Zigamus : Zombies au Vigamus

In Rome there's a video game museum called Vigamus that's been around for a while. This game, which is an illustrated and translated version of the English game I originally played in the 2016 IFComp, is set in that museum and includes photographs of the actual museum.

The gameplay is intentionally simplistic. You start off in a room of the museum where zombies have poured out of an arcade machine. The game offers you items one at a time, each one solving a problem at hand. There is some non-linearity in that you find things before you need them and you have some choices in what order to use them. You use many items from video games, like the hammer from Donkey Kong, to win the day.

I had a little trouble figuring out what to do at times in French, so I had to play the English version to figure out how to get through some parts before coming back to French.

The game has a few small errors here and there (like not capitalizing 'salle' in one of the room names). Some of the parts that felt objectionable in the English version felt a little less so in the French, as the language barrier gave me some distance from the material. There is a lot of silly things here, but it makes sense as a game intended for visitors to Vigamus to play.

Zigamus nous propose de combattre une invasion zombie au sein d'un musée dédié au jeu vidéo dans un parser imprégné d'un humour certain.
Certaines actions ne sont pas interprétés comme on s'y attend, comme lorsqu'on veut utiliser un objet précis pour attaquer mais que le jeu ne considère pas l'objet que l'on spécifie comme un objet d'attaque et en utilise un autre.
L’enchaînement des pièce est un peu complexe à appréhender au début mais quelques allers-retour pour récupérer les différents objets finissent par bien aider. Les nombreuses références aux jeux vidéos old school et moderne est un vrai plus.

Zigamus : Zombies au Vigamus is a parser game set in a video game museum, where you must fight a horde of zombies to escape (and save the museum, maybe) - zombies that appeared when you tried the museum’s new game. Because the zombies came from a video game, defeating them won’t always be as straight forward as just hitting or shooting them.

I found myself being frustrated with the game, as synonyms are not always implemented (I can “play game” but can’t “play arcade” for example) or actions giving an incorrect reply (hitting a zombie with a game cartridge gave me an error message that I couldn’t hit it with a chainsaw), or just getting a ‘this is not important’ when interacting with a mentioned item. I’m sure there was logic behind some of the actions you have to take, based probably on some mystical game lore, but I’m still confused about the dentures…
I ended up checking the Club Floyd’s transcript of the English version to get passed some of the blocks

Though it is possible to get all 50 points when completing the game, you can also fail miserably by trying to fight the main boss before getting all the items around the museum or fighting all the zombies (and here I thought killing the big baddy would insta-kill everything I might have missed). I don’t thing you can’t win the game without all 50 points anyway.

Not enjoying zombies, I appreciated the version without the images on the side. Also, since part of the puzzle is rescuing NPCs, I did like being able to take my time to get to and save them.