The Stack

Let’s just get all my minor complaints about this game out of the way. The sound quality is really poor — dialogue has an audible hiss. Sound effects are often downright irritating, especially when played repeatedly. The music volume is too loud for my tastes by default, and any change you make to it in the settings menu isn’t stored, so you have to change it again at the beginning of every session.

Speaking of things that happen at the beginning of every session, there’s no main menu. This is often a good thing in games — Fidel Dungeon Rescue, for example, does the straight-into-gameplay thing really well, giving you a title screen that doubles as the first level of the game and loading straight into your last save on every subsequent session. Here in Touché!, it just automatically plays the opening cutscene and dialogue, forcing you to either sit through it or repeatedly hit the skip-line button (space) before you can access the save menu.

About half the characters in the game have English accents and the other half have exaggerated fake French accents.

The verb UI is awkward to use from my laptop’s trackpad. It’s basically a drop-down context menu accessed via the right mouse button, but it leaves out some of the functionality of a normal drop-down menu. In a normal drop-down menu, you can either click to open the menu and then click on the desired item, or hold and drag to open the menu and release the drag when the desired item is highlighted. Here, only the latter works. Right-clicking on things just provides a cursory description. To do anything else, you have to right-drag.

A lot of the game’s dialogue is repeated whenever you do something, never dying off. This includes banter between Geoffroi and Henri when you try to exit to another room, which is something that you do a lot when you’re trying to solve an adventure game and aren’t sure if you have everything you need for a puzzle or not. It’s like the testers were all working from walkthroughs or something and didn’t have the experiences of a real player wandering around. It would be understandable if the dialogue in question contained hints, but even then, I’d expect it to switch to an abbreviated version after the first time. Very often the scene-transition dialogue starts with Geoffroi saying “Come on, Henri!” in an exasperated tone, provoking exactly the same reaction in the player.