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Zipped Deluxe Edition
Contains Walker & Silhouette v9/Walker & Silhouette.t3
Windows version; story file for Linux and Mac interpreters; quick-start instructions.
Requires a TADS interpreter. Visit IFWiki for download links. (Compressed with ZIP. Free Unzip tools are available for most systems at www.info-zip.org.)

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Walker & Silhouette

by C.E.J. Pacian profile

Mystery
2009

Web Site

(based on 50 ratings)
5 reviews

About the Story

Team up with a dashing detective and an iconoclastic flapper to solve absurd and unfathomable crimes in this interactive story - where you control the action just by typing or clicking highlighted words in the text.

Walker & Silhouette uses a similar keyword system to Blue Lacuna, and experiments with applying it to various forms of interaction: talk, investigate, solve puzzles and fight villains... using only single word commands.


Game Details


Awards

Nominee, Best Writing; Nominee, Best Individual PC - 2009 XYZZY Awards

41st Place - Interactive Fiction Top 50 of All Time (2015 edition)

Editorial Reviews

Play This Thing
Click any keyword
Add to that a light romance and a theme about promoting gender equality, and you have a distinctively Pacian-esque piece. It's fun, adventurous, and not too hard; it feels like enjoyable fluff while you're playing, but after you're done you may find it leaves more of an impression than you expected.
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IndieGames.com
The writing on display is good, the storyline is intriguing, and there are some clever puzzles designed just for the single keyword system.
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Member Reviews

5 star:
(7)
4 star:
(34)
3 star:
(7)
2 star:
(0)
1 star:
(2)
Average Rating:
Number of Reviews: 5
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Most Helpful Member Reviews


10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
high-grade candy, April 19, 2010
by Sam Kabo Ashwell (Seattle)

As with Gun Mute, the basic approach here is to take a lot of fun, highly familiar tropes, pack them in densely and then turn the saturation up a couple of notches. So, the crime-fighting protagonists are ravishingly attractive and barely avoid falling into each others' arms at any given moment; the villain is given to over-the-top monologuing; and so on. The writing is good, even if the one-word parser limits your ability to poke at the scenery.

Because the basic style being drawn on is an episodic one - a Sherlock Holmes short story, an Avengers episode - the game feels very short. Character development doesn't really get very far beyond introduction, for instance.

Not as theoretically exciting as Gun Mute -- the setting's more conventionally handled and the interaction gimmick is less striking -- but a solid and enjoyable piece of work.

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8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
Great characters, but I'm not sure about one-word commands, December 13, 2009

I really liked this game, and for a lot of reasons : the setting (early 20th century with some interesting differences) is original, and its description and references were very efficient in drawing me into this world ((Spoiler - click to show)hysteria diagnosis or expeditions to the north pole are such references I found very much immersive). The duo of detectives works really well : the characters are charismatic, quite antagonistic and their exchanges are often humorous (with a totally British sense of humor, which I like very much!). There's even (Spoiler - click to show)a bit of romance between those two, very subtlely and nicely displayed by the author. The story in itself is not extraordinary, but I found it okay nevertheless, and to my mind it quite fitted the tone of the game. I admit I would have preferred a longer story, because I ended up wanting to spend more time with those characters! (but maybe a sequel is secretly planned ;)

But I cannot talk about this game without mentioning the unusual parsing system: it consists in one-word commands, such as "door" or "corpse". I understand that it's been a parsing system that's quite new and interests people since Blue Lacuna; the attempt to make a whole game not only using this system, but revolving around it, is quite bold! However, I must admit that I need more than what this game shows to be totally convinced by this system. It may be easier for some readers to click on words to interact with them, but it seems to me that it's reducing interactivity and a sense of freedom. Actually, in this game, you can also interact with words that aren't underlined, a fact I liked when I discovered it because I felt that freedom wasn't so much reduced after all. But on the other side, you can make the character perform actions you'd never thought of, and thus you can win the game relying on a "lawnmowering strategy" and without understanding the story: I find this fact not very satisfactory (at least in a normal game you have to figure out the verb, and so you have to deduce first what you have to do). (Actually, it's a little bit the same reproach as the one with the ">TALK TO X" conversation system, because in a way both systems are similar) For instance in this game, (Spoiler - click to show)you have to deduce from the clues in the deceased's room the way he was killed: I had no idea, and just typed "explain" several times because the word was underlined, and the character ended up saying "it was a giant octopus on wheels", altough I was very far from deducing such a thing! (but let's face it, it's hard to create a puzzle in which you have to make the player guess that it was a giant octopus on wheels). To avoid such a "lawnmowering effect", maybe that puzzles that require a series of actions in a precise (and logical) order can be a part of the solution, because it's more difficult than finding the only action that would make the story go further, and I think it encourages the player to figure out what he has to do and how first. (just an idea)
To sum up about this system, I'm not convinced that it's bringing something more or something different to the game; actually it makes it easier, substracting the need to understand what you're doing and why to solve a puzzle or to advance in the story. But I'm not formally opposed to it, and I hope other games in the future will go further enough in the use of this system to show me new and interesting things that the system can bring: but to me "Walker & Silhouette" fails to bring those elements (it's easily forgivable though, because the system is quite new and unexplored).

In conclusion, while I'm not very fond of the parsing system, I found the game very enjoyable. And I'm starting to think more and more that, judging by the quality of every of his games, C.E.J. Pacian will soon become a major author.

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7 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
Another nice game from Pacian , June 21, 2010
by Nusco (Bologna, Italy)
Related reviews: steampunk

If C.E.J. Pacian keeps churning out little games of this quality and consistency, I'll have to go back to his other games and rate them all up one notch. As usual, Walker & Silhouette sports the author's trademark mix of pulp space-opera fiction, relentless pace and deliciously flawed characters.

In this game, Walker is an inhumanly smart crippled police detective specialized in solving freaky mysteries by sheer force of logic. His counterpart Silhouette is a passionate anarco-feminist bad girl with a big hearth. Together, they solve a case involving as much steampunk staples, English understatement and freaky accidents as Pacian can cram in a one-hour game. Both characters border on gender bending, and their nuanced mutual attraction works very well to keep this short game together. I'm regularly bored by romance in games, but Pacian's unusual approach to the topic actually works for me. You can feel that the author really likes and respects his characters.

Like Gun Mute, this game experiments with restricted input: in this case, you move the game forward by typing keywords rather than relying on the usual (semi)-free form IF commands. Although limiting, this device works well for such a short game, smoothing out the experience and preventing you from getting stuck. Pacian even manages to build a couple of puzzles around this limited parser, which gives you the feeling you're actually playing a game, although very linear, rather than reading a short story. The result is a small polished game that doesn't last long enough for you to suspend disbelief and actually question its calculatedly naive absurdity.

Like other games from Pacian, this one feels like the author was smiling constantly as he wrote it. I also carried that smile throughout the experience.

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Walker & Silhouette on IFDB

Recommended Lists

Walker & Silhouette appears in the following Recommended Lists:

Games that made me smile by MathBrush
I wanted to do a list of comedy games, but I think people rarely think "I want to play a comedy game"; to me, the phrase brings up some kind of jokey, goofy game, like many of the poorly made Twine games that people make now. Instead,...

Keyword Parsers by ImaginaryTalkingRabbit
[LIST IS A WORK IN PROGRESS] Parser games that use keyword input, for example a game where only the words in bold are usable commands. This often means eschewing the standard 'x cat' or 'get banana' style of gameplay. So instead of...

Favorite "atmosphere" games by MathBrush
These are games that are fun because of the atmosphere and plot more than the puzzles. These games are not too hard and not too easy. They generally have a big over-arching theme. I have included most horror and comedy games in other...

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Polls

The following polls include votes for Walker & Silhouette:

Achievements, catch them all and other stuff. by Xionix
Looking for some IF with achievements, like, collect the 50 golden coins, or if you type 20 wrong commands you get the newbie achievement, or if you type "use hat in head" you get the "IF hater-to-be" achievement, well you get the idea.

Plot-driven Narrative by Jerako
I'm looking for a list of games to try where the narrative is the focus of the game. Where the author is really trying to tell a story over making a puzzlefest (though puzzles aren't necessarily unwelcome, especially if they drive they...

PC's personality integrated with the story by JasonMel
I would like to be able to recommend to someone many examples of interactive fiction in which the player character is far from a cipher or an everyman or everywoman, but is instead a character with a definite personality within a game...

See all polls with votes for this game




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