block your progress. On a personal note, i completed the game with version 2.5, and it didn't block me from playing from A to Z, never encountered major crashes. The only issue i noticed was that from level 40 to 50, your party levels very fast! You get the 10 last possible levels as fast as you got the 40 first... Maybe one of the bugs in the end.

And then something rather beautiful happened.

Nine years after that final official patch, a modder going by Czudak released an unofficial patch on ModDB. Alone. He fixed the two long-standing blockers — the Piece of Coral in Block 6 and the King's Key in Block 10 — along with every piece of equipment carrying wrong stats, and every spell description that was too vague to be useful.

He's up to version 1.3, it works with the Steam, GOG, Humble and retail releases, and he's still maintaining it. He even asks for bug reports on Discord. There's a fan-made Japanese translation floating around too.

Think about the symmetry for a second. One man built this game alone. Nearly a decade after he walked away from it, another man repaired it alone, for free, for a game he didn't make, so that strangers could finish it properly.

If you're going to play Paper Sorcerer in 2026 — and you should — grab that patch first.

And note that starting a new game is mandatory for it to apply.

Conclusion: The Game That Deserved a Sequel

Paper Sorcerer's playground is genuinely big.

The book is vast, there are many levels to explore if you want out. I don't remember exactly how long it took me on 1980's difficulty, but it was well over 40 hours. The art is striking, the battle animations have real character, and the soundtrack is a mix of modern composition and old MIDI textures — I'm literally listening to it while writing this.

The game costs about four euros now. That's a steal. And it holds up: 427 Steam reviews, 82% positive, more than a decade after release, with no marketing, no publisher and no updates since 2015.

And that number is exactly why this hurts. Four hundred and twenty-seven people took the time to come back and say this game was good. One man made it. He never made another.

Ultra Runaway Games' Steam page still says the studio "continues to develop and release new games." There's only one game on it. In a 2016 interview, Jesse mentioned he'd started work on a new project but wasn't ready to announce anything. Nothing ever came. Easy to understand when you game gets pirated... not worth it to try again.

So here's my honest take, twelve years on: Paper Sorcerer is one of the finest independent RPGs you can play, and it's a monument to what one determined person can build with almost no money and no experience

— and to what happens when that isn't enough.

If you're a Bard's Tale or Wizardry nostalgic: go and buy it. Four euros for this game is a joke. It's worth much more. You really should donate 20 bucks to the guy for it... And at this point, buying it isn't really about the game anymore — it's about telling someone their work mattered. The RPG world would be a better one with more people like Jesse.

Update: if you enjoyed this and want something in a more modern style — a Might & Magic feel with plenty of puzzles, battles and a solid story to keep you going — I'd recommend Operencia: The Stolen Sun. Another dungeon crawler made by fans, for fans… and another hidden gem whose studio never made a sequel either. I'm starting to notice a pattern in this category 😏

+ A visual style nobody else has — pure ink on paper
+ A really good MIDI Soundtrack, like in the 80's
+ You play the villain, and the game commits to it fully
+ Strategy over grinding, even on the hardest difficulty
+ Equipment made of grafted body parts. Genuinely inspired.
+ Built by one man for $13,000. Still holds up twelve years on.

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- Abandoned after v2.5 — the unofficial patch is now mandatory
- A few rough edges betray the lack of budget
- No sequel, and there never will be
- Piracy took more from this one than it ever took from a AAA