Faute De Servo

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.