prog | Three hours of Savoir-Faire later

Whew... that's enough of that, for now. I really like the game's setting: feels like late nineteenth-century Europe, with just enough magical realism to pull you in. Like a lot of other modern IF I've enjoyed, Savoir-Faire's universe acts like our own, but for one or two extra directions of movement; in this case, your character, an aging dandy and dilletante magician (who is nosing about his uncle's mysteriously abandoned mansion to seek debt relief), can fashion magical links between objects that share similar properties (such as an onion skin and a sheet of paper), and thereafter what affects one will also affect the other. Naturally, this trick is key to solving nearly all the game's puzzles, and it's wonderful fun to come upon the solutions, since they all involve juxtaposing real-world objects in ways that don't make sense in this world, but are perfectly reasonable in the game's world, once you learn how it works.

Also, because it's an Emily Short story, it's just a delight to read. Your character may be wandering alone through a creaky old house now, but it's the house where he grew up, and the many rooms, objects, and even smells that he encounters work not just as puzzle-props but a backdrop for him to recall his past, and the colorful characters who inhabited it. It's an interesting way to develop characters in an interactive medium.

My previous entry's link wasn't quite right; Hines has carbonized MaxTADS, but not MaxZIP yet. He does link to a native OS X Zip interpreter called Zoom, though, so that's what I used. It's OK... the page-scrolling keys don't work with it, which is actually rather a bummer, to me.

Meanwhile, I placed an order with feelies.org, a nonprofit launched by Short and a few other IF notables. It's a service that helps IF authors create and sell physical props that go with their games. (Back in their 1980s heyday, Infocom loved to do this). For less than $20 (including shipping), I ordered feelies for four games (Savoir-Faire among them), plus a little intro-to-adevnture-games book written by Short &c. Pretty good.

I saw a small mammal scuttle across our kitchen floor while playing, and told Noah about it. (No, it wasn't M. I dunno where she is.) We have (to the best of our knowledge) no food lying around where small mammals can access it, so I am hoping that this one is a loner, and not indicative of legions of furry critters a-chew-chew-chewing through my Annie's organic pasta collection even as I type. Seeing no evidence in this direction, we decided to leave it be for now.