GameInformer

Book of Spells Screenshot © Playstation

Harry Potter fanatics will be pleased to learn that Sony announced its collaboration with JK Rowling - Wonderbook: Book of Spells. The game aims to use augmented reality 

From the world of Harry Potter, Book of Spells is an enchanted textbook written over 200 years ago by Miranda Goshawk. Open the book and you are immediately transported to the Hogwarts library, where your lessons will begin. Chapter by chapter, you will be able to read about and practice 20 spells, picking up valuable experiences and lessons along the way – as well as house points – just like a student at Hogwarts.

So onto the game itself. Book of Spells is set in Hogwarts, 200 years before the events of the Harry Potter series. You have discovered the book in the restricted section of the library and gradually read through the book, learning spells. These are the spells you will know from the books and films: Lumos, Incendio and Wingardium Leviosa are among the first you will come across. A narrator (with a voice disarmingly similar to a certain Mr. Tennant) helps guide you through the book, explaining what to do on each page, although this does get faintly irritating after a while if you’re an experienced gamer.

The game is clearly aimed at a fairly young age bracket. My 10-year-old niece attended the press launch with me and loved the game, her favorite part being the spell casting. This differs from my favorite aspect, which is all the backstory and extra details about the Wizarding World. (The story of how Wingardium Leviosa was discovered was particularly amusing.)

Demonstrating new technology in public is always perilous. A bad first impression can forever dog a product. And Sony’s Wonderbook, an augmented reality game/interactive take on books, kind of sputtered in its too-long debut segment at E3.

Sapping Wonderbook’s buzz should have been a challenge, as the first offering for the new toy is Book of Spells  a Harry Potter-themed book and one of the first things out of J.K. Rowling’s Pottermore site.

Augmented reality technology basically takes live images of a real-world, physical setting and adds computer-generated graphics or sound.

The book is split into five two-part chapters, each one teaching four spells and ending with a test. Each spell combines an incantation and a wand movement — for example, with Lumos, the illumination spell from the books, it’s a sideways loop. Once a spell’s been mastered, players can practice it, for example against enemies like the light-hating Devil’s Snare vines.

Each chapter should take a little more than a half-hour to complete, but there are additions like delightful pop-up style stories that add depth to the spell lessons. The tales and settings are excellent fan service for Harry Potter fans, which makes sense as Rowling reportedly had a hand in some of the writing.
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He also stated that PSN offers devs better royalty rates than Nintendo and Microsoft, but refrained from disclosing figures.