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Le comte et la communiste

by deBeauharnais

2025
Inform 7

(based on 1 rating)
Estimated play time: 10 hours (based on 2 votes)
Members voted for the following times for this game:
  • 10 hours: "Not native frenchspeaker, used many hints" — MathBrush
  • 10 hours: "with some hints" — filiaa
1 review2 members have played this game. It's on 1 wishlist.

About the Story

«Ma chère, la Révolution est en danger. Tout ce que a été construit risque de s'effrondrer.»

"Tu ne devrais pas t'en faire", m'avait dit Marceline. "Peut-être qu'on a monté toute cette opération pour rien"... Eh bien, elle avait complètement tort. Si j'avais eu la moindre idée des péripéties qui m'attendaient dans ce bête château, je me serais certainement inquiétée davantage.

Le comte et la communiste se déroule en 1918, quelques jours après la fin de la Grande Guerre, et une année après la Révolution d'Octobre. Une espionne communiste est engagée comme lingère dans le château d'un aristocrate russe, officier dans l'armée impériale tsariste. Le mandat de la jeune femme : démasquer et déjouer les sombres manigances qui se trament dans ces lieux.

Pas de repos avant la libération de tous les peuples !

Awards

Winner overall; 2nd Place, Prix d’Excellence en Design Narratif; Winner, Prix d’Excellence Technique; 2nd Place, Prix d’Excellence Littéraire - French Comp 2025

Ratings and Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
Very long, complex French communist spy laundry game with extensive ASCII art, March 28, 2025
Related reviews: more than 10 hours

I intended on playing all of the FrenchComp 25 (or, more properly, the Concours de Fiction Interactive Francophone) games in a week or two, and then I found this game.

Altogether, it took me over a week to finish. This is quite a big game, with the unusual feature that almost every part of it is illustrated with beautiful ASCII art, including the inventory screen (showing our heroine and the things she carries), a map, and all of the NPCs and several important items.

The source code is huge (partly due to the art), currently the second-largest file I've personally ever opened in terms of words and the longest in terms of lines (in Inform 7).

But is it well-made and fun?

I think so. The idea is that you are a spy sent to pose as a laundrywoman in the mansion of a count rumored to be a Russian general in disguise. You have to infiltrate the mansion, gain everyone's trust, and do everything you can to promote the communist cause, with missions of increasing importance.

Gameplay is almost entirely choice-based, with numbered and lettered menu options. Occasionally it was fiddly; if you want to look at something you're holding, you must open the inventory before looking at it. Similarly, if you want to use an item you're holding, you have to open the inventory. Making the wrong choice can take a few turns to get back on track as you have to opt out of the menu you're in.

But once you get practice with the system, it works well.

I didn't encounter any major bugs. After 5 days of making progress on my own (real life days; in the game I was on night 3) I asked for hints from the author, who obliged. Following the hints got me stuck twice due to not doing the things that I should have done first ((Spoiler - click to show)I didn't find the elevator before getting the photographic kit, and I didn't open the crates before sabotaging them). However, I found cheat codes in the source text which let me skip exactly those parts.

There is a great deal of text in the game, most of it very interesting. The characters are nuanced and there is a lot of tension, especially with our spy handler who is also likely our lover.

Some puzzles were a bit hard to figure out, but it's hard to know whether that's due to me not knowing French or because the game is hard. Playing in a foreign language casts a rosy glow over a game for me, so a native speaker may find it less fun or more fun than I did, I suppose. I don't know!

The text presented in-game is thoroughly pro-communist, extolling the virtues of the worker and decrying the capitalist system. Growing up in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, I've read many texts by church leaders in the 1910's to 1980's that warned of communism as one of the greatest threats in the world, a godless conspiracy that killed millions and had the goal to destroy religion, abolish the nuclear family (since kids are raised communally in traditional communism) and so on. So it's interesting to hear full-throated explanations on both sides for why essentially the same actions are either a great evil or the greatest good.

Overall, puzzle highlights include using a wartime code-sender and operating (Spoiler - click to show)a tank and various old-fashioned tools.

A fun game. A long game; it takes place over 5 days and each day is basically a complete game. I thought that the first day would be about it (getting into the basement) and was shocked there was more; in fact, there was a lot more, I hadn't even seen half the map and seeing the whole map isn't even half the game! I'd say it's similar in size to Counterfeit Monkey and Anchorhead (maybe a bit smaller than Anchorhead, it's hard to tell. More dialogue, certainly).

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Game Details

Language: French (fr)
First Publication Date: March 3, 2025
Current Version: Unknown
License: GPL3
Development System: Inform 7
IFID: F896625E-4682-11EF-8BE0-C329F7FBD2F4
TUID: iboziib6if1rnt61

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This is version 3 of this page, edited by JTN on 22 April 2025 at 10:26pm. - View Update History - Edit This Page - Add a News Item - Delete This Page