Savoir Faire
Emily Short
Platform: Z-code?
Rating: 8.0
Total Votes: 48
Std. Dev.: +- 2.0
Average Playtime: Between 2 and 6 hours
Genre: Puzzle-fest / Fantasy / Historical / Surreal / Swashbuckling / Humor
Rate this
Audience Comments:2/28/07 12:41 PM
Rating:1
10/17/06 04:24 AM
Rating:7
7/15/06 01:13 PM
A game of the highest quality. Excellent writing, mood, and implementation. Puzzles are fair and clever. There's even an interesting story.
Rating:10
6/04/06 06:53 PM
I have mixed feelings about some aspects of this game(yes,some puzzles;the finale),yet I did enjoy it very much.A real classic!
Rating:8
5/22/06 01:39 PM
Absolutely brilliant. The magic of this world is at once wholly original and, thanks to its meticulously worked out internal consistency, wholly intuitive. The puzzles have resoundingly satisfying solutions, even when more than one solution is possible, and the writing sparkles.
Rating:10
1/29/06 11:44 PM
Not very engrossing. While I would say the locations and objects were technically described well, I didn't feel at all interested or involved in the story. The lack of NPC's didn't help. The ridiculously-sized inventory - by the end I was carrying hundreds of items - was quite annoying to manage. "Linking" was admittedly ingenious and made for some pretty good puzzles, but they became gradually tiring. Would have preferred fewer puzzles, more story.
Rating:6
9/05/05 05:32 AM
Rating:9
2/04/06 09:11 PM
Large effort that gets almost everything right. Many of the puzzles revolve around the LINK command, which was new to me and seemed very clever. The writing is descriptive without becoming overlong.
Rating:8
3/31/05 09:54 AM
Very detailed, very intricate. Lots to look at and play with. Puzzles are for the most part very good and challenging without being impossible, though two could've used more feedback on the path to success. Typical Emily Short humor makes this fun to read, as well; the level of immersion, even in some of the "you can't do that" messages lets you feel the world.
Rating:9
3/15/05 04:05 AM
Emily Short's work is consistently dazzling. Savoir Faire is one of my favorites: exceptional prose and a tasty buffet of puzzles to feast upon.
Rating:10
1/16/05 01:29 AM
Rating:7
11/17/04 03:26 PM
A uniformly excellent array of takes on opening locked doors, retrieving unreachable objects, and finding hidden items. Plus, the wit, humor, and plot with which the game is carried out are simply delightful. A few non-solutions to the puzzles are a bit frustrating: many puzzles rely on creating magical links between similar objects, but some of the object-pairs that cannot be linked can seem to be more similar than some of those that can.
Rating:10
9/19/04 04:20 AM
I liked the prose and the feel of the game and on a technical level it's brilliant. But I found some puzzles not only to be hard, but unfair (in a way I also think the puzzles of Curses are). In addition I did not get the feel for the magic system. It surely is not a bad game, but for people that don't like reading walkthroughs it's a tough choice.
Rating:6
9/05/05 05:29 AM
Rating:6
2/26/04 02:15 AM
Rating:8
1/25/04 12:49 PM
Rating:9
1/02/04 05:35 AM
Rating:5
12/11/03 10:54 AM
I began the game and was instantly addicted! It's packed with delightful prose, a rich plot, and elegant puzzles with multiple solutions. I played with the occasional hint from Emily Short's website, which kept me from ever becoming overly frustrated.
Rating:10
11/28/03 04:49 AM
Rating:8
11/20/03 04:25 AM
Rating:8
9/08/03 05:06 AM
I'd never usually rate a puzzle-fest this highly, but the puzzles are interesting: they have multiple solutions and depend somewhat on your grasping the backstory.
Rating:9
8/27/03 11:32 AM
History, fantasy, packed with puzzles, nice characterization, a sweet story, and a swashbuckling feel on top of it. This game has *it all*! But it is quite difficult in parts, so expect to spend some time mulling it over, or get the most excellent walkthrough. A very good game, if tricky!
Rating:8
8/19/03 06:21 AM
Good writing, very interesting magic system. But sometimes too difficult : we can be stuck forever, many many objects which are useless, frustrating puzzles. Another IF I really needed to read the walkthrough.
Rating:6
8/14/03 03:22 AM
Rating:8
7/26/03 07:48 PM
Rating:10
7/20/03 03:42 PM
A game that pleases my critical biases almost to perfection. The system of magic
is consistent, yet just about unpredictable enough to be interesting, given that
the small scale of the game forces it to be simple. The manipulation of objects
is both the centre of the game and the central task of the imagined character.
There is enough of a background story to provide the given objects with a certain richness of association, but I never had the feeling that the same effect on the player/reader could have been produced within a traditional medium.
Rating:9
7/16/03 01:56 AM
I'm not one for puzzles, so I had to resort to a walkthrough early on. The puzzles are fiendish, the writing entertaining, but the physics model seemed too visible to me and distracted from the story. But it's an old school puzzle fest, so perhaps that's appropriate.
Rating:8
7/15/03 08:47 AM
Rating:8
7/10/03 12:10 PM
Forces lateral thinking in a way very little IF does; the setting is well-realized, but it's the puzzles that shine.
Rating:9
7/10/03 12:10 PM
Probably the most enjoyable time I spent with IF to date. Doesn't aspire to greatness, but in a sense, acheives it.
Rating:10
7/10/03 12:10 PM
I'm not a fan of puzzle-fests and I'm not a fan of victorian-era writing. Unfortunately, this game includes both. It was boring for me.
Rating:6
7/10/03 12:10 PM
Great puzzles, prose, and plot although I wasn't particularily fond of the PC nor the ending.
Rating:7
7/10/03 12:10 PM
Mmm... food.
Rating:8
7/10/03 12:10 PM
Rating:5
7/10/03 12:10 PM
Kudos for the work and imagination involved, but I didn't find any of it interesting. I'm not at all keen on the old-skool 'backlash'.
Rating:3
7/11/03 03:06 PM
Rating:5
7/10/03 12:10 PM
Highly enjoyable; let down slightly by a few implementation details.
Rating:9
7/10/03 12:10 PM
Rating:10
7/10/03 12:10 PM
Very nice, solid game, with plenty of fair puzzles. Be sure to get the latest version, as odd bugs from the complex world model have been squashed.
Rating:9
7/10/03 12:10 PM
Great descriptions and puzzles. Interesting backstory but the final plot bit is a tad disappointing.
Rating:9
7/10/03 12:10 PM
Rating:8
7/10/03 12:10 PM
It is old school and puzzle-heavy, but with more to read. Bit rough in places.
Rating:8
7/10/03 12:10 PM
Elegant, satisfying. I loved the magic system. Near the middle, I started to get slowly more frustrated than I wanted to, and the endgame (especially the very last couple of puzzles) seemed like a letdown. But the writing alone makes up for much.
Rating:8
7/10/03 12:10 PM
Masterful updating of old-school tropes to modern IF sensibilities, with Short's usual high command of writing and story being combined with a new focus on satisfying-but-fiendish puzzles.
Rating:10
7/10/03 12:10 PM
"Old school" without all the annoyances of old games, and a brilliant magic system.
Rating:10
7/10/03 12:10 PM
Entirely deserving of the Best Game XYZZY it garnered, immersive and frustrating in just the right amounts.
Rating:10
7/10/03 12:10 PM
Makes claims to the old style of IF -- puzzles galore, hunger daemons, manison trawling and the like -- yet melds them into a delightful story.
Rating:10
7/10/03 12:10 PM
Among the most engaging pieces of IF I've ever played. Massively ambitious, and far more aesthetically attractive than one would expect of such a puzzle-heavy game.
Rating:10
| |