Walker & Silhouette

by C.E.J. Pacian profile

Mystery
2009

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Reviews and Ratings

5 star:
(7)
4 star:
(34)
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Number of Ratings: 50
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- thesleuthacademy, June 27, 2023

- sw3dish, October 13, 2022

- TheBoxThinker, July 30, 2022

- Shaduf, May 22, 2022

- Zape, August 25, 2020

- Edo, July 30, 2020

- peachesncream, July 24, 2020

- kierlani, May 5, 2020

- Sammel, April 25, 2020

- ArchDelacy, November 29, 2019

- getlostdont, February 4, 2019

- CMG (NYC), April 1, 2016

- Matt W (San Diego, CA), February 26, 2016

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
A detective/sci fi/romance game by the author of Gun Mute, February 3, 2016
by MathBrush
Related reviews: about 1 hour

This is a short, fun thriller-type detective game by the author of Gun Mute and Rogue of the Multiverse.

Like those games, this game has a delightful romance. The game is linear, with only a few different decisions at different times. You can play as multiple characters, but which character you play is dictated by the scene.

There are a few scenarios where it is easy to miss a clue on what to do. If you just want to move forward, type 'hint' to get a fairly easy hint on what to do.

If you liked this game, check out Pacian's other excellent games.

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- verityvirtue (London), January 23, 2016

- Floating Info, January 8, 2015

0 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
I loved this!, January 3, 2015
by Chai Hai (Kansas City KS)

This was well done! It felt like a quirky tv show and the story was hilarious.

I loved the part where you're trying to figure out the cause of death, that really had me laughing my head off!I want more of this duo, they're so precious! Excellente!

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- Sobol (Russia), September 12, 2014

- Emily Boegheim, February 9, 2014

- Sdn (UK), August 9, 2013

- Andy Devil, July 14, 2013

- DJ (Olalla, Washington), February 5, 2013

- AADA7A, September 24, 2012

- PNervous, July 9, 2012

- MKrone (Harsleben), February 18, 2012

- E.K., February 16, 2012

- Mr. Patient (Saint Paul, Minn.), January 28, 2012

- EJ, November 19, 2011

- Felix Pleșoianu (Bucharest, Romania), June 13, 2011

- baywoof, May 5, 2011

- Lea, April 19, 2011

- Ben Cressey (Seattle, WA), January 25, 2011

- Markoff23, December 6, 2010

- Nikos Chantziaras (Greece), September 26, 2010

- yandexx (Saint-Petersburg, Russia), July 14, 2010

- karcher, July 11, 2010

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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- Azazel, April 21, 2010

- Kenneth Hutt (London, UK), April 19, 2010

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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- eleison, January 23, 2010

- orbis_tertius, January 13, 2010

- afita (Bacău, Romānia), December 27, 2009

- cormorancy, December 27, 2009

- Rhian Moss (UK), December 16, 2009

- Emily Short, December 14, 2009

- Kake (London, England), December 14, 2009

- eu, December 14, 2009

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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- perching path (near Philadelphia, PA, US), December 11, 2009


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