E-Lit Review Series

Savoir-Faire

Emily Short

Text Genre: This text is a work on interactive fiction within the genre of a text-based puzzle game. A treasure hunt. 

It seems to follow the literary tradition of mystery novels or detective fiction. It presents you with elements of a story, snippets and clues, and also offers an objective you mean to reach. In this case, you are trying to find out what has happened to your father and sister as they are missing from your childhood home. As the story progresses, you find more puzzles to solve and clues to obtain that, overtime, make things (or should make things) clearer in the end. 

Textual Elements: The story uses a varied number of elements to create a pretty immersive environment. The descriptions given to you from room to room are short but give you exactly the right amount of information that you might need to proceed. Almost everything is able to be interacted with one way or another and many of them give you more clues or important items you'll need. 

One of the most interesting, and sometimes confusing, elements of this story was the "link" function. Basically, you were able to link certain objects that shared characteristics with each other making it so that when an action was performed to the one, it also happened to the other. For example, if you linked two boxes together because they were yellow or both had the same symbol on them, if you opened one box, the other would automatically open of its own accord. This was a sort of "magic" introduced into the story and ended up being very important in the endgame. 

All in all, these elements create a world where everything has a connection to something. Where no pin or loaf of bread is useless but can be used to solve puzzles that stop you from moving forward. However, it can also be more than a little overwhelming at first. This being a text-based game makes it difficult to keep everything in order without having to take copious notes. you have to imagine the world Emily Short is writing about very clearly to get a sense of what to do, but thankfully she does a good job presenting that world to you. 

Reviews: Overall, this work of interactive fiction has been received very well by critics as can be seen here in the interactive fiction database. 

"Savoir-Faire is an excellent game, featuring a strong sense of place, an innovative backstory & magic system, and a protagonist whose idiosyncrasies are charming"