Maximilien by Yohan Dupuy and team
When you mash two things together, there’s a binary expansion involved. On the input side, there is either “I love these things individually, they must be awesome together!” or “Who knows WHAT this is gonna make, let’s find out!” On the output side there is either “Hey, that worked great, this is better than sum of parts!” or “They can’t all be winners.” Either of those inputs can lead to either of those outputs - out of water and grain, we discovered beer; chocolate and pineapple produce an acidy mess. IF itself is a mashup of sorts, combining narrative and gameplay, and IFDB is a repository of works across the output spectrum. There is a third path - I know, I’m sorry to poison the simplicity of the binary but I don’t think life ACTUALLY works like that, it’s just a rhetorical tool. There is an extra-binary approach where the thrill of mashing up takes over in a fever of additions, where the charge of combining something, ANYTHING, is just too compelling and everything starts flying into the stew. If the final brew is not revelatory, the blend may defy your ability to identify which ingredient(s) took things down a wrong path.
Maximilien, as its central conceit, implements a “Two Great Tastes” mashup. Sleuthing gameplay ala Detective/Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective and supernatural thriller. I love both those thing! The central play loop is one of budgeting limited daily actions against developing and following leads in a turn-of-last-century Boston. The investigation itself leads the player through family histories and Jewish Kabbalah lore where you are solving the mystery of your own supernatural affliction. As the revelations get more and more esoteric, it becomes a race against your own sanity (ala Call of Cthulhu). These two tastes seem engineered SPECIFICALLY to pull me in, and the central game loop was terrific. Centered on a map of Boston, where investigations unlock new locations, your quest zips from archives to interviewing outsiders, to suddenly violent encounters. The breadth of things to do in the investigation is varied and entertaining.
The content of those encounters is also a terrific blend of historical flavor and real-world Jewish mysticism (at least as far as my limited exposure can judge). It felt so incredibly grounded which is one of my favorite ways to sell the supernatural - make its mysteries seem darkly inevitable rather then wildly surprising. In setup and conceit, this work seemed a slamdunk “Awesome!” combination. Certainly, it delivered copious Sparks of Joy wherever those two elements rubbed against each other. There definitely were more than just those two flavors in the stew though.
Far and away the strongest taste in the work is presented by its prose. It reads like the prose is attempting a Victorian flowery formalism. For this reviewer, it tipped deeply into poetic verse that did not resonate, either as a period affectation or as an image-delivery mechanism. It was consistent, I’ll give it that, though for someone for whom this elicits grimaces that is not a strength. I will grant that this is very much a personal-taste thing, but because the entire work was drenched in it, it couldn’t help but color the entire experience. For me, that experience was, “less please.” I grabbed a few examples of off-putting prose, which I reproduce not to mock, but give a flavor of the excess I could not embrace. If you are unbothered by these flourishes, this might not be a problem for you.
“I loosen the vise formed by the bitter grimace of my jaws.”
“…well aware that the strained line serving me for a smile is anything but natural.”
“my flesh is lashed by some coarse matter”
“The partition wall to the right is pierced by two doors.”
That last one really got me. The verb “pierced” is SO WRONG: active subtext whose implications are kind of nonsensical. The impulse to apply it to the most prosaic of “two doors in the wall to the right” gives you an idea how pervasive this was. It’s the kind of description that serves itself more than the narrative. And somehow ALSO fails to be a convincing pastiche?
Discomfort with this kind of prose is something long-time readers will not be surprised by. I wonder, if this was the only off flavor, would its powerhouse gameplay engine have overcome it? A hypothetical I have no answer for, as there WERE additional elements that tainted the work. Technically, graphically its presentation was VERY accomplished. The artwork and especially the central map did wonderful work establishing sense of time and place. Infrequent technical issues undermined this a bit. In one spot, you are asked to input text to focus your research. Open ended inputs can be a pitfall, and sure enough my progress was stalled because Baker Street Cemetery was rejected, and only later when I felt blocked did I spam some alternatives until the first two words alone proved sufficient. In another spot spot, an error message polluted things
Error: <<audio>>: error during runner initialization: track "play" does not exist
The work also used timed text, reasonably well for most of the work, but in a particularly egregious spot (when making a phone call) it was SO SLOW, I was sure either the game had hung or that my machine had been coopted by bots. It was only providence (and frustration) that prevented me from quitting and restarting before the narrative resumed.
The last confounding artifact for me was some late game plotting decisions. To that point, the game had really presented a SOLID investigation architecture. Leads progressing naturally from one to the next, a nicely varied mix of investigative techniques to navigate, mystery coming into focus on a really strong pace. In not one but two places, initiative was seized by the narrative to advance the plot with all the subtlety of a blow to the head. I mean that LITERALLY, a textual blow to the head, as the result of a seeming innocuous choice. On the one hand, yes, a staple of the genre and a nod that the protagonist’s initiative isn’t the only thing at play here. On the other, the game did SO well putting the mystery into the player’s hands, by abruptly grabbing the wheel, in particular in response to completely pedestrian player choices, it felt capricious and unsatisfying. Like the player was no longer trusted to move things forward.
These plot developments ALSO had the effect of pushing me to endgame before I was ready, leading to a failed ending. I don’t begrudge bad endings in supernatural stories, sometimes they are the perfect closure. But only when perceived as dramatically appropriate culminations of the preceding narrative. It is certainly POSSIBLE my failure was not the fault of those capricious events, that my detective skills let me down in the end. It didn’t play that way though. It PLAYED like I made two bad choices I had no way of knowing would be bad, and lost opportunity to finish the investigation as a result. After putting in so much rewarding time on it!
This work has a lot going for it - its fundamental mashup is RED MEAT for me, and the architecture and presentation of it so very, very good. Notwithstanding the elements that pushed at me, my overall gameplay experience was Engaging. But an Engaging experience with Notable off flavors.
Played: 9/24/26
Playtime: 1hr 55m, Sanity 54 or lower; Possessed; Boston Surveyor achievement
Score: 6 (Engaging/Notable prose and gameplay artifacts) Notable artifacts outweighing the Engaging (-1)
Would Play After Comp?: I really want to, but re-traversing two hours of that prose is a daunting prospect.
