The Count and the Communist

The Count and the Communist

The original French version of this game was one of my favorite games of 2025 when it originally released. Alas, mine is the only review on IFDB. Hopefully the English version will meet a broader audience.

The design is daring. Every page has ASCII art, either of people, a map, or something else. These drawings adapt to different circumstances, changing clothing and items carried.

More daring is the command input structure. Like Superluminal Vagrant Twin or Skybreak!, it's a menu-based parser system. It also has many parts that require typing a period followed by enter to get to the next page, which slows down things a bit. In French, it was perfect, as my slow reading speed benefitted from a slow input system. In English, I found it annoying, until by the end (5 or so hours later) I was quickly double tapping the keys.

Everything is accessed through menus, including saving and looking around. Again, some shortcuts were very annoying at first. EXAMINING and USING items that are carried requires an entirely different menu than objects in the area around you. Yet the game is long enough that, by the end, these menus can be mastered.

The game is very long, taking place over about a week. You are a communist spy supporting the Red faction after the Russian revolution, and you are sent to a count's household in France to support him as a laundress. The game tackles themes of communism, misogyny and homophobia in the early 1900s.

As a spy, your main job is to gather information. At first you are strictly limited to a small set of rooms, and you quickly learn your duties as a laundress. SAVING often is good as UNDO doesn't work here (due to the complex structure producing the images).

Over time, you gain access to many more areas. This game is huge; the wordcount is higher than Never Gives Up Her Dead, though much of it is from the ascii images. But over and over more areas and events unlock in the game, including complicated devices (some requiring pdfs of old French war manuals) and code transcribing.

The attached hints are absolutely useful, especially later on. It is possible to beat the game without doing everything; I didn't bother doing the last 3 optional puzzles as I had played the game all night for 2 nights and was reaching midnight and wished to finish.

The characters are well-developed, including the beautiful spy Marceline who leads you and the complex housekeeper whose young dreams of fame and success have been subverted by the cold Count.

The communism propaganda is huge here; our character spends every night trying to teach herself communist theory. Tons of conversations and lessons on communism are had. It is essentially like playing a religious crusades game with heavily Christian themes, except the all-consuming religion driving one to violence has been replaced with communism.

Overall, I think this is a fantastic game. It is clunky, sure. Some puzzles are not fair without hints, true. It is probably too long and too hard for IFComp. Fine. But I think it's a fantastic game, and my time playing it was worth it.