Anyone have a walkthrough or hints for Le Comte et la Communiste?

Playing Game Hints
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This is the game that has a ton of ascii art like so in Frenchcomp 2025:

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I enjoy the game but am bad at it. I’ve spent 5 days on it and have only just made it to the second night and been able to tell Marceline about the photos in the lighthouse and get the task of getting the keys.

I imagine it would be a pretty easy game for a native speaker. For me, it definitely helps having shortcuts and not needing to type things myself. But it is difficult for me to notice if new things have appeared or are out of place as opposed to just having ambient text.

The source code is available, but it is very complex, and doesn’t lead to easy understanding of the way the game works.

Overall, I’ve really enjoyed it. It is substantial and complex; both of these things increase my difficulty in finishing it.

For those just starting, here’s what I have so far:

Very beginning:

You can get started by COMBINING the apron with yourself and COMBINING the hairpin with yourself.

First day:

Talking to everyone as much as you can is important. You should also open things if possible. Specifically, it is useful to open up the armoire near the governess, see the lamp, and talk to everyone about it.

Laundry is done by taking all the baskets and using the machine in the laundry room (this is not a spoiler, since it’s explained to you quite clearly).

You can get into a lot of places by just waiting for everyone to leave then entering. I found some chained-up letters, the governesses boring room, which I later found 1 secret in the next day, and the cellar, which was fun but dark.

Second Day:

On this day, I was able to get the lamp by talking to the governess after discussing things with the others.

I also did laundry twice to get to the end of the day. There, I descended to the cellar and found (I don’t know if it was there the day before) a coil of wire in the tallboy. I used that with the upstairs panel and went back down to open the door. Inside, I turned on the electricity, opened the lighthouse (after seeing it was openable in the code), plugged it in, looked at the cards. Last of all, I waited until dark to go outside to marceline and tell her everything, getting the quest to copy the keys.

This has been a lot of fun, but it has taken me 5 days, and I would love to go a bit faster to see the other Frenchcomp games before Spring Thing begins. Any tips on how to proceed next?

Edit:
I got a bit further:

I saw that a letter had arrived, and read it. To make the meeting happened, I found a pen and paper in the cook’s room, but I needed a writing sample, which I found in the maid’s box. I then slipped it under a door.

At night, I made an impression of the keys in the governesses’ room and of the maid while she slept.

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I haven’t finished it yet, and I can assure you, it is not a particularly easy game, even for native speakers. I’m a little further along than you are, so in case you need it:

Now that you have the keys, you can enter the personal appartments of the Comte, first step is getting there, becoming familiar with the rooms and his schedule, and noticing where you can hide or not.

At that point, there are three things that you need to find before you can move on to the next part of the story: find secret documents, and decode two messages, you can do them in any order.

For the secret documents : there is a safe hidden in the study, behind the painting. You need a password to open it, once you know that, you can ask the other members of staff about it. The maid clearly knows something, but is reluctant to tell you about it. Since you have her key, you can use it to read the letters in her chest, the password is in there. There may be an another way around without the maid’s key, but I don’t know it. The password is Anya. Then, you just need to read all the documents.

For the secret messages: first, you need to find the way to enter the room with the weird handle. The Comte is the only person who knows how to get there, so you should watch him while he opens the door. You don’t have the right angle from underneath the display case, but you can spy him from elsewere, the east keyhole from his own bedroom is perfect, the character won’t remember the sequence for you, so keep it in mind, you’ll only need it the first time, thankfully.
Once you can get into that room, you should examine everything. You’ll have to decode your first message, it is a bit tedious, because you have to do it all at once, and if you get a single character wrong, you have to do it all over again, but it’s not particularly difficult. I don’t remember the text of the message. Then, there is a second message to find, hidden elsewhere in the building. In the master bedroom, there is a book on the bedside table, open it, and you’ll find a suspicious bookmark. Take the bookmark to the secret room and decode the second message, it is from Clémenceau, but I don’t remember it perfectly.

You can then share your knowledge with Marcelline at night.

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The next day is extremely busy, and lots of stuff happens, it’s important to remember to save the game quite often.

In the morning, the governess makes a big announcement, lots of important people are coming for lunch. Marcelline said she’d bring us a camera this afternoon, but that’s not soon enough, we need to tell her about the big opportunity immediately. Going out and walking to her hotel would take too long, we need to find another way. There is a phone in the sitting room we could use. Unfortunately, it is missing its handcrank, and is unusable as is. The crank is hidden in a compartment inside the phone.

Once that’s dealt with, it’s time to do our chores until lunchtime.

The guests arrive, along with a brand new, state of the art tank. We need to find a way to listen to all the important conversations these people are having, and maybe getting close to the tank would be nice as well.

In the courtyard, we won’t manage to convince the soldier guarding the tank to let us close just yet, so we’ll keep that in mind for later.

Listening to the conversations from the surrounding rooms won’t do, we need to find a way to be hidden inside a room before they get in.[/spoiler] For now, the governess is preparing the dining room, and will stay inside for a while. We can ask the maid and the cook about it. The cook tells us lunch is almost ready, that starts a hidden countdown,[spoiler] the governess will soon exit the dining room, that’s our opportunity window to get inside, and hide underneath the table until everyone comes in.

With all the new information we’ve obtained, we are able to convince the soldier to leave us with the tank. Going down lets us enter the turret. We are now facing a lot of different parts and a clear objective. I imagine the language barrier won’t help with that part, it was already a bit hard for me to make a proper mental image of it all. Thankfully, the descriptions when you do something useless give you clues to what you should be doing instead, so keep fiddling around, everything you need is around you, things should work out eventually.

I think that’s how lunch ends, and I haven’t finished the afternoon just yet. I hope that was helpful, and that didn’t forget to blur spoilers.

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First of all, many thanks once again to Filiaa for the support you give to the players! And Brian, congratulations on getting this far in a game written in French!

You convinced me to write a list of hints! It’s now available for download on the game page, in the downloads section. It’s a good complement to the walkthrough you both have so bravely written here, and should be useful to anyone who doesn’t visit this forum.

A few notes: what you’ve translated as “lighthouse” should be translated as “headlight” - it’s an episcope, and does indeed look like a car headlight.
Also, it should be possible to spy on the door combination when hidden under the display case.
Just to annoy everyone, the safe code is randomized :slight_smile: So it’s not always Anya.

Thanks again for your efforts, both of you! It makes me want to translate the game, but it’s a lot of work!

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Thanks, this will help a lot!

And yeah, while I think people would love this in English, getting the formatting right again would probably take forever!

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By the way, @deBeauharnais, I mentioned this elsewhere, but I was shocked to see how big the code for this game is!

The largest non-pornographic Inform games I know of are Blue Lacuna and my own game Never Gives Up Her Dead, which have 348613 and 362559 words respectively.

This game has 351726 words. It has 38065 lines, whereas mine has 36728 and Blue Lacuna has 21242. So I don’t know of any game that has more lines than yours.

It makes me wonder how long it took to write!

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To be fair, , - - - probably counts as four words, so a lot of the word/line count is probably the ASCII art. Still impressive, though! How did you come up with/make the art for this?

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Just finished playing, after 10 hours and a ton of hints!

Here’s my review:

(copied from IFDB):

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)). 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) 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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Congrats on finishing the game, and thanks a lot for this thorough review! Your insight regarding your own story and the pro-communist discourse is really interesting.

Could you clarify the issues you encountered after following the hints? I’d like to fix the list of hints if I can.

  • First one: what was the problem? Was it annoying to get back to the under-levels?
  • Second one: should I clarify one has to open the crates before doing anything with them?

It’s funny that you found the cheat codes, I really don’t recommend using them. As we say in French, I coded them with my feet. It’s good that it got you unstuck, though.

Also, it’s not canon that Marceline and the laundress are lovers! :smiley:

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True, many words go into the drawings! Also, I think my code is very verbose. See for example “The communist can be able to see the maid taking the note”… That’s 12 words, and I use the property four times (for a nice feature that nobody will ever see in the game, by the way) ! So the word count is not really representative of the game length.

The game was made in ASCII because it’s simpler to integrate into a textual game - and also because I don’t have the skills to make a “real” game with “real” graphics. Also, I like the style, and it’s quite original :slight_smile:
I simply make the drawings in a notepad, with heavy use of those poor forgotten keys: insert, home, end…

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I went into the basement and figured out that one lever controls electric lights. I never investigated the other lever.

Later on, when I have the camera, the cook is always either in the kitchen or the cellar, so I can not pass him. I am supposed to use the elevator to get to the basement, I think, but I never turned on the elevator or found it.

For the second one, I think that would be perfect!

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Thanks for the details!
Sorry for the softlock, you can’t indeed go back to the basement during this mission if you didn’t power up the elevator beforehand. But missing some photos actually has no impact on the ending.
I reflected that in the hints, as well as the other info we talked about.

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