Concours Francophone 2024 ~ All Games Reviewed šŸ‡«šŸ‡·

And finallyā€¦

Le Dernier Serment, by Narkhos

Le Dernier Serment is an old school parser adventure made for the Amstrad CDC, in which you must rid your village of a nasty curse: losing their freewill, leading them to their death. The adventure includes a nice range of puzzles, and an external manual/feelies pdf. There are no hints, help, or walkthrough included. There are also 5 endings listed (though I am not sure whether one of them is possible?).

I definitely had a few difficulties going through some of the puzzles, but itā€™s probably more due to me not being good at (French) parsers or just not reading the manual correctly, or whether the puzzles are actually obtuse (which, for an old-school parser, wouldnā€™t be too surprising). But figuring it out (and seeing the environment change before your eyes) felt so darn good! The puzzles are pretty varied, going from interacting with your environment to timing puzzles. I struggled with one so much because it dealt with opposites and transposition.

The game is also GORGEOUS! Every screen includes pixel art, one part showing what is in front of you (directions between rooms can change) ~ each being distinct from the others, and another showing yourself (and your state). The font used might not always be legible, but its design is so atmospheric.

A beautiful neat game!

I hadnt managed to use a local emulator (kept getting a disk error), but CrocoDS worked :smiley: (meant I could only play in one go).
Hereā€™s a potential walkthrough (I made a manual transcript) for one of the ending:
transcript.txt (1.1 KB)

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Iā€™m not going to talk about Les lettres du Docteur Jeangille in length. I donā€™t think it would be in the ethos of the competition if I toot my own horn. If itā€™s too hard to get into, thatā€™s no worries, Iā€™m currently working on the English translation. :wink:

So, that is it for me :slight_smile:

I played 20 games the past few days, and it was very entertaining. There were some gorgeous games, some very intriguing stories, some cool gameplay, and some beautiful writingā€¦ It was once again a very fun competitionā€¦

Aaaaadnnnnd


I just need to send my voting form :stuck_out_tongue:

Thanks for reading along!~

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