Faute De Servo

I beta tested this game, so it's hard to be objective about it. I think I would give it a 4.5/5, so I rounded up.

Faute De Servo combines several game ideas that I love, including waking up in a lab-like environment with no clue what's going on (like Babel) and gaining powers by devouring random things (like the under-played Mangiasaur).

Much of the game consists of figuring out the action system, as well as the backstory of your location. I found this somewhat confusing (which is why I gave 4.5/5) but the presentation is so slick that it makes up for it.

There's also a good deal of humorous banter in the game, which I enjoyed. It is derivved from a cast of characters with distinct personalities and varying levels of intelligence.

This is definitely worth playing, both for the overall game concept and for the nifty implementation.

A modest Inform7 game lightly tweaked with Vorple gives a very innovative and engrossing gameplay experience. Instead of typing input, the player clicks coloured buttons which correspond to one-word commands. These are the main compass directions, and some verbs.

Now, the player is left in the dark as to the meaning of the colours, so a bit of experimenting and memorisation (or note-taking) are necessary. Stage by stage throughout the game, the number of coloured buttons (and hence the available commands) increases, until the main difficulty is of deciding where and when to click which button.

The satisfaction in this setup lies in how close the mechanism is tied to the story being told. Through consumption of certain, ahem, items, the player character changes, and their abilities change with them. There is only one traditional adventure puzzle in the entire game, and even then it's something that can be solved by asking "What would I do if this happened in my home?" Despite this lack off puzzly challenge, there's a lot of pleasant brainteasing in figuring out where this story is leading, and what kind of backstory lead to the present situation.

Faute de Servo cleverly plays with the amnesiac PC trope, giving a perfecly plausible in-game explanation for the initial loss of memory and the subsequent regaining and expanding of memories.

The style of writing supports this clever playfulness tremendously. Since the PC changes while the story advances, their view of the surroundings evolves too, giving more detailed or just plain different descriptions for the diverse rooms. The majority of the game text however presents the internal speech of the PC. In parallel with their evolving and expanding mind and improving amnesia, the PC's inner voice becomes more complex and, well, chatty.

Deceptively simple, very engaging, amusingly trope-bending. A pleasure to play through.

Un excellent jeu qui marie parfaitement le fond (Spoiler - click to show)(une histoire de zombi qui retrouve la mémoire, ou plutôt la mémoire de plusieurs de ses victimes, en mangeant leurs cerveaux) et la forme, puisqu'on agit en cliquant sur des cases de couleur, où chaque couleur correspond à une action qu'il faut retenir, à la manière du jeu de « Memory ». L'écriture et les dialogues sont pleins d'humour et d'esprit, les différents personnages bien caractérisés et attachants, malgré la brièveté de l'histoire.