Walker & Silhouette

If C.E.J. Pacian keeps churning out little games of this quality and consistency, I'll have to go back to his other games and rate them all up one notch. As usual, Walker & Silhouette sports the author's trademark mix of pulp space-opera fiction, relentless pace and deliciously flawed characters.

In this game, Walker is an inhumanly smart crippled police detective specialized in solving freaky mysteries by sheer force of logic. His counterpart Silhouette is a passionate anarco-feminist bad girl with a big hearth. Together, they solve a case involving as much steampunk staples, English understatement and freaky accidents as Pacian can cram in a one-hour game. Both characters border on gender bending, and their nuanced mutual attraction works very well to keep this short game together. I'm regularly bored by romance in games, but Pacian's unusual approach to the topic actually works for me. You can feel that the author really likes and respects his characters.

Like Gun Mute, this game experiments with restricted input: in this case, you move the game forward by typing keywords rather than relying on the usual (semi)-free form IF commands. Although limiting, this device works well for such a short game, smoothing out the experience and preventing you from getting stuck. Pacian even manages to build a couple of puzzles around this limited parser, which gives you the feeling you're actually playing a game, although very linear, rather than reading a short story. The result is a small polished game that doesn't last long enough for you to suspend disbelief and actually question its calculatedly naive absurdity.

Like other games from Pacian, this one feels like the author was smiling constantly as he wrote it. I also carried that smile throughout the experience.