Ensorcelled

By: Eliot Peper

Narrated by: Eliot Peper

Tam can't wait to play Ark of the Shadow Moon, the hotly anticipated new game from Clandestine Studios. But when his parents force him to go on a camping trip, he discovers that the mountains wield their own magic, and that while magic offers you everything, it asks everything of you in return.

Ensorcelled is a one-sitting listen that will suck you in, make you think, and leave you changed.

©2025 Eliot Peper (P)2025 Eliot Peper

Critic reviews

"A single-serving masterclass in what can happen when you pay attention, drop the distractions, and really look at the world." -Craig Mod

Enchanting novella

Started on a morning grocery run and ended up listening to the entire thing in a single go. Love that it was narrated by the author. Well done!

Life is not a Computer Game

Peper's attempt to integrate reality with gaming falls flat in this short novella. The characters are barely developed one dimensional beings resembling avatars in so many adventure games. The simplistic story does not so much simplify complex ideas about reality or gaming as ignore them all toether. Rather than integrating reality and gaming the novella succeeds in reducing reality to a simplistic adventure game paradigm complete with a (needlessly) clandestine journey to a mystical tree (that turns out to possess little by way of mystical qualities once reached) and (an improbable) rescue of a damsel (improbably) in distress and subsequent marriage of the rescuer and the rescued damsel. The protagonist's becoming a designer of computer games at the end could certainly have been a way to integrate reality with gaming, but this is not what the story focuses on, and in any event such a strategy could only work for gamers who become successful game designers, and never for anyone else.