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Today, I'm playing a game called "Death off the Cuff".
You play a world-famous French mystery-solver, but you haven't figured out whodunnit! So you have to bluff your way through the part of the story where you've gathered all the suspects together in one room and you tell them all about how you solved the case.
No big deal. Most of the time when you do this the murderer breaks down and confesses half way through your speech anyway. All you have to do is stall and wait for the guilty party to slip up. People love talking about themselves. If you wait long enough, they always end up revealing something you can use. It is going to be fine...
This is a highly unusual piece of Interactive Fiction because you don't go anywhere. Instead of wandering around from place to place, you examine the suspects and the things in the room and you talk about what you know.
This game solves the weird amnesia problem by having the player character supply the information that he knows. You type in "Constable", and Monsieur Saint Germain starts talking about him. As the player, you just kind of guide this character by pointing him in the direction of whatever clues you think seem relevant and he kind of takes it from there.
The weird amnesia of interactive fiction
This is a fun game. It's perfect for an afternoon when you have a few hours to spare, and challenging enough to be fun, but usually not frustrating.
There are only a couple of times when you have to play "guess which words the parser wants", and the tutorial at the beginning unfortunately caused some problems for me.
This game is mostly about talking, so most of the physical actions you can perform are pure flavor, and won't actually affect the story... However, there are a few occasions during the game where it will be necessary to perform actions to proceed.
Yeah, I remembered the first part, but not the secord part, so I got stuck thinking I couldn't solve a problem with physical actions.
If you get stuck, there's a very good help system that gives you progressively explicit clues. So if you're not a die-hard puzzler, this game is still enjoyable.
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✍️ Last Updated: 2021-11-18